On one liberal resource I saw a discussion of the situation in France with a reference to our country. They discussed the fact that Russia will soon have a revolution and half of the police are unhappy. Will definitely go over to the side of the protesters. However, later in the thread of discussion, someone remembered the "Stanford Prison Experiment".
The famous prison experiment was carried out in 1971 by F. Zimbardo and three of his colleagues from Stanford University. He investigated the nature of violence and cruelty that arise as a person's reaction to the restriction of freedom in the conditions of a social role imposed on him. To study social psychology in prison settings, researchers invited undergraduate students to act out the roles of guards or convicts. More than 70 applicants who wanted to make $ 15 a day responded to the ad.
However, there is an opinion that it was staged very incorrectly and, in general, was even staged. This is how it was …
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". Interestingly, it seemed to the prisoners that they were being hired for being tall, but in fact they were honestly drawn by lot, tossing a coin, and there was no objective difference in physical characteristics between the two groups.
Promotional video:
The prison is preparing to receive prisoners. Photo by F. Zimbardo, 1971.
The actual 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.
Guards work during the Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971.
The guards were given wooden batons and khaki military uniforms, which 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 it was their duty to make the rounds of the prison, which they could do however they wanted.
The guards talk to the prisoners. At one point, the inmates were dressed in sacks and were moved in response to rumors of planning an escape.
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 had 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 prisoners 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 long 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.
Shackles on the leg of a prisoner during a prison experiment. Photo by F. Zimbardo
Over the course of the experiment, several of the guards became more and more sadistic - especially at night, when they thought the cameras were off. The experimenters claimed that about one in three security guards showed 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 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.
The guard leads the prisoner to the toilet while blindfolded.
Zimbardo interrupted the experiment on the sixth day, after the outrage expressed by his fiancée Christina Maslach.
“I caught up with her and we started to quarrel. She said that I was doing terrible things to these boys: "How can you see all this and not feel how they are suffering?" But in those days, I could no longer look at the situation through her eyes. It was at this point that I realized that research had transformed me from a scientist to a warden. Then I said: “You're right, you need to stop the experiment,” Zimbardo recalled.
Thanks to this experience, Zimbardo became world famous, his research aroused great public interest. Many reproached him for his inhumanity and unethicality, while the scientist himself said that he could not foresee such cruel behavior of the guards.
conclusions
The results of the experiment were used to demonstrate the receptivity and obedience 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.
Documentary and feature films have been filmed about this experiment (see, for example, the films Das Experiment (2001), The Experiment (2010), The Stanford Prison Experiment (2015)), books have been written, and among its participants up to tough controversy is still going on.
However, the other day the American writer and scientist Ben Blum said that the whole experiment was in fact a fake. In his article, Blum stated about records he found in the archives of Stanford University, from which it follows that the behavior of some of the participants was not natural, and Zimbardo himself forced the guards to be rude to the prisoners. And at least one of the prisoners said that his "madness" was feigned.
“The Stanford Prison Experiment often teaches us that our behavior is deeply determined by the social roles and situations in which we find ourselves,” Bloom writes. “But its deeper, more significant impact is that we all have an inexhaustible source of potential sadism lurking in us, waiting for the opportunity to break out,” writes Blum.
Blum, who has a computer science degree from the University of Berkeley, turned to Professor Zimbardo's previously unpublished notes and interviewed some of its members. One of them was Korpi, now 57 years old, he admitted that he faked his seizure in order to quickly finish the experiment, return home and continue preparing for the exams.
“Any doctor would understand that I was pretending. I played badly. I mean I did a good job, but it was more hysterical than psychosis,”he said. According to Korpi, he somewhat enjoyed the experiment, as he did not feel threatened by the guards, because he knew they were not allowed to harm the prisoners.
“We knew that they would not touch us, they could not hit us. They were white students like us, so the situation was safe enough. It was like a job."
On the other hand, questioning the “guards” allowed Blum to conclude that their cruelty was not innate, namely, Professor Zimbardo made them treat the prisoners badly, despite the fact that before the experiment he said: “We cannot physically torture them or mock them. We can create longing. We can create feelings of frustration. We can create a sense of fear, to some extent...
One of the guards said that he pretended to be a sadist, and acted in such a way that later his actions were called a natural manifestation of cruelty. “I thought this was what the researchers expected of me,” he said.
According to the Daily Mail, a number of scientists have already expressed critical remarks about the revealed details of the experiment. For example, Simin Wazir, a psychologist at the University of California at Davis, said she regrets that in the field of psychology, the author of the experiment is perceived as a hero.