the stanford prison experiment psychologist

Stanford Prison Experiment: Zimbardo’s Famous Study

Saul McLeod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul McLeod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

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Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc

Associate Editor for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MSc Psychology of Education

Olivia Guy-Evans is a writer and associate editor for Simply Psychology. She has previously worked in healthcare and educational sectors.

On This Page:

• The experiment was conducted in 1971 by psychologist Philip Zimbardo to examine situational forces versus dispositions in human behavior.
• 24 young, healthy, psychologically normal men were randomly assigned to be “prisoners” or “guards” in a simulated prison environment.
• The experiment had to be terminated after only 6 days due to the extreme, pathological behavior emerging in both groups. The situational forces overwhelmed the dispositions of the participants.
• Pacifist young men assigned as guards began behaving sadistically, inflicting humiliation and suffering on the prisoners. Prisoners became blindly obedient and allowed themselves to be dehumanized.
• The principal investigator, Zimbardo, was also transformed into a rigid authority figure as the Prison Superintendent.
• The experiment demonstrated the power of situations to alter human behavior dramatically. Even good, normal people can do evil things when situational forces push them in that direction.

Zimbardo and his colleagues (1973) were interested in finding out whether the brutality reported among guards in American prisons was due to the sadistic personalities of the guards (i.e., dispositional) or had more to do with the prison environment (i.e., situational).

For example, prisoners and guards may have personalities that make conflict inevitable, with prisoners lacking respect for law and order and guards being domineering and aggressive.

Alternatively, prisoners and guards may behave in a hostile manner due to the rigid power structure of the social environment in prisons.

Zimbardo predicted the situation made people act the way they do rather than their disposition (personality).

To study people’s roles in prison situations, Zimbardo converted a basement of the Stanford University psychology building into a mock prison.

He advertised asking for volunteers to participate in a study of the psychological effects of prison life.

The 75 applicants who answered the ad were given diagnostic interviews and personality tests to eliminate candidates with psychological problems, medical disabilities, or a history of crime or drug abuse.

24 men judged to be the most physically & mentally stable, the most mature, & the least involved in antisocial behaviors were chosen to participate.

The participants did not know each other prior to the study and were paid $15 per day to take part in the experiment.

Participants were randomly assigned to either the role of prisoner or guard in a simulated prison environment. There were two reserves, and one dropped out, finally leaving ten prisoners and 11 guards.

Prisoners were treated like every other criminal, being arrested at their own homes, without warning, and taken to the local police station. They were fingerprinted, photographed and ‘booked.’

Then they were blindfolded and driven to the psychology department of Stanford University, where Zimbardo had had the basement set out as a prison, with barred doors and windows, bare walls and small cells. Here the deindividuation process began.

When the prisoners arrived at the prison they were stripped naked, deloused, had all their personal possessions removed and locked away, and were given prison clothes and bedding. They were issued a uniform, and referred to by their number only.

The use of ID numbers was a way to make prisoners feel anonymous. Each prisoner had to be called only by his ID number and could only refer to himself and the other prisoners by number.

Their clothes comprised a smock with their number written on it, but no underclothes. They also had a tight nylon cap to cover their hair, and a locked chain around one ankle.

All guards were dressed in identical uniforms of khaki, and they carried a whistle around their neck and a billy club borrowed from the police. Guards also wore special sunglasses, to make eye contact with prisoners impossible.

Three guards worked shifts of eight hours each (the other guards remained on call). Guards were instructed to do whatever they thought was necessary to maintain law and order in the prison and to command the respect of the prisoners. No physical violence was permitted.

Zimbardo observed the behavior of the prisoners and guards (as a researcher), and also acted as a prison warden.

Within a very short time both guards and prisoners were settling into their new roles, with the guards adopting theirs quickly and easily.

Asserting Authority

Within hours of beginning the experiment, some guards began to harass prisoners. At 2:30 A.M. prisoners were awakened from sleep by blasting whistles for the first of many “counts.”

The counts served as a way to familiarize the prisoners with their numbers. More importantly, they provided a regular occasion for the guards to exercise control over the prisoners.

The prisoners soon adopted prisoner-like behavior too. They talked about prison issues a great deal of the time. They ‘told tales’ on each other to the guards.

They started taking the prison rules very seriously, as though they were there for the prisoners’ benefit and infringement would spell disaster for all of them. Some even began siding with the guards against prisoners who did not obey the rules.

Physical Punishment

The prisoners were taunted with insults and petty orders, they were given pointless and boring tasks to accomplish, and they were generally dehumanized.

Push-ups were a common form of physical punishment imposed by the guards. One of the guards stepped on the prisoners” backs while they did push-ups, or made other prisoners sit on the backs of fellow prisoners doing their push-ups.

Asserting Independence

Because the first day passed without incident, the guards were surprised and totally unprepared for the rebellion which broke out on the morning of the second day.

During the second day of the experiment, the prisoners removed their stocking caps, ripped off their numbers, and barricaded themselves inside the cells by putting their beds against the door.

The guards called in reinforcements. The three guards who were waiting on stand-by duty came in and the night shift guards voluntarily remained on duty.

Putting Down the Rebellion

The guards retaliated by using a fire extinguisher which shot a stream of skin-chilling carbon dioxide, and they forced the prisoners away from the doors. Next, the guards broke into each cell, stripped the prisoners naked and took the beds out.

The ringleaders of the prisoner rebellion were placed into solitary confinement. After this, the guards generally began to harass and intimidate the prisoners.

Special Privileges

One of the three cells was designated as a “privilege cell.” The three prisoners least involved in the rebellion were given special privileges. The guards gave them back their uniforms and beds and allowed them to wash their hair and brush their teeth.

Privileged prisoners also got to eat special food in the presence of the other prisoners who had temporarily lost the privilege of eating. The effect was to break the solidarity among prisoners.

Consequences of the Rebellion

Over the next few days, the relationships between the guards and the prisoners changed, with a change in one leading to a change in the other. Remember that the guards were firmly in control and the prisoners were totally dependent on them.

As the prisoners became more dependent, the guards became more derisive towards them. They held the prisoners in contempt and let the prisoners know it. As the guards’ contempt for them grew, the prisoners became more submissive.

As the prisoners became more submissive, the guards became more aggressive and assertive. They demanded ever greater obedience from the prisoners. The prisoners were dependent on the guards for everything, so tried to find ways to please the guards, such as telling tales on fellow prisoners.

Prisoner #8612

Less than 36 hours into the experiment, Prisoner #8612 began suffering from acute emotional disturbance, disorganized thinking, uncontrollable crying, and rage.

After a meeting with the guards where they told him he was weak, but offered him “informant” status, #8612 returned to the other prisoners and said “You can”t leave. You can’t quit.”

Soon #8612 “began to act ‘crazy,’ to scream, to curse, to go into a rage that seemed out of control.” It wasn’t until this point that the psychologists realized they had to let him out.

A Visit from Parents

The next day, the guards held a visiting hour for parents and friends. They were worried that when the parents saw the state of the jail, they might insist on taking their sons home. Guards washed the prisoners, had them clean and polish their cells, fed them a big dinner and played music on the intercom.

After the visit, rumors spread of a mass escape plan. Afraid that they would lose the prisoners, the guards and experimenters tried to enlist help and facilities of the Palo Alto police department.

The guards again escalated the level of harassment, forcing them to do menial, repetitive work such as cleaning toilets with their bare hands.

Catholic Priest

Zimbardo invited a Catholic priest who had been a prison chaplain to evaluate how realistic our prison situation was. Half of the prisoners introduced themselves by their number rather than name.

The chaplain interviewed each prisoner individually. The priest told them the only way they would get out was with the help of a lawyer.

Prisoner #819

Eventually, while talking to the priest, #819 broke down and began to cry hysterically, just like two previously released prisoners had.

The psychologists removed the chain from his foot, the cap off his head, and told him to go and rest in a room that was adjacent to the prison yard. They told him they would get him some food and then take him to see a doctor.

While this was going on, one of the guards lined up the other prisoners and had them chant aloud:

“Prisoner #819 is a bad prisoner. Because of what Prisoner #819 did, my cell is a mess, Mr. Correctional Officer.”

The psychologists realized #819 could hear the chanting and went back into the room where they found him sobbing uncontrollably. The psychologists tried to get him to agree to leave the experiment, but he said he could not leave because the others had labeled him a bad prisoner.

Back to Reality

At that point, Zimbardo said, “Listen, you are not #819. You are [his name], and my name is Dr. Zimbardo. I am a psychologist, not a prison superintendent, and this is not a real prison. This is just an experiment, and those are students, not prisoners, just like you. Let’s go.”

He stopped crying suddenly, looked up and replied, “Okay, let’s go,“ as if nothing had been wrong.

An End to the Experiment

Zimbardo (1973) had intended that the experiment should run for two weeks, but on the sixth day, it was terminated, due to the emotional breakdowns of prisoners, and excessive aggression of the guards.

Christina Maslach, a recent Stanford Ph.D. brought in to conduct interviews with the guards and prisoners, strongly objected when she saw the prisoners being abused by the guards.

Filled with outrage, she said, “It’s terrible what you are doing to these boys!” Out of 50 or more outsiders who had seen our prison, she was the only one who ever questioned its morality.

Zimbardo (2008) later noted, “It wasn’t until much later that I realized how far into my prison role I was at that point — that I was thinking like a prison superintendent rather than a research psychologist.“

This led him to prioritize maintaining the experiment’s structure over the well-being and ethics involved, thereby highlighting the blurring of roles and the profound impact of the situation on human behavior.

Here’s a quote that illustrates how Philip Zimbardo, initially the principal investigator, became deeply immersed in his role as the “Stanford Prison Superintendent (April 19, 2011):

“By the third day, when the second prisoner broke down, I had already slipped into or been transformed into the role of “Stanford Prison Superintendent.” And in that role, I was no longer the principal investigator, worried about ethics. When a prisoner broke down, what was my job? It was to replace him with somebody on our standby list. And that’s what I did. There was a weakness in the study in not separating those two roles. I should only have been the principal investigator, in charge of two graduate students and one undergraduate.”

According to Zimbardo and his colleagues, the Stanford Prison Experiment revealed how people will readily conform to the social roles they are expected to play, especially if the roles are as strongly stereotyped as those of the prison guards.

Because the guards were placed in a position of authority, they began to act in ways they would not usually behave in their normal lives.

The “prison” environment was an important factor in creating the guards’ brutal behavior (none of the participants who acted as guards showed sadistic tendencies before the study).

Therefore, the findings support the situational explanation of behavior rather than the dispositional one.

Zimbardo proposed that two processes can explain the prisoner’s “final submission.”

Deindividuation may explain the behavior of the participants; especially the guards. This is a state when you become so immersed in the norms of the group that you lose your sense of identity and personal responsibility.

The guards may have been so sadistic because they did not feel what happened was down to them personally – it was a group norm. They also may have lost their sense of personal identity because of the uniform they wore.

Also, learned helplessness could explain the prisoner’s submission to the guards. The prisoners learned that whatever they did had little effect on what happened to them. In the mock prison the unpredictable decisions of the guards led the prisoners to give up responding.

