Stanford prison experiment
The Stanford prison experiment (SPE) was a psychological experiment conducted in August 1971. It was a two-week simulation of a prison environment that examined the effects of situational variables on participants' reactions and behaviors. Stanford University psychology professor Philip Zimbardo led the research team who administered the study.[1]
This article is about the psychology experiment. For the American punk rock band, see Stanford Prison Experiment (band). For the film, see The Stanford Prison Experiment (film).Date
August 14–21, 1971
Single corridor in the basement of Stanford University's psychology building
SPE
Psychology experiment
Participants were recruited from the local community with an ad in the newspapers offering $15 per day ($113 in 2023) to male students who wanted to participate in a "psychological study of prison life". Volunteers were chosen after assessments of psychological stability and then randomly assigned to being prisoners or prison guards.[2] Critics have questioned the validity of these methods.[3]
Those volunteers selected to be "guards" were given uniforms specifically to de-individuate them, and they were instructed to prevent prisoners from escaping. The experiment officially started when "prisoners" were arrested by real Palo Alto police. Over the following five days, psychological abuse of the prisoners by the "guards" became increasingly brutal. After psychologist Christina Maslach visited to evaluate the conditions, she was upset to see how study participants were behaving and she confronted Zimbardo. He ended the experiment on the sixth day.[4]
SPE has been referenced and critiqued as an example of an unethical psychology experiment, and the harm inflicted on the participants in this and other experiments in the post-World War II era prompted American universities to improve their ethical requirements and institutional review for human subject experiments in order to prevent them from being similarly harmed. Other researchers have found it difficult to reproduce the study, especially given those constraints.[5]
Critics have described the study as unscientific and fraudulent.[6][7] In particular, Thibault Le Texier has established that the guards were directly asked to behave in certain ways in order to support Zimbardo's conclusions, which were largely written in advance of the experiment. However, Le Texier's article has been criticized by Zimbardo for focusing mostly on ad hominem attacks and ignoring available data that contradicts his counterarguments.
Publishing[edit]
Prior to publishing in American Psychologist and other peer-reviewed journals, the researchers reported the findings in Naval Research Reviews,[12] International Journal of Criminology and Penology (IJCP),[13] and the New York Times Magazine.[14] David Amodio, psychology instructor at both New York University and the University of Amsterdam, dismissed Zimbardo's study, stating that releasing the article to an "obscure journal" demonstrated that Zimbardo was unable to convince fellow psychologists of the validity and reliability of his study. This action taken by Zimbardo broke the tradition of scientific dissemination by publishing in other journals before publishing in a scientific peer-reviewed journal.[15]
Zimbardo has stated that the grant agreement with the Office of Naval Research included a requirement to publish data in their journal, Naval Research Reviews. He states that the International Journal of Criminology and Penology invited Zimbardo to write about his study in their journal, and he then wrote an article with the New York Times Magazine to share the findings with a broad audience. He states that the article still needed to pass through the very strict requirements of the American Psychologist, the official journal of the American Psychological Association, in order to be published. After publishing the article in the American Psychologist, the findings were also reported in other peer-reviewed journals and books.[16]
Similar studies[edit]
In 1967, The Third Wave experiment involved the use of authoritarian dynamics similar to Nazi Party methods of mass control in a classroom setting by high school teacher Ron Jones in Palo Alto, California with the goal of vividly demonstrating to the class how the German public in World War II could have acted in the way it did.[60] Although the veracity of Jones' accounts has been questioned, several participants in the study have gone on record to confirm the events.[61]
In both experiments, participants found it difficult to leave the study due to the roles they were assigned. Both studies examine human nature and the effects of authority. Personalities of the subjects had little influence on both experiments despite the test before the prison experiment.[62]
Both the Milgram and Zimbardo studies clearly show that participants conform to social pressures. Conformity is strengthened by allowing some participants to feel more or less powerful than others.[63] In both experiments, the people's behavior are altered to match the group stereotypes and shows that we conform to others passively, even if the subject at hand is malevolent. It is clear that people's desire to be a good subject is much more prevalent than to be a subject that does good.
A 2007 study on prison-life examined the potential relationship between participant self-selection and the disposition toward aggressive behaviors. They found that when responding to an advertisement, participants "were significantly higher on measures of aggressiveness, authoritarianism, Machiavellianism, narcissism, and social dominance than those who responded to a parallel ad that omitted the words 'of prison life,' and they were significantly lower in dispositional empathy and altruism".[64]
Abu Ghraib and the experiment: