(The prison’s “warden” was also a researcher.) /Occasionally, disputes between prisoner and guards got out of hand, violating an explicit injunction against physical force that both prisoners and guards had read prior to enrolling in the study. But that didn’t mean that they were fully autonomous: Zimbardo himself took part in the experiment, playing the role of the prison superintendent. Often, the guards operated without explicit, moment-to-moment instructions.
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(The guards wore khaki uniforms and were given whistles, nightsticks, and mirrored sunglasses inspired by a prison guard in the movie “Cool Hand Luke.”) “Real male prisoners don't wear dresses,” Zimbardo explained, “but real male prisoners, we have learned, do feel humiliated, do feel emasculated, and we thought we could produce the same effects very quickly by putting men in a dress without any underclothes.” The stocking caps were in lieu of shaving the prisoner’s heads. In a presentation to his Stanford colleagues shortly after the study’s conclusion, he described the procedures surrounding each prisoner’s arrival: each man was stripped and searched, “deloused,” and then given a uniform-a numbered gown, which Zimbardo called a “dress,” with a heavy bolted chain near the ankle, loose-fitting rubber sandals, and a cap made from a woman’s nylon stocking. To understand the meaning of the experiment, you have to understand that it wasn’t a blank slate from the start, its goal was to evoke the experience of working and living in a brutal jail.įrom the first, the guards’ priorities were set by Zimbardo. But, in reality, the Stanford County Prison was a heavily manipulated environment, and the guards and prisoners acted in ways that were largely predetermined by how their roles were presented. The appeal of the experiment has a lot to do with its apparently simple setup: prisoners, guards, a fake jail, and some ground rules. Was the study about our individual fallibility, or about broken institutions? Were its findings about prisons, specifically, or about life in general? What did the Stanford Prison Experiment really show? Even as it suggests that ordinary people harbor ugly potentialities, it also testifies to the way our circumstances shape our behavior. From the beginning, the study has been haunted by ambiguity. The Stanford Prison Experiment is cited as evidence of the atavistic impulses that lurk within us all it’s said to show that, with a little nudge, we could all become tyrants.Īnd yet the lessons of the Stanford Prison Experiment aren’t so clear-cut. Today, more than forty-five years later, many look to the study to make sense of events like the behavior of the guards at Abu Ghraib and America’s epidemic of police brutality. To many, the Stanford experiment underscored those findings, revealing the ease with which regular people, if given too much power, could transform into ruthless oppressors. Less than a decade earlier, the Milgram obedience study had shown that ordinary people, if encouraged by an authority figure, were willing to shock their fellow-citizens with what they believed to be painful and potentially lethal levels of electricity. The behavior of all involved was so extreme that the experiment, which was meant to last two weeks, was terminated after six days. The prisoners, in turn, became submissive and depersonalized, taking the abuse and saying little in protest. According to the lore that’s grown up around the experiment, the guards, with little to no instruction, began humiliating and psychologically abusing the prisoners within twenty-four hours of the study’s start. It opens July 17th.) The study subjects, middle-class college students, had answered a questionnaire about their family backgrounds, physical- and mental-health histories, and social behavior, and had been deemed “normal” a coin flip divided them into prisoners and guards. (It’s the subject of a new film of the same name-a drama, not a documentary-starring Billy Crudup, of “Almost Famous,” as the lead investigator, Philip Zimbardo. They were willing participants in the Stanford Prison Experiment, one of the most controversial studies in the history of social psychology. Finally, they were transported to the Stanford County Prison-also known as the Stanford University psychology department. The cars took them to a Palo Alto police station, where the men were booked, fingerprinted, moved to a holding cell, and blindfolded. While their neighbors looked on, the men were arrested for violating Penal Codes 211 and 459 (armed robbery and burglary), searched, handcuffed, and led into the rear of a waiting police car. On the morning of August 17, 1971, nine young men in the Palo Alto area received visits from local police officers.