After the prison experiment was terminated, Zimbardo interviewed the participants. Here’s an excerpt:

‘Most of the participants said they had felt involved and committed. The research had felt “real” to them. One guard said, “I was surprised at myself. I made them call each other names and clean the toilets out with their bare hands. I practically considered the prisoners cattle and I kept thinking I had to watch out for them in case they tried something.” Another guard said “Acting authoritatively can be fun. Power can be a great pleasure.” And another: “… during the inspection I went to Cell Two to mess up a bed which a prisoner had just made and he grabbed me, screaming that he had just made it and that he was not going to let me mess it up. He grabbed me by the throat and although he was laughing I was pretty scared. I lashed out with my stick and hit him on the chin although not very hard, and when I freed myself I became angry.”’

Most of the guards found it difficult to believe that they had behaved in the brutal ways that they had. Many said they hadn’t known this side of them existed or that they were capable of such things.

The prisoners, too, couldn’t believe that they had responded in the submissive, cowering, dependent way they had. Several claimed to be assertive types normally.

When asked about the guards, they described the usual three stereotypes that can be found in any prison: some guards were good, some were tough but fair, and some were cruel.

A further explanation for the behavior of the participants can be described in terms of reinforcement.  The escalation of aggression and abuse by the guards could be seen as being due to the positive reinforcement they received both from fellow guards and intrinsically in terms of how good it made them feel to have so much power.

Similarly, the prisoners could have learned through negative reinforcement that if they kept their heads down and did as they were told, they could avoid further unpleasant experiences.

Critical Evaluation

Ecological validity.

The Stanford Prison Experiment is criticized for lacking ecological validity in its attempt to simulate a real prison environment. Specifically, the “prison” was merely a setup in the basement of Stanford University’s psychology department.

The student “guards” lacked professional training, and the experiment’s duration was much shorter than real prison sentences. Furthermore, the participants, who were college students, didn’t reflect the diverse backgrounds typically found in actual prisons in terms of ethnicity, education, and socioeconomic status.

None had prior prison experience, and they were chosen due to their mental stability and low antisocial tendencies. Additionally, the mock prison lacked spaces for exercise or rehabilitative activities.

Demand characteristics

Demand characteristics could explain the findings of the study. Most of the guards later claimed they were simply acting. Because the guards and prisoners were playing a role, their behavior may not be influenced by the same factors which affect behavior in real life. This means the study’s findings cannot be reasonably generalized to real life, such as prison settings. I.e, the study has low ecological validity.

One of the biggest criticisms is that strong demand characteristics confounded the study. Banuazizi and Movahedi (1975) found that the majority of respondents, when given a description of the study, were able to guess the hypothesis and predict how participants were expected to behave.

This suggests participants may have simply been playing out expected roles rather than genuinely conforming to their assigned identities.

In addition, revelations by Zimbardo (2007) indicate he actively encouraged the guards to be cruel and oppressive in his orientation instructions prior to the start of the study. For example, telling them “they [the prisoners] will be able to do nothing and say nothing that we don’t permit.”

He also tacitly approved of abusive behaviors as the study progressed. This deliberate cueing of how participants should act, rather than allowing behavior to unfold naturally, indicates the study findings were likely a result of strong demand characteristics rather than insightful revelations about human behavior.

However, there is considerable evidence that the participants did react to the situation as though it was real. For example, 90% of the prisoners’ private conversations, which were monitored by the researchers, were on the prison conditions, and only 10% of the time were their conversations about life outside of the prison.

The guards, too, rarely exchanged personal information during their relaxation breaks – they either talked about ‘problem prisoners,’ other prison topics, or did not talk at all. The guards were always on time and even worked overtime for no extra pay.

When the prisoners were introduced to a priest, they referred to themselves by their prison number, rather than their first name. Some even asked him to get a lawyer to help get them out.

Fourteen years after his experience as prisoner 8612 in the Stanford Prison Experiment, Douglas Korpi, now a prison psychologist, reflected on his time and stated (Musen and Zimbardo 1992):

“The Stanford Prison Experiment was a very benign prison situation and it promotes everything a normal prison promotes — the guard role promotes sadism, the prisoner role promotes confusion and shame”.

Sample bias

The study may also lack population validity as the sample comprised US male students. The study’s findings cannot be applied to female prisons or those from other countries. For example, America is an individualist culture (where people are generally less conforming), and the results may be different in collectivist cultures (such as Asian countries).

Carnahan and McFarland (2007) have questioned whether self-selection may have influenced the results – i.e., did certain personality traits or dispositions lead some individuals to volunteer for a study of “prison life” in the first place?

All participants completed personality measures assessing: aggression, authoritarianism, Machiavellianism, narcissism, social dominance, empathy, and altruism. Participants also answered questions on mental health and criminal history to screen out any issues as per the original SPE.

Results showed that volunteers for the prison study, compared to the control group, scored significantly higher on aggressiveness, authoritarianism, Machiavellianism, narcissism, and social dominance. They scored significantly lower on empathy and altruism.

A follow-up role-playing study found that self-presentation biases could not explain these differences. Overall, the findings suggest that volunteering for the prison study was influenced by personality traits associated with abusive tendencies.

Zimbardo’s conclusion may be wrong

While implications for the original SPE are speculative, this lends support to a person-situation interactionist perspective, rather than a purely situational account.

It implies that certain individuals are drawn to and selected into situations that fit their personality, and that group composition can shape behavior through mutual reinforcement.

Contributions to psychology

Another strength of the study is that the harmful treatment of participants led to the formal recognition of ethical  guidelines by the American Psychological Association. Studies must now undergo an extensive review by an institutional review board (US) or ethics committee (UK) before they are implemented.

Most institutions, such as universities, hospitals, and government agencies, require a review of research plans by a panel. These boards review whether the potential benefits of the research are justifiable in light of the possible risk of physical or psychological harm.

These boards may request researchers make changes to the study’s design or procedure, or, in extreme cases, deny approval of the study altogether.

Contribution to prison policy

A strength of the study is that it has altered the way US prisons are run. For example, juveniles accused of federal crimes are no longer housed before trial with adult prisoners (due to the risk of violence against them).

However, in the 25 years since the SPE, U.S. prison policy has transformed in ways counter to SPE insights (Haney & Zimbardo, 1995):

• Rehabilitation was abandoned in favor of punishment and containment. Prison is now seen as inflicting pain rather than enabling productive re-entry.
• Sentencing became rigid rather than accounting for inmates’ individual contexts. Mandatory minimums and “three strikes” laws over-incarcerate nonviolent crimes.
• Prison construction boomed, and populations soared, disproportionately affecting minorities. From 1925 to 1975, incarceration rates held steady at around 100 per 100,000. By 1995, rates tripled to over 600 per 100,000.
• Drug offenses account for an increasing proportion of prisoners. Nonviolent drug offenses make up a large share of the increased incarceration.
• Psychological perspectives have been ignored in policymaking. Legislators overlooked insights from social psychology on the power of contexts in shaping behavior.
• Oversight retreated, with courts deferring to prison officials and ending meaningful scrutiny of conditions. Standards like “evolving decency” gave way to “legitimate” pain.
• Supermax prisons proliferated, isolating prisoners in psychological trauma-inducing conditions.

The authors argue psychologists should reengage to:

• Limit the use of imprisonment and adopt humane alternatives based on the harmful effects of prison environments
• Assess prisons’ total environments, not just individual conditions, given situational forces interact
• Prepare inmates for release by transforming criminogenic post-release contexts
• Address socioeconomic risk factors, not just incarcerate individuals
• Develop contextual prediction models vs. focusing only on static traits
• Scrutinize prison systems independently, not just defer to officials shaped by those environments
• Generate creative, evidence-based reforms to counter over-punitive policies

Psychology once contributed to a more humane system and can again counter the U.S. “rage to punish” with contextual insights (Haney & Zimbardo, 1998).

Evidence for situational factors

Zimbardo (1995) further demonstrates the power of situations to elicit evil actions from ordinary, educated people who likely would never have done such things otherwise. It was another situation-induced “transformation of human character.”

• Unit 731 was a covert biological and chemical warfare research unit of the Japanese army during WWII.
• It was led by General Shiro Ishii and involved thousands of doctors and researchers.
• Unit 731 set up facilities near Harbin, China to conduct lethal human experimentation on prisoners, including Allied POWs.
• Experiments involved exposing prisoners to things like plague, anthrax, mustard gas, and bullets to test biological weapons. They infected prisoners with diseases and monitored their deaths.
• At least 3,000 prisoners died from these brutal experiments. Many were killed and dissected.
• The doctors in Unit 731 obeyed orders unquestioningly and conducted these experiments in the name of “medical science.”
• After the war, the vast majority of doctors who participated faced no punishment and went on to have prestigious careers. This was largely covered up by the U.S. in exchange for data.
• It shows how normal, intelligent professionals can be led by situational forces to systematically dehumanize victims and conduct incredibly cruel and lethal experiments on people.
• Even healers trained to preserve life used their expertise to destroy lives when the situational forces compelled obedience, nationalism, and wartime enmity.

Evidence for an interactionist approach

The results are also relevant for explaining abuses by American guards at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

An interactionist perspective recognizes that volunteering for roles as prison guards attracts those already prone to abusive tendencies, which are intensified by the prison context.

This counters a solely situationist view of good people succumbing to evil situational forces.

Ethical Issues

The study has received many ethical criticisms, including lack of fully informed consent by participants as Zimbardo himself did not know what would happen in the experiment (it was unpredictable). Also, the prisoners did not consent to being “arrested” at home. The prisoners were not told partly because final approval from the police wasn’t given until minutes before the participants decided to participate, and partly because the researchers wanted the arrests to come as a surprise. However, this was a breach of the ethics of Zimbardo’s own contract that all of the participants had signed.

Protection of Participants

Participants playing the role of prisoners were not protected from psychological harm, experiencing incidents of humiliation and distress. For example, one prisoner had to be released after 36 hours because of uncontrollable bursts of screaming, crying, and anger.

Here’s a quote from Philip G. Zimbardo, taken from an interview on the Stanford Prison Experiment’s 40th anniversary (April 19, 2011):

“In the Stanford prison study, people were stressed, day and night, for 5 days, 24 hours a day. There’s no question that it was a high level of stress because five of the boys had emotional breakdowns, the first within 36 hours. Other boys that didn’t have emotional breakdowns were blindly obedient to corrupt authority by the guards and did terrible things to each other. And so it is no question that that was unethical. You can’t do research where you allow people to suffer at that level.”

“After the first one broke down, we didn’t believe it. We thought he was faking. There was actually a rumor he was faking to get out. He was going to bring his friends in to liberate the prison. And/or we believed our screening procedure was inadequate, [we believed] that he had some mental defect that we did not pick up. At that point, by the third day, when the second prisoner broke down, I had already slipped into or been transformed into the role of “Stanford Prison Superintendent.” And in that role, I was no longer the principal investigator, worried about ethics.”

However, in Zimbardo’s defense, the emotional distress experienced by the prisoners could not have been predicted from the outset.

Approval for the study was given by the Office of Naval Research, the Psychology Department, and the University Committee of Human Experimentation.

This Committee also did not anticipate the prisoners’ extreme reactions that were to follow. Alternative methodologies were looked at that would cause less distress to the participants but at the same time give the desired information, but nothing suitable could be found.

