Stanford Prison Experiment by Philip Zimbardo

Philip George Zimbardo

Born on March 23, 1933 in New York City

Completed his BA with a triple major in psychology, sociology, and anthropology from Brooklyn College in 1954
Completed his M.S. (1955) and Ph.D. (1959) in psychology from Yale University Joined the faculty of Stanford University in 1968

Known for his Stanford prison study and authorship of various psychology books for college students, including The Lucifer Effect and The Time Paradox

Understanding How Good People Turn Evil

Overview of the Book

The Lucifer Effect raises a fundamental question about the nature of human nature.

It provides a detailed chronology of the transformations in human character that took place during the Stanford Prison experiment that randomly assigned healthy, normal intelligent college students to play the roles of prison or guard in a projected 2 weeklong study.
It explains the Lucifer Effect in terms of the cosmic transformation of God's favorite angel, Lucifer, into Satan as he challenges God's authority.

It outlines the lessons and messages from the Stanford study, along with considering its ethics and extensions: conformity, obedience to authority, role-playing and dehumanization.

Why Lucifer Effect?

The Lucifer Effect describes the point in time when an ordinary, normal person first crosses the boundary between good and evil to engage in an evil action. It was coined after Gods favorite angel, Lucifer. Thus, The Lucifer Effect represents this most extreme transformation imaginable from Gods favorite Angel into the Devil.

Factors Leading to Lucifer Effect

Conformity

Obedience to Authority
Role-playing Dehumanization

Situational Factors

Conformity
Conformity is the act of matching attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors to what individuals perceive as normal to their society or social group. This influence occurs in small groups and/or society as a whole, and may result from subtle unconscious influences, or direct and overt social pressure. There are two main types of conformity: informational and normative.

Conformity
Informative conformity often occurs in situations in which there is high uncertainty and ambiguity. In an unfamiliar situation, we are likely to shape our behavior to match that of others. Normative conformity is the dominant form of social conformity when we are concerned about making a good impression in front of a group. In the experiment, certain guards, such as one known as "John Wayne", changed their behavior because of wanting to conform to the behavior that Zimbardo was trying to elicit.

Obedience to Authority
According to Stanley Milgram, people obey either out of fear or out of a desire to appear cooperative even when acting against their own better judgment and desires. Strength of tendency to obey comes from systematic socialization of society members that obedience constitutes correct conduct. Tendency to respond to "symbols and signs of authority" rather than to its substance.

Role-playing
Refers to the changing of one's behaviour to assume a role, either unconsciously to fill a social role, or consciously to act out an adopted role. The participants based their behavior on how they were expected to behave, or modelled it after stereotypes they already had about the behavior of prisoners and guards. Zimbardo claimed that even if there was role-playing initially, participants internalized these roles as the experiment continued.

Dehumanization
Certain people or collectives of them, are depicted as less than human, as non comparable in humanity or personal dignity to those who do the labelling. One of the central processes in the transformation of ordinary, normal people into indifferent or even wanton perpetrators of evil. Dehumanization is like a cortical cataract that clouds ones thinking and fosters the perception that other people are less than human.

Situational Factors
It is a truism in psychology that personality and situations interact to generate behavior.

Many people who engage in actions that could be deemed evil are more likely to be ordinary people caught up in behavioral contexts that are unfamiliar, and in which their habitual response patterns and moral judgments become disengaged. The direct confrontation of good versus evil, of good people pitted against the forces inherent in bad situations was evident from everyday life that smart people made dumb decisions when they were engaged in mindless groupthink. When people are faced with situations unfamiliar to them, they tend to respond using the best option which is to ride the flow of the situation.

Stanford Prison Experiment

Study of the psychological effects of becoming a prisoner or prison guard. Conducted from August 1420, 1971 by a team of researchers led by psychology professor Philip Zimbardo at Stanford University.

Funded by a grant from the US Office of Naval Research and was of interest to both the US Navy and Marine Corps in order to determine the causes of conflict between military guards and prisoners.

Goals and Methods

Zimbardo and his team set out to test the idea that the inherent personality traits of prisoners and guards were summarily key to understanding abusive prison situations. Out of 75 respondents, Zimbardo and his team selected the 24 males whom they deemed to be the most psychologically stable and healthy. They were all signed up to participate in a 7 to 14 day period and receive $15 per day (equivalent to $80 in 2010).

Set-up
The small mock prison cells were set up to hold three prisoners each. There was a small space for the prison yard, solitary confinement, and a bigger room across from the prisoners for the guards and warden. The prisoners were to stay in their cells all day and night until the end of the study. The guards worked in teams of three for eight-hour shifts. The guards did not have to stay on site after their shift.

Results
After a relatively uneventful first day, a riot broke out on the second day.

After only 36 hours, one prisoner began to act "crazy.

Zimbardo says; "#8612 then began to act crazy, to scream, to curse, to go into a rage that seemed out of control. It took quite a while before we became convinced that he was really suffering and that we had to release him. On the fourth day, some prisoners were talking about trying to escape. Zimbardo and the guards attempted to move the prisoners to the more secure local police station, but officials there said they could no longer participate in Zimbardo's experiment. Zimbardo aborted the experiment early when Christina Maslach objected to the appalling conditions of the prison after she was introduced to the experiment to conduct interviews.

Conclusion
The results of the experiment are said to support situational attribution of behavior rather than dispositional attribution. In other words, it seemed the situation caused the participants' behavior, rather than anything inherent in their individual personalities.

Criticisms
This study was cleared by the Ethics Code of the American Psychological Association, showing that experiments on paper can look very different from the way that they play out in reality. The experiment was criticized as being unethical and unscientific. Conclusions and observations drawn by the experimenters were largely subjective and anecdotal, and the experiment would be difficult for other researchers to reproduce. In contrast to Zimbardo's claim that participants were given no instructions about how to behave, his briefing of the guards gave them a clear sense that they should oppress the prisoners. Additionally, the study has been criticized on the basis of ecological validity.

Milgrams Experiment and Abu Ghraib Prison Torture

STANLEY MILGRAMS EXPERIMENT
A series of notable social psychology experiments conducted by psychologist Stanley Milgram, which measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience.

ABU GHRAIB PRISON TORTURE

In 2004, human rights violations in the form of physical, psychological, and sexual abuse of prisoners held in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq (also known as Baghdad Correctional Facility) came to public attention. These acts were committed by military police personnel of the United States Army together with additional US governmental agencies.

Abu Ghraib Prison Torture

Milgrams Experiment