The Stanford Prison Experiment is a psychological experiment that was conducted in 1971 by the American psychologist Philip Zimbardo. The experiment is a psychological study of a person's reaction to the restriction of freedom, to the conditions of prison life and to the influence of an imposed social role on behavior.
Volunteers played the roles of guards and prisoners and lived in a conditional prison set up in the basement of the psychology department. Prisoners and guards quickly adapted to their roles, and contrary to expectations, truly dangerous situations began to arise. Every third guard showed sadistic inclinations, and the prisoners were severely traumatized, and two were excluded from the experiment ahead of time. The experiment was finished ahead of time.
The experiment was conducted without taking into account the ethical principles of the American Psychological Association, for which it is rightly criticized as unethical and unscientific. Ethically, the experiment is often compared to the Milgram experiment conducted in 1963 at Yale by Stanley Milgram, a former fellow Zimbardo's student.
Goals and means
The study was funded by the US Navy to explain conflicts in its correctional facilities and in the Marines.
Participants were recruited from a newspaper ad and were offered $ 15 a day (adjusted for inflation, the equivalent of $ 76 in 2006) for two weeks in a "prison simulation." Of the 70 people who responded to the ad, Zimbardo and his team selected 24 who they considered the healthiest and most mentally resilient. These participants were predominantly white, middle-class males. They were all college students.
The group of twenty-four young men was randomly divided into "prisoners" and "guards". It seemed to the prisoners later that they were taken as guards for their height, but in fact they were honestly drawn by lot, tossing a coin, and there was no objective difference in physical data between the two groups.
Promotional video:
The conditional prison was established on the basis of the Stanford Department of Psychology. The undergraduate laboratory assistant was appointed "overseer," and Zimbardo himself was appointed manager.
Zimbardo created a number of specific conditions for the participants, which were supposed to contribute to disorientation, loss of a sense of reality and their self-identification.
The guards were given wooden truncheons and military-style khaki uniforms they had chosen from the store. They were also given mirrored sunglasses, behind which they could not see their eyes. Unlike the inmates, they were required to work shifts and return home on weekends, although many were subsequently involved in unpaid overtime.
Prisoners were required to dress only in ill-fitting loose-fitting robes without underwear and rubber slippers. Zimbardo argued that such clothing would cause them to adopt "unusual body posture" and they would experience discomfort, which would contribute to their disorientation. They were only called by numbers instead of names. These numbers were sewn onto their uniforms, and prisoners were required to wear tight-fitting tights over their heads to depict the shaved heads of recruits undergoing basic military training. In addition, they wore a small chain around their ankles as a constant reminder of their imprisonment and oppression.
The day before the experiment, the guards attended a short orientation meeting, but were not given any instructions other than that no physical violence would be tolerated. They were told that the duty was to make the rounds of the prison, which they could do however they wanted.
Zimbardo made the following statement to the guards at the meeting:
Create in the prisoners a sense of longing, a sense of fear, a sense of arbitrariness, that their life is completely controlled by us, the system, you, me, and they have no personal space … We will take away their individuality in different ways. All this together will create a feeling of powerlessness in them. It means that in this situation we will have all the power, but they will have none.
from the video from "Stanford Prison Studios"
The participants, who were selected to act as prisoners, were told to wait at home until they were "called in" for the experiment. Without warning, they were “charged” with armed robbery and were arrested by the Palo Alto Police Department, which was involved in this stage of the experiment.
The inmates went through a full police examination procedure, including fingerprinting, photographing and reading out their rights. They were brought to a conditional prison, where they were examined, ordered to strip naked, "cleaned of lice" and assigned numbers.
results
The experiment quickly got out of hand. The inmates experienced sadistic and abusive treatment from the guards, and by the end many of them developed severe emotional distress.
After a relatively calm first day, a riot broke out on the second day. The guards voluntarily went to work overtime and, without supervision from the researchers, suppressed the riot, while attacking inmates with fire extinguishers. After this incident, the guards tried to divide the prisoners and play them against each other, choosing "good" and "bad" corps, and made the prisoners think that there were "informants" in their ranks. These measures had a significant effect, and further large-scale disturbances did not occur. According to Zimbardo's former inmate consultants, this tactic was similar to that used in actual American prisons.