Withdrawal 

Although guards were explicitly instructed not to physically harm prisoners at the beginning of the Stanford Prison Experiment, they were allowed to induce feelings of boredom, frustration, arbitrariness, and powerlessness among the inmates.

This created a pervasive atmosphere where prisoners genuinely believed and even reinforced among each other, that they couldn’t leave the experiment until their “sentence” was completed, mirroring the inescapability of a real prison.

Even though two participants (8612 and 819) were released early, the impact of the environment was so profound that prisoner 416, reflecting on the experience two months later, described it as a “prison run by psychologists rather than by the state.”

Extensive group and individual debriefing sessions were held, and all participants returned post-experimental questionnaires several weeks, then several months later, and then at yearly intervals. Zimbardo concluded there were no lasting negative effects.

Zimbardo also strongly argues that the benefits gained from our understanding of human behavior and how we can improve society should outbalance the distress caused by the study.

However, it has been suggested that the US Navy was not so much interested in making prisons more human and were, in fact, more interested in using the study to train people in the armed services to cope with the stresses of captivity.

Discussion Questions

What are the effects of living in an environment with no clocks, no view of the outside world, and minimal sensory stimulation?

Consider the psychological consequences of stripping, delousing, and shaving the heads of prisoners or members of the military. Whattransformations take place when people go through an experience like this?

The prisoners could have left at any time, and yet, they didn’t. Why?

After the study, how do you think the prisoners and guards felt?

If you were the experimenter in charge, would you have done this study? Would you have terminated it earlier? Would you have conducted a follow-up study?

Frequently Asked Questions

What happened to prisoner 8612 after the experiment.

Douglas Korpi, as prisoner 8612, was the first to show signs of severe distress and demanded to be released from the experiment. He was released on the second day, and his reaction to the simulated prison environment highlighted the study’s ethical issues and the potential harm inflicted on participants.

After the experiment, Douglas Korpi graduated from Stanford University and earned a Ph.D. in clinical psychology. He pursued a career as a psychotherapist, helping others with their mental health struggles.

Why did Zimbardo not stop the experiment?

Zimbardo did not initially stop the experiment because he became too immersed in his dual role as the principal investigator and the prison superintendent, causing him to overlook the escalating abuse and distress among participants.

It was only after an external observer, Christina Maslach, raised concerns about the participants’ well-being that Zimbardo terminated the study.

What happened to the guards in the Stanford Prison Experiment?

In the Stanford Prison Experiment, the guards exhibited abusive and authoritarian behavior, using psychological manipulation, humiliation, and control tactics to assert dominance over the prisoners. This ultimately led to the study’s early termination due to ethical concerns.

What did Zimbardo want to find out?

Zimbardo aimed to investigate the impact of situational factors and power dynamics on human behavior, specifically how individuals would conform to the roles of prisoners and guards in a simulated prison environment.

He wanted to explore whether the behavior displayed in prisons was due to the inherent personalities of prisoners and guards or the result of the social structure and environment of the prison itself.

What were the results of the Stanford Prison Experiment?

The results of the Stanford Prison Experiment showed that situational factors and power dynamics played a significant role in shaping participants’ behavior. The guards became abusive and authoritarian, while the prisoners became submissive and emotionally distressed.

The experiment revealed how quickly ordinary individuals could adopt and internalize harmful behaviors due to their assigned roles and the environment.

Banuazizi, A., & Movahedi, S. (1975). Interpersonal dynamics in a simulated prison: A methodological analysis. American Psychologist, 30 , 152-160.

Carnahan, T., & McFarland, S. (2007). Revisiting the Stanford prison experiment: Could participant self-selection have led to the cruelty? Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 33, 603-614.

Drury, S., Hutchens, S. A., Shuttlesworth, D. E., & White, C. L. (2012). Philip G. Zimbardo on his career and the Stanford Prison Experiment’s 40th anniversary.  History of Psychology ,  15 (2), 161.

Griggs, R. A., & Whitehead, G. I., III. (2014). Coverage of the Stanford Prison Experiment in introductory social psychology textbooks. Teaching of Psychology, 41 , 318 –324.

Haney, C., Banks, W. C., & Zimbardo, P. G. (1973). A study of prisoners and guards in a simulated prison . Naval Research Review , 30, 4-17.

Haney, C., & Zimbardo, P. (1998). The past and future of U.S. prison policy: Twenty-five years after the Stanford Prison Experiment.  American Psychologist, 53 (7), 709–727.

Musen, K. & Zimbardo, P. (1992) (DVD) Quiet Rage: The Stanford Prison Experiment Documentary.

Zimbardo, P. G. (Consultant, On-Screen Performer), Goldstein, L. (Producer), & Utley, G. (Correspondent). (1971, November 26). Prisoner 819 did a bad thing: The Stanford Prison Experiment [Television series episode]. In L. Goldstein (Producer), Chronolog. New York, NY: NBC-TV.

Zimbardo, P. G. (1973). On the ethics of intervention in human psychological research: With special reference to the Stanford prison experiment.  Cognition ,  2 (2), 243-256.

Zimbardo, P. G. (1995). The psychology of evil: A situationist perspective on recruiting good people to engage in anti-social acts.  Japanese Journal of Social Psychology ,  11 (2), 125-133.

Zimbardo, P.G. (2007). The Lucifer effect: Understanding how good people turn evil . New York, NY: Random House.

Further Information

• Reicher, S., & Haslam, S. A. (2006). Rethinking the psychology of tyranny: The BBC prison study. The British Journal of Social Psychology, 45 , 1.
• Coverage of the Stanford Prison Experiment in introductory psychology textbooks
• The Stanford Prison Experiment Official Website

Demonstrating the Power of Social Situations via a Simulated Prison Experiment

A person-centered analysis of human behavior attributes most behavior change, in positive or negative directions, to internal, dispositional features of individuals. The factors commonly believed to direct behavior are to be found in the operation of genes, temperament, personality traits, personal pathologies and virtues. A situation-centered approach, in contrast, focuses on factors external to the person, to the behavioral context in which individuals are functioning. Although human behavior is almost always a function of the interaction of person and situation, social psychologists have called attention to the attributional biases in much of psychology and among the general public that overestimates the importance of dispositional factors while underestimating situational factors. This "fundamental attribution error" they argue, leads to a misrepresentation of both causal determinants and means for modifying undesirable behavior patterns. Research by social psychologist Stanley Milgram, PhD, (1974; see also Blass, 1999) was one of the earliest demonstrations of the extent to which a large sample of ordinary American citizens could be led to blindly obey unjust authority in delivering extreme levels of shock to an innocent "victim."

The Stanford Prison Experiment extended that analysis to demonstrate the surprisingly profound impact of institutional forces on the behavior of normal, healthy participants. Philip Zimbardo, PhD, and his research team of Craig Haney, Curtis Banks, David Jaffe, and ex convict consultant, Carlo Prescott (Zimbardo, Haney, Banks, & Jaffe, 1973) designed a study that separated the usual dispositional factors among correctional personnel and prisoners from the situational factors that characterize many prisons. They wanted to determine what prison-like settings bring out in people that are not confounded by what people bring into prisons. They sought to discover to what extent the violence and anti-social behaviors often found in prisons can be traced to the "bad apples" that go into prisons or to the "bad barrels" (the prisons themselves) that can corrupt behavior of even ordinary, good people.

The study was conducted this way: College students from all over the United States who answered a city newspaper ad for participants in a study of prison life were personally interviewed, given a battery of personality tests, and completed background surveys that enabled the researchers to pre-select only those who were mentally and physically healthy, normal and well adjusted. They were randomly assigned to role-play either prisoners or guards in the simulated prison setting constructed in the basement of Stanford University's Psychology Department. The prison setting was designed as functional simulation of the central features present in the psychology of imprisonment (Zimbardo, Maslach, & Haney, 1999). Read a full description of the methodology, chronology of daily events and transformations of human character that were revealed.

The major results of the study can be summarized as: many of the normal, healthy mock prisoners suffered such intense emotional stress reactions that they had to be released in a matter of days; most of the other prisoners acted like zombies totally obeying the demeaning orders of the guards; the distress of the prisoners was caused by their sense of powerlessness induced by the guards who began acting in cruel, dehumanizing and even sadistic ways. The study was terminated prematurely because it was getting out of control in the extent of degrading actions being perpetrated by the guards against the prisoners - all of whom had been normal, healthy, ordinary young college students less than a week before.

Significance

Practical application.

The lessons of the Stanford Prison Experiment have gone well beyond the classroom (Haney & Zimbardo, 1998). Zimbardo was invited to give testimony to a Congressional Committee investigating the causes of prison riots (Zimbardo, 1971), and to a Senate Judiciary Committee on crime and prisons focused on detention of juveniles (Zimbardo, 1974). Its chair, Senator Birch Bayh, prepared a new law for federal prisons requiring juveniles in pre-trial detention to be housed separately from adult inmates (to prevent their being abused), based on the abuse reported in the Stanford Prison Experiment of its juveniles in the pre-trial detention facility of the Stanford jail.

A video documentary of the study, "Quiet Rage: the Stanford Prison Experiment," has been used extensively by many agencies within the civilian and military criminal justice system, as well as in shelters for abused women. It is also used to educate role-playing military interrogators in the Navy SEAR program (SURVIVAL, EVASION, and RESISTANCE) on the potential dangers of abusing their power against others who role-playing pretend spies and terrorists (Zimbardo, Personal communication, fall, 2003, Annapolis Naval College psychology staff).

The eerily direct parallels between the sadistic acts perpetrator by the Stanford Prison Experiment guard and the Abu Ghraib Prison guards, as well as the conclusions about situational forces dominating dispositional aspects of the guards' abusive behavior have propelled this research into the national dialogue. It is seen as a relevant contribution to understanding the multiple situational causes of such aberrant behavior. The situational analysis of the Stanford Prison Experiment redirects the search for blame from an exclusive focus on the character of an alleged "few bad apples" to systemic abuses that were inherent in the "bad barrel" of that corrupting prison environment.

Cited Research

Blass, T. (Ed.) ( 1999). Obedience to Authority: Current Perspectives on the Milgram Paradigm. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Haney, C. & Zimbardo, P.G., (1998). The Past and Future of U.S. Prison Policy. Twenty-Five Years After the Stanford Prison Experiment. American Psychologist, Vol. 53, No. 7, pp. 709-727.

Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to Authority. New York: Harper & Row.

Zimbardo, P. G. (1971). The power and pathology of imprisonment. Congressional Record. (Serial No. 15, October 25, 1971). Hearings before Subcommittee No. 3, of the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, Ninety-Second Congress, First Session on Corrections, Part II, Prisons, Prison Reform and Prisoner's Rights: California. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Zimbardo, P. G. (1974). The detention and jailing of juveniles (Hearings before U. S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, 10, 11, 17, September, 1973). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 141-161.

Zimbardo, P. G., Haney, C., Banks, W. C., & Jaffe, D. (1973, April 8). The mind is a formidable jailer: A Pirandellian prison. The New York Times Magazine, Section 6, pp. 38, ff.

Zimbardo, P. G., Maslach, C., & Haney, C. (1999). Reflections on the Stanford Prison Experiment: Genesis, transformations, consequences. In T. Blass (Ed.), Obedience to Authority: Current Perspectives on the Milgram Paradigm. (pp. 193-237). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

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The Stanford Prison Experiment

• Participants
• Setting and Procedure

In August of 1971, psychologist Philip Zimbardo and his colleagues created an experiment to determine the impacts of being a prisoner or prison guard. The Stanford Prison Experiment, also known as the Zimbardo Prison Experiment, went on to become one of the best-known studies in psychology's history —and one of the most controversial.

This study has long been a staple in textbooks, articles, psychology classes, and even movies. Learn what it entailed, what was learned, and the criticisms that have called the experiment's scientific merits and value into question.

Purpose of the Stanford Prison Experiment

Zimbardo was a former classmate of the psychologist Stanley Milgram . Milgram is best known for his famous obedience experiment , and Zimbardo was interested in expanding upon Milgram's research. He wanted to further investigate the impact of situational variables on human behavior.

Specifically, the researchers wanted to know how participants would react when placed in a simulated prison environment. They wondered if physically and psychologically healthy people who knew they were participating in an experiment would change their behavior in a prison-like setting.

Participants in the Stanford Prison Experiment

To carry out the experiment, researchers set up a mock prison in the basement of Stanford University's psychology building. They then selected 24 undergraduate students to play the roles of both prisoners and guards.

Participants were chosen from a larger group of 70 volunteers based on having no criminal background, no psychological issues , and no significant medical conditions. Each volunteer agreed to participate in the Stanford Prison Experiment for one to two weeks in exchange for $15 a day.

Setting and Procedures

The simulated prison included three six-by-nine-foot prison cells. Each cell held three prisoners and included three cots. Other rooms across from the cells were utilized for the jail guards and warden. One tiny space was designated as the solitary confinement room, and yet another small room served as the prison yard.

The 24 volunteers were randomly assigned to either the prisoner or guard group. Prisoners were to remain in the mock prison 24 hours a day during the study. Guards were assigned to work in three-man teams for eight-hour shifts. After each shift, they were allowed to return to their homes until their next shift.

Researchers were able to observe the behavior of the prisoners and guards using hidden cameras and microphones.

Results of the Stanford Prison Experiment

So what happened in the Zimbardo experiment? While originally slated to last 14 days, it had to be stopped after just six due to what was happening to the student participants. The guards became abusive and the prisoners began to show signs of extreme stress and anxiety .

It was noted that:

• While the prisoners and guards were allowed to interact in any way they wanted, the interactions were hostile or even dehumanizing.
• The guards began to become aggressive and abusive toward the prisoners while the prisoners became passive and depressed.
• Five of the prisoners began to experience severe negative emotions , including crying and acute anxiety, and had to be released from the study early.

Even the researchers themselves began to lose sight of the reality of the situation. Zimbardo, who acted as the prison warden, overlooked the abusive behavior of the jail guards until graduate student Christina Maslach voiced objections to the conditions in the simulated prison and the morality of continuing the experiment.

One possible explanation for the results of this experiment is the idea of deindividuation , which states that being part of a large group can make us more likely to perform behaviors we would otherwise not do on our own.

Impact of the Zimbardo Prison Experiment

The experiment became famous and was widely cited in textbooks and other publications. According to Zimbardo and his colleagues, the Stanford Prison Experiment demonstrated the powerful role that the situation can play in human behavior.

Because the guards were placed in a position of power, they began to behave in ways they would not usually act in their everyday lives or other situations. The prisoners, placed in a situation where they had no real control , became submissive and depressed.

In 2011, the Stanford Alumni Magazine featured a retrospective of the Stanford Prison Experiment in honor of the experiment’s 40th anniversary. The article contained interviews with several people involved, including Zimbardo and other researchers as well as some of the participants.

In the interviews, Richard Yacco, one of the prisoners in the experiment, suggested that the experiment demonstrated the power that societal roles and expectations can play in a person's behavior.

In 2015, the experiment became the topic of a feature film titled The Stanford Prison Experiment that dramatized the events of the 1971 study.

Criticisms of the Stanford Prison Experiment

In the years since the experiment was conducted, there have been a number of critiques of the study. Some of these include:

Ethical Issues

The Stanford Prison Experiment is frequently cited as an example of unethical research. It could not be replicated by researchers today because it fails to meet the standards established by numerous ethical codes, including the Code of Ethics of the American Psychological Association .

Why was Zimbardo's experiment unethical?

Zimbardo's experiment was unethical due to a lack of fully informed consent, abuse of participants, and lack of appropriate debriefings. More recent findings suggest there were other significant ethical issues that compromise the experiment's scientific standing, including the fact that experimenters may have encouraged abusive behaviors.

Lack of Generalizability

Other critics suggest that the study lacks generalizability due to a variety of factors. The unrepresentative sample of participants (mostly white and middle-class males) makes it difficult to apply the results to a wider population.

Lack of Realism

The Zimbardo Prison Experiment is also criticized for its lack of ecological validity. Ecological validity refers to the degree of realism with which a simulated experimental setup matches the real-world situation it seeks to emulate.

While the researchers did their best to recreate a prison setting, it is simply not possible to perfectly mimic all the environmental and situational variables of prison life. Because there may have been factors related to the setting and situation that influenced how the participants behaved, it may not truly represent what might happen outside of the lab.

Recent Criticisms

More recent examination of the experiment's archives and interviews with participants have revealed major issues with the research method , design, and procedures used. Together, these call the study's validity, value, and even authenticity into question.

These reports, including examinations of the study's records and new interviews with participants, have also cast doubt on some of its key findings and assumptions.

Among the issues described:

• One participant suggested that he faked a breakdown so he could leave the experiment because he was worried about failing his classes.
• Other participants also reported altering their behavior in a way designed to "help" the experiment .
• Evidence suggests that the experimenters encouraged the guards' behavior and played a role in fostering the abusive actions of the guards.

In 2019, the journal American Psychologist published an article debunking the famed experiment. It detailed the study's lack of scientific merit and concluded that the Stanford Prison Experiment was "an incredibly flawed study that should have died an early death."

In a statement posted on the experiment's official website, Zimbardo maintains that these criticisms do not undermine the main conclusion of the study—that situational forces can alter individual actions both in positive and negative ways.

The Stanford Prison Experiment is well known both inside and outside the field of psychology . While the study has long been criticized for many reasons, more recent criticisms of the study's procedures shine a brighter light on the experiment's scientific shortcomings.

Stanford University. About the Stanford Prison Experiment .

Stanford Prison Experiment. 2. Setting up .

Sommers T. An interview with Philip Zimbardo . The Believer.

Ratnesar R. The menace within . Stanford Magazine.

Jabbar A, Muazzam A, Sadaqat S. An unveiling the ethical quandaries: A critical analysis of the Stanford Prison Experiment as a mirror of Pakistani society . J Bus Manage Res . 2024;3(1):629-638.

Horn S. Landmark Stanford Prison Experiment criticized as a sham . Prison Legal News .

Bartels JM. The Stanford Prison Experiment in introductory psychology textbooks: A content analysis .  Psychol Learn Teach . 2015;14(1):36-50. doi:10.1177/1475725714568007

American Psychological Association. Ecological validity .

Blum B. The lifespan of a lie . Medium .

Le Texier T. Debunking the Stanford Prison Experiment . Am Psychol . 2019;74(7):823-839. doi:10.1037/amp0000401

Stanford Prison Experiment. Philip Zimbardo's response to recent criticisms of the Stanford Prison Experiment .

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

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Stanford Prison Experiment

• Quiet Rage: The Stanford Prison Experiment

About the Stanford Prison Experiment

Carried out August 15-21, 1971 in the basement of Jordan Hall, the Stanford Prison Experiment set out to examine the psychological effects of authority and powerlessness in a prison environment. The study, led by psychology professor Philip G. Zimbardo, recruited Stanford students using a local newspaper ad. Twenty-four students were carefully screened and randomly assigned into groups of prisoners and guards. The experiment, which was scheduled to last 1-2 weeks, ultimately had to be terminated on only the 6th day as the experiment escalated out of hand when the prisoners were forced to endure cruel and dehumanizing abuse at the hands of their peers. The experiment showed, in Dr. Zimbardo’s words, how “ordinary college students could do terrible things.”

This exhibit includes documentation of the experiment, including images and audiovisual recordings, that some viewers may find disturbing. Viewer discretion is advised.

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Table of Contents

Background and Objectives

In the 1960s and 70s, psychologist Philip Zimbardo conducted several notable social psychology experiments examining how social roles and situations can impact human behavior .

Zimbardo designed the Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971 to explore the psychology of imprisoning people. He aimed to study how participants reacted to being assigned randomized roles of prisoner and guard.

Zimbardo’s primary hypothesis was that the imposed social roles and environment of a prison would dominate the individual personalities of the participants, causing them to exhibit more extreme behaviors.

The experiment intended to demonstrate that situational variables can have a more powerful influence over behavior than inherent individual traits.

Zimbardo set up a simulated prison environment in the basement of Stanford University’s psychology building.

He recruited 18 male college students through a newspaper ad offering $15 per day to participate.

Although the participants had no abnormal psychological issues, Zimbardo hoped to provoke realistic responses by creating a believable mock prison.

The experiment planned to observe the participants’ interactions, emotions, and behaviors in this environment over a planned two-week study period.

Through this approach, Zimbardo sought to gain insight into the psychological mechanisms that make prisons dehumanizing environments.

Methodology

Zimbardo converted a corridor of the psychology department building into a simulated prison environment.

The experiment was monitored with video cameras and microphones. The participants were randomly assigned to be either “prisoners” or “guards” using a coin flip.

The “prisoners” were picked up by surprise at their homes by actual police officers, searched, handcuffed, and brought to the mock prison.

The prisoners were stripped naked, deloused, and given smocks and stocking caps to establish their powerless status.

Each prisoner was assigned an ID number to replace their name and lived in a small cell containing only a cot for sleeping.

The “guards” worked eight-hour shifts, with three guards working each shift. Guards wore military-style uniforms and reflector sunglasses to create an anonymous, authoritative appearance.

They carried handcuffs, whistles, and billy clubs. The guards followed protocols to maintain control, including bag searches, ID checks, and setting strict schedules.

However, they could otherwise run the prison however they wished and were told to demand total compliance from prisoners.

The study was scheduled to run for 14 days.

Zimbardo intended to observe how the participants interacted in these circumstances.

He took on the role of the prison superintendent, navigating how the study would proceed. Zimbardo encouraged the guards to create an oppressive atmosphere and break down the prisoners over time.

Findings and Analysis

The experiment quickly escalated out of control as the “guards” began ramping up their harassment and authoritarian measures, while the “prisoners” passively accepted the abuse.

On the second day of the experiment, the prisoners rebelled by barricading their cell doors and taunting the guards.

The guards responded by forcibly stripping the prisoners naked and removing their beds as punishment.

One prisoner developed acute emotional disturbance and had to be released after only 36 hours.

Over the next few days, the guards escalated their aggressive and dehumanizing tactics using psychological humiliation.

They set up privilege systems to make prisoners turn on each other.

Prisoners were forced to repeat their ID numbers and do meaningless chores and exercise.

Some prisoners began showing signs of depression and acute anxiety .

The guards and prisoner “#819” came into major conflict , with the prisoner launching a hunger strike.

Prisoner #819 was then subjected to further abuse.

Zimbardo interpreted the behavior results as arising from the assigned social roles and rules dominating over individual dispositions.