Inmate counts, which were originally conceived to help them get accustomed to identification numbers, turned into hour-long ordeals in which guards harassed prisoners and subjected them to physical punishment, such as forcing them to exercise for extended periods of time.
The prison quickly became dirty and gloomy. The right to wash became a privilege that could be denied and was often denied. Some inmates were forced to clean toilets with their bare hands. The mattresses were removed from the “bad” cell, and the inmates had to sleep on an uncovered concrete floor. As a punishment, food was often refused. Zimbardo himself speaks of his growing immersion in the experiment, which he directed and in which he actively participated. On the fourth day, upon hearing of the escape plot, he and the guards attempted to move the entire experiment to a real unused prison building in the local police, as a more "reliable" one. The police department turned him down on security grounds, and Zimbardo says he was angry and annoyed at the lack of cooperation between him and the police system.
In the course of the experiment, several guards became more and more sadistic - especially at night, when they thought the cameras were off. The experimenters have argued that about one in three security guards exhibit genuine sadistic tendencies. Many guards became upset when the experiment was terminated prematurely.
Subsequently, the prisoners were offered "on parole" to get out of the prison, if they refuse to pay, the majority agreed to this. Zimbardo uses this fact to show how much the members have gotten used to the role. But the prisoners were later refused, and no one left the experiment.
One participant developed a psychosomatic rash all over his body when he learned that his request for parole had been rejected (Zimbardo rejected him because he thought he was trying to cheat and was feigning illness). Confused thinking and tears have become commonplace in prisoners. Two of them were so shocked that they were removed from the experiment and replaced.
One of the replacement prisoners, No. 416, was horrified by the treatment of the guards and went on a hunger strike. He was locked in a cramped closet for solitary confinement for three hours. During this time, the guards forced him to hold sausages in his hands, which he refused to eat. Other prisoners saw him as a bully. To play on these feelings, the guards offered the other inmates a choice: either they would give up blankets, or No. 416 would be in solitary confinement all night. The inmates preferred to sleep under blankets. Zimbardo later intervened and issued # 416.
Zimbardo decided to end the experiment ahead of time when Christina Maslach, a student and at the same time his fiancée, not previously familiar with the experiment, protested against the frightening conditions of the prison after she came there to conduct talks. Zimbardo mentions that of all fifty witnesses to the experiment, only she raised the question of its ethics. Although the experiment was designed for two weeks, it was terminated after six days.
Abu Ghraib
When the Abu Ghraib scandal (bullying and torture of prisoners in the American military prison in Iraq) broke out in March 2004, many experts immediately noticed its resemblance to the Stanford prison experiment - among them Philip Zimbardo, who was very interested in the details of this story. He worried that the efforts of the military and the government were aimed at blaming the abuse of a few "black sheep" instead of admitting it as a systemic problem of the officially established military penal system.
In fact, Zimbardo found himself in a team of lawyers that defended one of the overseers of the Abu Ghraib prison of Staff Sergeant Ivan "Chip" Frederick. He had access to all investigative and restricted documents and testified as an expert witness at Frederick's military tribunal that he was sentenced to eight years in prison (October 2004)
Zimbardo used his experience in the Frederick case to write The Lucifer Effect: Understanding the Transformation of Good People into Bad People, in which he suggests that the Stanford Experiment and the Abu Ghraib abuse have many similarities.
conclusions
The results of the experiment were used to demonstrate the receptivity and submissiveness of people when there is a justifying ideology supported by society and the state. They were also used to illustrate the theory of cognitive dissonance and the influence of the power of authorities. In psychology, the results of the experiment are used to demonstrate the situational factors of human behavior as opposed to personal ones. In other words, it seems that the situation affects the person's behavior more than the inner personality traits. In this it is similar to the result of the well-known Milgram experiment, in which ordinary people obeyed orders against their own desires, and thus became accomplices of the experimenter.
By coincidence, shortly after the end of the research, there were bloody riots in the prisons of San Quentin and Attica, and Zimbardo reported his experience in the experiment to the US Department of Justice.