The prisoners became increasingly passive , depressed, and helpless as the study went on.

The phenomenon of one domineering guard nicknamed “John Wayne” emerged through the study procedures.

Zimbardo concluded the imposed prison environment crushed internal values and morals.

Criticisms and Ethical Concerns

The Stanford Prison Experiment has been widely criticized for being unscientific and unethical.

Critics point out there was no control group to compare against the prisoner and guard group.

The sample size of only 24 male participants was also too small to draw general conclusions about human behavior.

There are major ethical concerns about the amount of psychological distress inflicted on the participants.

The prisoners showed signs of anxiety, depression, and learned helplessness. Critics argue it was unethical to allow participants to continue suffering emotional harm.

The guards were encouraged to degrade the prisoners without oversight on their methods.

The experimenters became overinvolved as the study progressed rather than remaining neutral observers.

The experiment could not be conducted today with current ethical standards.

Today’s Institutional Review Boards would never allow vulnerable participants to be subjected to such dangerous psychological manipulation without proper informed consent.

Critics argue Zimbardo was irresponsible for encouraging aggression and abuse between participants.

The dramatic, uncontrolled nature of the study design would be prohibited by today’s more stringent safeguards.

Ultimately, the Stanford Prison Experiment revealed more about the problematic study procedures than any deep insights into human behavior.

While thought-provoking, the experiment is widely considered unethical and lacking in scientific rigor by today’s standards.

Legacy and Relevance Today

While the Stanford Prison Experiment faced deserved criticism, it left a legacy and continues to be referenced given the dramatics of the study.

Zimbardo’s experiment demonstrated how situational variables like social roles can override individual disposition to generate extreme behaviors.

The study shed light on how putting people in positions of power without oversight can lead to the abuse of authority.

The Stanford Prison Experiment is frequently cited when discussing the psychology of imprisonment.

The study showed how prisoners can become distressed and resigned in response to an oppressive environment.

It provided insight into how regimes like concentration camps can gain control through psychological manipulation.

However, the experiment’s scientific limitations mean its conclusions should be applied cautiously.

The study informed later research into prison conditions and supervisor/subordinate dynamics.

Modern replication attempts have used more rigorous methods and ethical standards.

However, the original experiment’s dramatic narrative keeps its themes relevant when examining topics like oppression, compliance, surveillance, and dehumanization.

Zimbardo’s prison study remains impactful despite its flaws, pioneering new areas of psychology research.

While controversial, it provided a warning about unconstrained authority that still resonates over 50 years later.

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The Stanford Prison Experiment 50 Years Later: A Conversation with Philip Zimbardo

In April 1971, a seemingly innocuous ad appeared in the classifieds of the Palo Alto Times : Male college students needed for psychological study of prison life. $15 per day for 1-2 weeks. In no time, more than 70 students volunteered, and 24 were chosen. Thus began the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE), conducted inside Jordan Hall on the Stanford campus. Originally scheduled to last two weeks, it was ended early over concerns regarding the behavior of both “prisoners” and “guards.” Still today, the SPE spikes enormous interest. Movies and documentaries have been made, books published, and studies produced about those six days. It’s clear today the research would never be allowed, but it was motivated by genuine concern over the ethical issues surrounding prisons, compliance with authority, and the evil humans have proved capable of. What was learned and at what cost? What is still being learned?

The Stanford Historical Society sponsors a look back at the controversial study with its leader, social psychologist Philip Zimbardo , Stanford Professor Emeritus of Psychology. Zimbardo is joined in conversation by Paul Costello who served as the chief communications officer for the School of Medicine for 17 years. He retired from Stanford in January 2021.

This program is organized by the Stanford Historical Society and co-sponsored by the Department of Psychology at Stanford University.

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Image credit: Stanford Prison Experiment (Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford Libraries)

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What the Stanford Prison Experiment Taught Us

In August of 1971, Dr. Philip G. Zimbardo of Stanford University in California conducted what is widely considered one of the most influential experiments in social psychology to date. Made into a New York Times best seller in 2007 ( The Lucifer Effect ) and a major motion picture in 2015 ( The Stanford Prison Experiment ), the Stanford Prison Experiment has integrated itself not only into the psychology community but also popular culture. The events that occurred within this experiment, though disturbing, have given many people insight into just how much a situation can affect behavior. They have also caused many to ponder the nature of evil. How disturbing was it? Well, the proposed two-week experiment was terminated after just six days, due to alarming levels of mistreatment and brutality perpetrated on student “prisoners” by fellow student “guards.”

The study aimed to test the effects of prison life on behavior and wanted to tackle the effects of situational behavior rather than just those of disposition. After placing an ad in the newspaper, Zimbardo selected 24 mentally and physically healthy undergraduate students to participate in the study. The idea was to randomly assign nine boys to be prisoners, nine to be guards, and six to be extras should they need to make any replacements. After randomly assigning the boys, the nine deemed prisoners were “arrested” and promptly brought into a makeshift Stanford County Prison, which was really just the basement of the Stanford Psychology Department building. Upon arrival, the boys’ heads were shaved, and they were subjected to a strip search as well as delousing (measures taken to dehumanize the prisoners). Each prisoner was then issued a uniform and a number to increase anonymity. The guards who were to be in charge of the prisoners were not given any formal training; they were to make up their own set of rules as to how they would govern their prison.

Over the course of six days, a shocking set of events unfolded. While day one seemed to go by without issue, on the second day there was a rebellion, causing guards to spray prisoners with a fire extinguisher in order to force them further into their cells. The guards took the prisoners’ beds and even utilized solitary confinement. They also began to use psychological tactics, attempting to break prisoner solidarity by creating a privilege cell. With each member of the experiment, including Zimbardo, falling deeper into their roles, this “prison” life quickly became a real and threatening situation for many. Thirty-six hours into the experiment, prisoner #8612 was released on account of acute emotional distress, but only after (incorrectly) telling his prison-mates that they were trapped and not allowed to leave, insisting that it was no longer an experiment. This perpetuated a lot of the fears that many of the prisoners were already experiencing, which caused prisoner #819 to be released a day later after becoming hysterical in Dr. Zimbardo’s office.

The guards got even crueler and more unusual in their punishments as time progressed, forcing prisoners to participate in sexual situations such as leap-frogging each other’s partially naked bodies. They took food privileges away and forced the prisoners to insult one another. Even the prisoners fell victim to their roles of submission. At a fake parole board hearing, each of them was asked if they would forfeit all money earned should they be allowed to leave the prison immediately. Most of them said yes, then were upset when they were not granted parole, despite the fact that they were allowed to opt out of the experiment at any time. They had fallen too far into submissive roles to remember, or even consider, their rights.

On the sixth day, Dr. Zimbardo closed the experiment due to the continuing degradation of the prisoners’ emotional and mental states. While his findings were, at times, a terrifying glimpse into the capabilities of humanity, they also advanced the understanding of the psychological community. When it came to the torture done at Abu Ghraib or the Rape of Nanjing in China, Zimbardo’s findings allowed for psychologists to understand evil behavior as a situational occurrence and not always a dispositional one.

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Chapter 4: Understanding and Influencing Others

Back to chapter, the stanford prison experiment, previous video 4.2: fundamental attribution error, next video 4.4: conformity.

There’s a dark side to the summer of 1971. Police “arrested” a number of college students who responded to an ad seeking volunteers for a psychological study of prison life.

Little did they know, in the basement of the Stanford Psychology Department, they were about to embark upon one of the most famous and controversial psychological studies: The Stanford Prison Experiment, led by Philip Zimbardo and colleagues.

After filling out an informational questionnaire, participants were randomly assigned to one of two groups: Prisoners—who were realistically picked up and booked by police—or Guards, who were in direct control of the inmates.

Depending on the assignment, they were dressed to fit their role —a set of expectations defining how those in the social position should behave.

For example, each guard was given a nightstick and whistle, along with mirrored aviator glasses, to emphasize their status and authority.

In addition, two researchers were present and oversaw the day-to-day operations: the lead experimenter, Zimbardo, acted as the prison superintendent, while another researcher, David Jaffe, was the Warden.

During one orientation session for the guards, Zimbardo vaguely outlined behaviors that they should conform with, like limiting the prisoners’ freedom and using their power to evoke fear and dominate non-violently.

In a follow-up session, the Warden provided more explicit directions to encourage the creation of a prison environment, for the collective good of the experiment.

With the correctional authorities in place, the prisoners entered the mock jail, which contained three cells and a closet for solitary confinement. They were stripped down, immediately degraded, and blindfolded to confuse them. Also, as part of their assigned role, they were outfitted in numbered gowns and nylon-stocking caps to depersonalize them.

On the second day, the prisoners started to rebel by blockading the cell door with the bed. As punishment, the ring leader was placed in confinement. This event precipitated the guards now turning on the other inmates, and the level of cruelty escalated.

Several guards… but not all …upped their performance to act tough—to fit the preconceived expectations of their label—all under the watchful eyes of the Warden and Superintendent. These leaders promoted toughness as a shared attribute of conforming to the in-group to achieve the goal of exposing the toxicity of the penal system.

Due to the increased and creative oppression placed on the prisoners, the experiment was terminated early, after six days instead of two weeks.

Ultimately, the guards behaved in a stereotypical tough-guy manner, striving to fit the normative guidance they were given. Sometimes, toxic situations can bring out the worst in someone, especially in cases where the individual identifies with a leader and the group’s collective cause.

The famous and controversial Stanford Prison Experiment , conducted by social psychologist Philip Zimbardo and his colleagues at Stanford University, demonstrated the power of social roles, social norms, and scripts.

Social Roles

One major social determinant of human behavior is our social role— a pattern of behavior that is expected of a person in a given setting or group (Hare, 2003). Each one of us has several social roles. You may be, at the same time, a student, a parent, an aspiring teacher, a son or daughter, a spouse, and a lifeguard. How do these social roles influence your behavior? Social roles are defined by culturally shared knowledge. That is, nearly everyone in a given culture knows what behavior is expected of a person in a given role. For example, what is the social role for a student? If you look around a college classroom you will likely see students engaging in studious behavior, taking notes, listening to the professor, reading the textbook, and sitting quietly at their desks. Of course, you may see students deviating from the expected studious behavior such as texting on their phones or using Facebook on their laptops, but in all cases, the students that you observe are attending class—a part of the social role of students.

Social roles, and our related behavior, can vary across different settings. How do you behave when you are engaging in the role of son or daughter and attending a family function? Now imagine how you behave when you are engaged in the role of employee at your workplace. It is very likely that your behavior will be different. Perhaps you are more relaxed and outgoing with your family, making jokes and doing silly things. But at your workplace you might speak more professionally, and although you may be friendly, you are also serious and focused on getting the work completed. These are examples of how our social roles influence and often dictate our behavior to the extent that identity and personality can vary with context (that is, in different social groups; Malloy, Albright, Kenny, Agatstein, & Winquist, 1997).

Social Norms

As discussed previously, social roles are defined by a culture’s shared knowledge of what is expected behavior of an individual in a specific role. This shared knowledge comes from social norms—a group’s expectations of what is appropriate and acceptable behavior for its members—how they are supposed to behave and think (Deutsch & Gerard, 1955; Berkowitz, 2004). How are we expected to act? What are we expected to talk about? What are we expected to wear? In our discussion of social roles, we noted that colleges have social norms for students’ behavior in the role of student and workplaces have social norms for employees’ behaviors in the role of employee. Social norms are everywhere including in families, gangs, and on social media outlets. 

Because of social roles, people tend to know what behavior is expected of them in specific, familiar settings. A script is a person’s knowledge about the sequence of events expected in a specific setting (Schank & Abelson, 1977). How do you act on the first day of school, when you walk into an elevator, or are at a restaurant? For example, at a restaurant in the United States, if we want the server’s attention, we try to make eye contact. In Brazil, you would make the sound “psst” to get the server’s attention. You can see the cultural differences in scripts. To an American, saying “psst” to a server might seem rude, yet to a Brazilian, trying to make eye contact might not seem an effective strategy. Scripts are important sources of information to guide behavior in given situations. Can you imagine being in an unfamiliar situation and not having a script for how to behave? This could be uncomfortable and confusing. How could you find out about social norms in an unfamiliar culture?

Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment

In the summer of 1971, an advertisement was placed in a California newspaper asking for male volunteers to participate in a study about the psychological effects of prison life. More than 70 men volunteered, and these volunteers then underwent psychological testing to eliminate candidates who had underlying psychiatric issues, medical issues, or a history of crime or drug abuse. The pool of volunteers was whittled down to 24 healthy male college students. Each student was paid $15 per day and was randomly assigned to play the role of either a prisoner or a guard in the study. Based on what you have learned about research methods, why is it important that participants were randomly assigned?

A mock prison was constructed in the basement of the psychology building at Stanford. Participants assigned to play the role of prisoners were “arrested” at their homes by Palo Alto police officers, booked at a police station, and subsequently taken to the mock prison. The experiment was scheduled to run for several weeks. To the surprise of the researchers, both the “prisoners” and “guards” assumed their roles with zeal. In fact, on day 2, some of the prisoners revolted, and the guards quelled the rebellion by threatening the prisoners with night sticks. In a relatively short time, the guards came to harass the prisoners in an increasingly sadistic manner, through a complete lack of privacy, lack of basic comforts such as mattresses to sleep on, and through degrading chores and late-night counts.

The prisoners, in turn, began to show signs of severe anxiety and hopelessness—they began tolerating the guards’ abuse. Even the Stanford professor who designed the study and was the head researcher, Philip Zimbardo, found himself acting as if the prison was real and his role, as prison supervisor, was real as well. After only six days, the experiment had to be ended due to the participants’ deteriorating behavior. 

The Stanford prison experiment demonstrated the power of social roles, norms, and scripts in affecting human behavior. The guards and prisoners enacted their social roles by engaging in behaviors appropriate to the roles: The guards gave orders and the prisoners followed orders. Social norms require guards to be authoritarian (such behavior was reinforced; see Haslam, Reicher, & Van Bavel, 2018) and prisoners to be submissive. When prisoners rebelled, they violated these social norms, which led to upheaval. The specific acts engaged by the guards and the prisoners derived from scripts. For example, guards degraded the prisoners by forcing them do push-ups and by removing all privacy. Prisoners rebelled by throwing pillows and trashing their cells. Some prisoners became so immersed in their roles that they exhibited symptoms of mental breakdown; however, according to Zimbardo, none of the participants suffered long term harm (Alexander, 2001).

This text is adapted from OpenStax, Psychology. OpenStax CNX.

Suggested Reading

Haslam, S. A., Reicher, S., & Van Bavel, J. J. (2018, June 27). Rethinking the nature of cruelty: The role of identity leadership in the Stanford Prison Experiment. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/b7crx

Alexander, M. (2001, August 22). Thirty years later, Stanford prison experiment lives on.  Stanford Report . Retrieved from http://news.stanford.edu/news/2001/august22/prison2-822.html.

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IResearchNet

Stanford Prison Experiment

The Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) is a highly influential and controversial study run by Philip Zimbardo and his colleagues at Stanford University in 1971. The researchers originally set out to support the notion that situational forces are just as powerful and perhaps more powerful than dispositional forces in influencing prison behavior. In addition to providing support for their hypothesis, the study was heavily covered in the mainstream media and had far-reaching ethical implications. Regardless, and perhaps because of its controversial nature, the SPE remains one of the most well-known experiments in social psychology.

The Purpose of the Stanford Prison Experiment

Stanford Prison Experiment Methodology

To test their hypothesis, Zimbardo and colleagues created a realistic mock prison in the basement of Stanford University. The participants included 21 male college students, specifically chosen for their normal responses on a battery of background questionnaires. The participants were randomly assigned to be either a guard or a prisoner, with an undergraduate research assistant acting as warden and Zimbardo himself taking on the role of superintendent. The prisoners stayed in the prison 24 hours per day, while the guards worked 8-hour shifts. Aside from a restriction on physical violence, guards were given great latitude in how they could deal with prisoners, including the rules they could establish and punishments they could dole out.

The experimenters went to great lengths to establish realism. Prisoners were unexpectedly “arrested” at their houses by the local police department, were taken to the police station to be charged their “crime” and brought to the prison at Stanford. Prisoners were assigned a number and wore only a smock, which was designed to deindividuate the prisoners. Guards were fitted with a uniform, nightstick, and reflective sunglasses to establish power. The prison cells consisted of a 6- by 9-foot space furnished with only a cot. To further increase realism, a catholic priest and attorney were brought in and a parole board was established.

Once the participants had arrived at the prison, the situation escalated at a surprising rate. On the second day, a prisoner rebellion was quickly quelled by the guards, who punished the prisoners through means conceived without guidance from the experimenters. For example, prisoners were stripped naked, forced to do menial tasks, and in many cases were deprived of their cots, meals, and bathroom privileges. After the attempted revolt and subsequent punishment, five prisoners began to experience extreme emotional reactions and were eventually released. As the obedience tactics became more brutal and humiliating and prisoners displayed increasingly negative affectivity, Zimbardo eventually decided to end the study on the sixth day of what had been planned as a 2-week study.

Findings of the Stanford Prison Experiment

Zimbardo and colleagues construed the increasingly hostile behavior of the guards and increasingly passive behavior of the prisoners, each of which had started out as groups of normal young men, as evidence that the extreme nature of the prison situation breeds such volatile and desperate behavior. Indeed, the SPE is often cited as evidence for the strong role of the situation over individuals in ways in which they often do not predict. The researchers also compared their work to Stanley Milgram’s research on obedience in that both provide support for the notion that given an extreme situation, good people can be coerced into doing evil things. Despite these exciting findings, the SPE has been criticized from both a methodological and ethical standpoint.

Methodological Criticisms of the Stanford Prison Experiment

Methodologically, critics have argued that participants of the SPE never fully accepted the situation as real and were merely playing the stereotypic roles of prisoners and guards. In essence, it was argued that the results were driven by demand characteristics of the experimental situation. It did not help the original authors’ argument that Zimbardo himself played a prominent role in the experiment, sometimes guiding the way in which the study played out. Regardless, evidence suggests that participants did internalize the situation, as well as their roles in the situation. For instance, only one-tenth of the conversations between prisoners contained speech about life outside of the experiment.

Ethical Criticisms of the Stanford Prison Experiment

The SPE was likely more controversial from an ethical point of view. The ethical implications of the study, as well as Zimbardo’s dual role as investigator and superintendent of the Stanford prison were highly criticized at the time. Zimbardo himself admitted that his own acceptance of the prison situation and his desire to run a good prison clouded his judgment, suggesting that even he had internalized his role in the situation. Although the experiment did conform to the guidelines set forth by the ethics review board at the time, few would argue that the sadistic and humiliating acts performed during the study were ethical by today’s standards. Even Zimbardo admits that it was unethical for the study to continue after the first prisoner showed an extreme negative reaction.

Stanford Prison Experiment Replications

Stephen Reicher and S. Alexander Haslam attempted to replicate the SPE, skirting ethical guidelines through allowing the experiment to take place in the context of a British reality television show. The results of the SPE were not replicated; in Reicher and Haslam’s version, the guards never organized themselves and were eventually overthrown.

References:

• Adam, D. (2002). Reality TV show recreates famed social study. Nature, 417, 213.
• Haney, C., Banks, C., & Zimbardo, P. (1973). Interpersonal dynamics in a simulated prison. International Journal of Criminology and Penology, 1, 69-97.
• Zimbardo, P. G., Maslach, C., & Haney, C. (1999). Reflections on the Stanford Prison Experiment: Genesis, transformations, consequences. In T. Blass (Ed.), Obedience to authority: Current perspectives on the Milgram paradigm (pp. 193-237). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

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Prison psychology and the stanford prison experiment.

A look at prison behavior: In 1971, volunteer students acted so badly during a study of the psychology of prisoners and guards, the study had to be cut short. Guest: Philip Zimbardo *Psychology professor at Stanford University *Conducted Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971

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The Stanford Prison Experiment was massively influential. We just learned it was a fraud.

The most famous psychological studies are often wrong, fraudulent, or outdated. Textbooks need to catch up.

by Brian Resnick

The Stanford Prison Experiment, one of the most famous and compelling psychological studies of all time, told us a tantalizingly simple story about human nature.

The study took paid participants and assigned them to be “inmates” or “guards” in a mock prison at Stanford University. Soon after the experiment began, the “guards” began mistreating the “prisoners,” implying evil is brought out by circumstance. The authors, in their conclusions, suggested innocent people, thrown into a situation where they have power over others, will begin to abuse that power. And people who are put into a situation where they are powerless will be driven to submission, even madness.

The Stanford Prison Experiment has been included in many, many introductory psychology textbooks and is often cited uncritically . It’s the subject of movies, documentaries, books, television shows, and congressional testimony .

But its findings were wrong. Very wrong. And not just due to its questionable ethics or lack of concrete data — but because of deceit.

• Philip Zimbardo defends the Stanford Prison Experiment, his most famous work 

A new exposé published by Medium based on previously unpublished recordings of Philip Zimbardo, the Stanford psychologist who ran the study, and interviews with his participants, offers convincing evidence that the guards in the experiment were coached to be cruel. It also shows that the experiment’s most memorable moment — of a prisoner descending into a screaming fit, proclaiming, “I’m burning up inside!” — was the result of the prisoner acting. “I took it as a kind of an improv exercise,” one of the guards told reporter Ben Blum . “I believed that I was doing what the researchers wanted me to do.”

The findings have long been subject to scrutiny — many think of them as more of a dramatic demonstration , a sort-of academic reality show, than a serious bit of science. But these new revelations incited an immediate response. “We must stop celebrating this work,” personality psychologist Simine Vazire tweeted , in response to the article . “It’s anti-scientific. Get it out of textbooks.” Many other psychologists have expressed similar sentiments.

( Update : Since this article published, the journal American Psychologist has published a thorough debunking of the Stanford Prison Experiment that goes beyond what Blum found in his piece. There’s even more evidence that the “guards” knew the results that Zimbardo wanted to produce, and were trained to meet his goals. It also provides evidence that the conclusions of the experiment were predetermined.)

Many of the classic show-stopping experiments in psychology have lately turned out to be wrong, fraudulent, or outdated. And in recent years, social scientists have begun to reckon with the truth that their old work needs a redo, the “ replication crisis .” But there’s been a lag — in the popular consciousness and in how psychology is taught by teachers and textbooks. It’s time to catch up.

Many classic findings in psychology have been reevaluated recently

The Zimbardo prison experiment is not the only classic study that has been recently scrutinized, reevaluated, or outright exposed as a fraud. Recently, science journalist Gina Perry found that the infamous “Robbers Cave“ experiment in the 1950s — in which young boys at summer camp were essentially manipulated into joining warring factions — was a do-over from a failed previous version of an experiment, which the scientists never mentioned in an academic paper. That’s a glaring omission. It’s wrong to throw out data that refutes your hypothesis and only publicize data that supports it.

Perry has also revealed inconsistencies in another major early work in psychology: the Milgram electroshock test, in which participants were told by an authority figure to deliver seemingly lethal doses of electricity to an unseen hapless soul. Her investigations show some evidence of researchers going off the study script and possibly coercing participants to deliver the desired results. (Somewhat ironically, the new revelations about the prison experiment also show the power an authority figure — in this case Zimbardo himself and his “warden” — has in manipulating others to be cruel.)

• The Stanford Prison Experiment is based on lies. Hear them for yourself.

Other studies have been reevaluated for more honest, methodological snafus. Recently, I wrote about the “marshmallow test,” a series of studies from the early ’90s that suggested the ability to delay gratification at a young age is correlated with success later in life . New research finds that if the original marshmallow test authors had a larger sample size, and greater research controls, their results would not have been the showstoppers they were in the ’90s. I can list so many more textbook psychology findings that have either not replicated, or are currently in the midst of a serious reevaluation.

• Social priming: People who read “old”-sounding words (like “nursing home”) were more likely to walk slowly — showing how our brains can be subtly “primed” with thoughts and actions.
• The facial feedback hypothesis: Merely activating muscles around the mouth caused people to become happier — demonstrating how our bodies tell our brains what emotions to feel.
• Stereotype threat: Minorities and maligned social groups don’t perform as well on tests due to anxieties about becoming a stereotype themselves.
• Ego depletion: The idea that willpower is a finite mental resource.

Alas, the past few years have brought about a reckoning for these ideas and social psychology as a whole.

Many psychological theories have been debunked or diminished in rigorous replication attempts. Psychologists are now realizing it’s more likely that false positives will make it through to publication than inconclusive results. And they’ve realized that experimental methods commonly used just a few years ago aren’t rigorous enough. For instance, it used to be commonplace for scientists to publish experiments that sampled about 50 undergraduate students. Today, scientists realize this is a recipe for false positives , and strive for sample sizes in the hundreds and ideally from a more representative subject pool.

Nevertheless, in so many of these cases, scientists have moved on and corrected errors, and are still doing well-intentioned work to understand the heart of humanity. For instance, work on one of psychology’s oldest fixations — dehumanization, the ability to see another as less than human — continues with methodological rigor, helping us understand the modern-day maltreatment of Muslims and immigrants in America.

In some cases, time has shown that flawed original experiments offer worthwhile reexamination. The original Milgram experiment was flawed. But at least its study design — which brings in participants to administer shocks (not actually carried out) to punish others for failing at a memory test — is basically repeatable today with some ethical tweaks.

And it seems like Milgram’s conclusions may hold up: In a recent study, many people found demands from an authority figure to be a compelling reason to shock another. However, it’s possible, due to something known as the file-drawer effect, that failed replications of the Milgram experiment have not been published. Replication attempts at the Stanford prison study, on the other hand, have been a mess .

In science, too often, the first demonstration of an idea becomes the lasting one — in both pop culture and academia. But this isn’t how science is supposed to work at all!

Science is a frustrating, iterative process. When we communicate it, we need to get beyond the idea that a single, stunning study ought to last the test of time. Scientists know this as well, but their institutions have often discouraged them from replicating old work, instead of the pursuit of new and exciting, attention-grabbing studies. (Journalists are part of the problem too , imbuing small, insignificant studies with more importance and meaning than they’re due.)

Thankfully, there are researchers thinking very hard, and very earnestly, on trying to make psychology a more replicable, robust science. There’s even a whole Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science devoted to these issues.

Follow-up results tend to be less dramatic than original findings , but they are more useful in helping discover the truth. And it’s not that the Stanford Prison Experiment has no place in a classroom. It’s interesting as history. Psychologists like Zimbardo and Milgram were highly influenced by World War II. Their experiments were, in part, an attempt to figure out why ordinary people would fall for Nazism. That’s an important question, one that set the agenda for a huge amount of research in psychological science, and is still echoed in papers today.

Textbooks need to catch up

Psychology has changed tremendously over the past few years. Many studies used to teach the next generation of psychologists have been intensely scrutinized, and found to be in error. But troublingly, the textbooks have not been updated accordingly .

That’s the conclusion of a 2016 study in Current Psychology. “ By and large,” the study explains (emphasis mine):

introductory textbooks have difficulty accurately portraying controversial topics with care or, in some cases, simply avoid covering them at all. ... readers of introductory textbooks may be unintentionally misinformed on these topics.

The study authors — from Texas A&M and Stetson universities — gathered a stack of 24 popular introductory psych textbooks and began looking for coverage of 12 contested ideas or myths in psychology.

The ideas — like stereotype threat, the Mozart effect , and whether there’s a “narcissism epidemic” among millennials — have not necessarily been disproven. Nevertheless, there are credible and noteworthy studies that cast doubt on them. The list of ideas also included some urban legends — like the one about the brain only using 10 percent of its potential at any given time, and a debunked story about how bystanders refused to help a woman named Kitty Genovese while she was being murdered.

The researchers then rated the texts on how they handled these contested ideas. The results found a troubling amount of “biased” coverage on many of the topic areas.

But why wouldn’t these textbooks include more doubt? Replication, after all, is a cornerstone of any science.

One idea is that textbooks, in the pursuit of covering a wide range of topics, aren’t meant to be authoritative on these individual controversies. But something else might be going on. The study authors suggest these textbook authors are trying to “oversell” psychology as a discipline, to get more undergraduates to study it full time. (I have to admit that it might have worked on me back when I was an undeclared undergraduate.)

There are some caveats to mention with the study: One is that the 12 topics the authors chose to scrutinize are completely arbitrary. “And many other potential issues were left out of our analysis,” they note. Also, the textbooks included were printed in the spring of 2012; it’s possible they have been updated since then.

Recently, I asked on Twitter how intro psychology professors deal with inconsistencies in their textbooks. Their answers were simple. Some say they decided to get rid of textbooks (which save students money) and focus on teaching individual articles. Others have another solution that’s just as simple: “You point out the wrong, outdated, and less-than-replicable sections,” Daniël Lakens , a professor at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, said. He offered a useful example of one of the slides he uses in class.

Anecdotally, Illinois State University professor Joe Hilgard said he thinks his students appreciate “the ‘cutting-edge’ feeling from knowing something that the textbook didn’t.” (Also, who really, earnestly reads the textbook in an introductory college course?)

And it seems this type of teaching is catching on. A (not perfectly representative) recent survey of 262 psychology professors found more than half said replication issues impacted their teaching . On the other hand, 40 percent said they hadn’t. So whether students are exposed to the recent reckoning is all up to the teachers they have.

If it’s true that textbooks and teachers are still neglecting to cover replication issues, then I’d argue they are actually underselling the science. To teach the “replication crisis” is to teach students that science strives to be self-correcting. It would instill in them the value that science ought to be reproducible.

Understanding human behavior is a hard problem. Finding out the answers shouldn’t be easy. If anything, that should give students more motivation to become the generation of scientists who get it right.

“Textbooks may be missing an opportunity for myth busting,” the Current Psychology study’s authors write. That’s, ideally, what young scientist ought to learn: how to bust myths and find the truth.

Further reading: Psychology’s “replication crisis”

• The replication crisis, explained. Psychology is currently undergoing a painful period of introspection. It will emerge stronger than before.
• The “marshmallow test” said patience was a key to success. A new replication tells us s’more.
• The 7 biggest problems facing science, according to 270 scientists
• What a nerdy debate about p-values shows about science — and how to fix it
• Science is often flawed. It’s time we embraced that.

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Comparison of the Milgram and Zimbardo Experiments

In: Stanley’s Milgram’s Obedience Paradigm for 2014. Ed. by A. Voronov, R. Ershova. Kolomna: Moscow State Regional Institute of Humanities and Social Studies. Pp. 178-183

3 Pages Posted: 16 May 2015

Alexander N. Poddiakov

National Research University Higher School of Economics (Moscow)

Date Written: May 9, 2015

Designs of Milgram’s and Zimbardo’s researches as aimed to study experimentally humans’ ability to do damage and evil have been compared. It has been shown that diagnosing the ability to cause damage and do evil is always loaded with the researcher’s value-related and ethical ideas of what is proper, allowable or not allowable, and of the price that can be paid for the result.

Keywords: experiments on abilities of doing damage, obedience, Stanford Prison Experiment

Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation

Alexander N. Poddiakov (Contact Author)

National research university higher school of economics (moscow) ( email ).

Myasnitskaya street, 20 Moscow, Moscow 119017 Russia

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50 Years On: What We've Learned From the Stanford Prison Experiment

The experiment generated important research into unexplored territories..

Posted August 16, 2021 | Reviewed by Tyler Woods

• What Is Shyness?
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• I developed 3 new areas of research after the Stanford prison experiment (SPE): good and evil, time perspective, and shyness.
• The SPE was closed down after 6 days because the "guards" became so brutal and as Superintendent, I was too caught up in my role.
• The Heroic Imagination Project teaches people how to be Everyday Heroes and take effective actions in challenging situations.

Fifty years ago this month I conducted a research experiment that could have been a blight to my career . Instead, what has become known as the Stanford prison experiment (SPE) drove me to extensively pursue the question: Why do good people do evil things? After three decades of research on this subject, I recorded my findings in The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (Random House, 2007).

But the SPE also led me to research three new topics that hadn’t previously been studied:

1) Heroism: Why, in difficult situations, some people heroically step forward to help others, oftentimes complete strangers, while others stand by and watch.

2) Time Perspective: The psychological time warp experienced by participants of the SPE—not knowing if it was day or night or what day it was—led to my research in people’s individual time perspectives and how these affect our lives.

3) Shyness : Rethinking shyness as a self-imposed psychological prison led me to conduct research on shyness in adults, and then create a clinic in the community designed to cure shyness.

The Experiment in a Nutshell

In August 1971, I led a team of researchers at Stanford University to determine the psychological effects of being a guard or a prisoner. The study was funded by the US Office of Naval Research as both the US Navy and the US Marine Corps were interested in the causes of conflict between military guards and prisoners. In the study, 24 normal college students were randomly assigned to play the role of guard or inmate for two weeks in a simulated prison located in the basement of the Stanford Psychology Department building. But the guards quickly became so brutal, and I had become so caught up in my role as Superintendent, that I shut down the experiment after only six days.

Challenging the Truth

There seem to be powerful silent barriers to dealing with new truths emanating from psychological laboratories and field experiments that tell us things about how the mind works, which challenge our basic assumptions. We want to believe our decisions are wisely informed, that our actions are rational, that our personal conscience buffers us against tyrannical authorities. Moreover, we want to believe in the dominating influence of our good character despite social circumstances. Yes, those personal beliefs are sometimes true, but often they are not, and rigidly defending them can get us in trouble individually and collectively. Let’s see how.

Denial and Finger Pointing

When we discover two or three ordinary American citizens administered extreme electric shocks to an innocent victim on the relentless commands of a heartless authority, we say, “no way, not me.” Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram’s obedience to authority research has been in the public arena for decades, yet we ignore its message of the power of unjust authority in undercutting our moral conscience. Similarly, the SPE research made vivid the power of hostile situational forces in overwhelming dispositional tendencies toward compassion and human dignity. Still, many who insist on honoring the dominance of character over circumstance reject its situational power message.

In 2004, people around the world witnessed online photos of horrific actions of American Military Police guards in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib Prison against prisoners in their charge. It was portrayed as the work of a “few bad apples” according to military brass and Bush administration spokespeople. I publicly challenged this traditional focus on individual dispositions by portraying American servicemen as good apples that were forced to operate in a Bad Barrel (the Situation) created by Bad Barrel Makers (the System).

I became an expert witness in the defense of the Staff Sergeant in charge of the night shift, where all the abuses took place. In that capacity, I had personal access to the defendant, to all 1,000 photos and videos, to all dozen military investigations, and more. It was sufficient to validate my view of that prison as a replica of the Stanford prison experiment on steroids, and of my defendant, Chip Frederick, as really a Good Apple corrupted by being forced to function for 12 hours every night for many months in the worst barrel imaginable. My situation-based testimony to the military Court Martial hearings helped reduce the severity of his sentence from 15 years down to only four years.

The January 6, 2021 insurrection is a recent example of some Good Apples being corrupted by a Bad Barrel. In this case, the Bad Barrel is the insidiousness of fascism led by the former president and other fraudulent politicians as well as media personalities. These “leaders” have been generously dumping poison in the Barrel and over the Apples with lies that feed the Apples’ deepest fears.

“The Stanford Prison Experiment” Film

In 2015, The Stanford Prison Experiment was made into a film starring Billy Crudup as me and Olivia Thrilby as Christina Maslach, the whistle-blowing graduate student (whom I later married) who pointed out the experiment had gone awry and had changed me to such a degree that she didn’t know who I was anymore. Her personal challenge led me to end the study the next day. The film received two awards at the Sundance Film Festival: best screenwriting and best science feature.

The Stanford Prison Experiment movie enables viewers to look through the observation window as if they were part of the prison staff watching this remarkable drama slowly unfold, and simultaneously observe those observers as well. They are witnesses to the gradual transformations taking place, hour by hour, day by day, and guard shift by guard shift. Viewers see what readers of The Lucifer Effect book account can only imagine. As these young students become the characters inhabited in their roles and dressed in their costumes, as prisoners or guards, a Pirandellian drama emerges.

The fixed line between Good, like us, and Evil, like them, is relentlessly blurred as it becomes ever more permeable. Ordinary people soon slip into doing extraordinarily bad things to other people, who are actually just like them except for a random coin flip. Other healthy people soon get sick mentally, being unable to cope with the learned helplessness imposed on them in that unique, unfamiliar setting. They do not offer comfort to their buddies as they break down, nor do those who adopt a “good guard” persona ever do anything to limit the sadistic excesses of the cruel guards heading their shifts.

Finally, the movie also tracks the emotional changes in the lead character (me) as his compassion and intellectual curiosity get distilled and submerged over time. The initial roles of research creator and objective observer are dominated by power and insensitivity to prisoners' suffering in the new role of Prison Superintendent.

Visit the official Stanford Prison Experiment website to learn more about the experiment.

Heroic Imagination

I should add that, along with continuing research in time perspectives and time perspective therapy , my new mission in life has been to empower everyone to wisely resist negative situational forces and evil by becoming Everyday Heroes in Training. Our non-profit Heroic Imagination Project (HIP) teaches ordinary people how to stand up, speak out and take effective actions in challenging situations in their lives.

Rosemary K.M. Sword and Philip Zimbardo are authors, along with Richard M. Sword, of The Time Cure: Overcoming PTSD with the New Psychology of Time Perspective Therapy.

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AQA ALEVEL PSYCHOLOGY - Social Influence: Zimbardo’s (1973) Stanford Prison Experiment

Subject: Psychology

Age range: 16+

Resource type: Unit of work

Last updated

4 September 2024

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This is a complete set of notes for Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment in AQA Alevel Psychology in the subtopic of social influence. This includes his aim, procedure, findings, conclusion and evaluation points. I hope this helps you with your revision. If you have any questions please message me or leave a reviews. Thank you

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"Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl'd"

Wednesday, March 7, 2012

"the lie of the stanford prison experiment".

It all began with the planning, execution, and analysis of the experiment we did at Stanford University back in August 1971. The immediate impetus for this research came out of an undergraduate class project on the psychology of imprisonment, headed by David Jaffe, who later became the warden in our Stanford Prison Experiment. In preparation for conducting this experiment, and to better understand the mentality of prisoners and correctional staff, as well as to explore what were the critical features in the psychological nature of any prison experience, I taught a summer school course at Stanford University covering these topics. My co-instructor was Andrew Carlo Prescott, who had recently been paroled from a series of long confinements in California prisons. Carlo came to serve as an invaluable consultant and dynamic head of our “Adult Authority Parole Board.”

The research reported in this article is part of a larger project sponsored by the Office of Naval Research which is designed to develop a better understanding of the basic psychological mechanisms underlying human aggression.... The 'prison' environment was further manipulated to promote anonymity, depersonalization and dehumanization among the subjects. The study demonstrates how these variables combine to increase the incidence of aggressive behavior on the part of the 'guards' and submissive and docile conformity on the part of the 'prisoners.'

The lie of the Stanford Prison Experiment By Carlo Prescott on April 28, 2005 in News I read recently in the entertainment industry trade journal Variety of Maverick Entertainment, the principle of whom is Madonna, that intends to produce a film based on the “infamous” Stanford Prison Experiment. I read this with considerable consternation. According to the article, the project’s principal investigator and the film’s driving force, Prof. Philip Zimbardo this “landmark” experiment is a classical treatise on the “power of the situation” and a full-blown explanation of the evils of every prison from Folsom to Abu Ghraib. I can assure you, it is neither. I say this not because I am an African American ex-con who served 17 years in San Quentin for attempted murder or one who spoke before Congress on the issue of prison reform. I say it because I was the Stanford Prison Experiment’s chief consultant. I armed the Zimbardo, Craig Haney and Curt Banks with the ideas that enabled them to infuse this study with the verisimilitude that it hangs its hat on to this day. And shouldn’t. Regrettably, the gulf between verisimilitude and real prison life is a huge leap of faith that still raises serious issues of validity from the get-go. Nevertheless, ideas such as bags being placed over the heads of prisoners, inmates being bound together with chains and buckets being used in place of toilets in their cells were all experiences of mine at the old “Spanish Jail” section of San Quentin and which I dutifully shared with the Stanford Prison Experiment braintrust months before the experiment started. To allege that all these carefully tested, psychologically solid, upper-middle-class Caucasian “guards” dreamed this up on their own is absurd. How can Zimbardo and, by proxy, Maverick Entertainment express horror at the behavior of the “guards” when they were merely doing what Zimbardo and others, myself included, encouraged them to do at the outset or frankly established as ground rules? At the time, I had hoped that I would help create a valid, intellectually honest indictment of the prison system. In hindsight, I blew it. I became an unwitting accomplice to a theatrical exercise that conveniently absolves all comers of personal responsibility for their abominable moral choices. It seems that Maverick Entertainment, riding shotgun with Zimbardo, is repeating historical folly (and dramatic contrivance) of the worst kind. And do you honestly believe Hollywood will come anywhere close to honoring or doing right by the field of psychology in this exercise? Carlo Prescott lives in Oakland. E-mail him at [email protected].

Participants [in the Stanford Prison Experiment] had no prior training in how to play the randomly assigned roles. Each subject’s prior societal learning of the meaning of prisons and the behavioural scripts associated with the oppositional roles of prisoner and guard was the sole source of guidance.

8 comments:

You may be interested in the idea that the famous Milgram experiment was phony, too---- http://big-lies.org/NUKE-LIES/www.nukelies.com/forum/jewish-phony-psychology-science-milgram-zimbardo.html And also the idea that 'brainwashing' was attributed to the nasty Chinese, to cover up US war crimes in Korea--- http://big-lies.org/NUKE-LIES/www.nukelies.com/forum/brainwashing-korea-hide-US-war-crimes.html Anyway; just a couple of things.

Of course the person claiming the Milgram experiment is phony proceeds to also deny the moon landing, the holocaust and claims that 9/11 was an inside job. Methinks there is a questionable source.

Yes, anonymous, that source of criticism on Milgram seems biased, if not anti-Semitic. Thanks for pointing that out.

Zimbardo meantions several times in his book that the study is funded by office of naval research. Oddly if the author had actually done his homework he would know that this is an old argument that has been confronted and defunked in the past.

I absolutely agree with this article. Zimbardo instructed his prisoners, was involved in his "study," and brought in an ex-convict who gave inside information about his own experience in prison. In fact, Zimbardo abused this ex-prisoner and caused pain for all of these students. Ethics don't need to be dictated. A researcher, and certainly anyone that understands the scientific method, knows that he/she never gets involved with his subjects, doesn't lead them as to how to act, and stops if and when a situation unfolds in a way that is unexpectedly harmful. And ethics can be learned by taking an intro class in philosophy, which I presume Zimbardo did. A true scientist has to be very objective. This is not an experiment at all, but a plan of deceit, and I think all it proves is that a professor, obsessed with power, used his position, degree, and lots of funding to bring credibility to conclusions he had already made. I could go on an on. I don't care what Zimbardo said in his book, but rather, I care about the damage he did to the participants and to social psychology. Challenging these "scientists" is mandatory. It was not and never will be a study, research, or an experiment to me. What this truly represents is a man who created an environment in which torture, humiliation, and powerlessness were sure to prevail. Also, wanting to please the researcher and get paid provided incentives for these roles to be played out. By they way, I love Social Psychology, but this, I do not!

I heard about the SPE in College in the mid 70s. The interpretation presented was in line with Zim’s explanation of the environment causing the problems. After watching the Showtime film I was sickened by the experiment, how Zim became part of the evil and encouraged the guards to be abusive either directly, as a supporting player and just plain omission of professional oversight. The question of a control group was spot on. What sickens me most is this guy has made a career out of this absurdity. Maybe the participants could bring a “Bill Cosby” suit against the experiments backers and Zim’s team. The ethics investigation results seem plausible. If the Auschwitz guards invited the Dachau guards to check their ethics we would have had the same results. “Looks OK to me! Has anyone been able to independently follow up with the participants? No APA types, actual investigators a true outside investigation?

It should also be noted in reference to the comment regarding the Milgram experiment that his original motivation (as a descendant of Holocaust survivors) was to prove that *Germans* were specifically susceptible to obedience and cruelty, however he failed to get funding to show this and had to carry out his work around New Haven, CT (point being, Milgram like Zimbardo had a preexisting agenda which he wanted to prove which calls into question the objectivity of his endeavor).

I agree and the methods used by some of these scientists are questionable not that I have tons of respect any longer. After seeing the corruption in social science (my field) and other sciences, which I'm not going to go into here, I think we need to update our method for studying things.

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