The Stanford Prison Experiment was a social psychology study “in which college students became prisoners or guards in a simulated prison environment.” The intent of the experiment was “to measure the effect of role-playing, labeling, and social expectations on behaviour over a period of two weeks.” However, principal investigator Philip G. Zimbardo ended the experiment after “only six days,” because the “mistreatment of prisoners escalated so alarmingly.”

 

PLAYERS

The plays involved in this were the twelve students in the role of prisoner; the twelve students acting as prison guards (three at any given time in three shifts of eight hours each day); the prison superintendent and principal investigator, Philip G. Zimbardo; and roughly fifty people—including parents, departmental secretaries, a priest, a lawyer—who witnessed the experiment.

 

SUMMARY OF CONFLICT

Out of seventy applicants to a newspaper ad looking for volunteers in a study of the psychological effects of prison life for $15 a day, twenty-four college students who were near Stanford University and were judged to be medically healthy were randomly divided into a group of “guards” and a group of “prisoners.” The principal investigator acted as the prison superintendent. A simulated prison environment was made out of a hallway in Stanford’s Psychology Department. The prison was constructed out of the corridor, “The Yard,” where prisoners were “prisoners were allowed to walk, eat, or exercise”; laboratory rooms with doors replaced with steel bars and cell numbers; and toilets that prisoners were led to blindfolded, so they would not know how to leave. Each prisoner was given a numbered “gown” or “dress” to wear, which was meant to simulate prisoners’ experience of feeling emasculated, and a chain around their foot, “to remind prisoners of the oppressiveness of their environment.” The guards were given no specific training on how to be guards and were told to do whatever they “thought was necessary to maintain law and order.” There were regular “counts”, including when prisoners were awakened at 2:30 AM, to familiarize prisoners with their numbers and to allow for guards to exercise control over the prisoners. Push-ups were used as a form of punishment. A rebellion broke out on the second day of the experiment, which guards eventually quelled. Guards used psychological tactics to break down solidarity between prisoners. Guards were either (a) tough, but fair, (b) “good guys” who did favors, or (c) “hostile, arbitrary, and inventive in their forms of prisoner humiliation.” Prisoners were submissive in victimhood and identified by their number, rather than their name. The experiment was ended after six days, as Zimbardo learned that guards were escalating their abuse at night, when they thought no one was watching, and as Christina Maslach, a recent Stanford Ph.D. witnessed the experiment and objected, “It’s terrible what you are doing to these boys!” which helped Zimbardo, who was fully playing the role of a prison warden, realize the immoral nature of how the experiment had evolved.

LEGACY 

Zimbardo’s initial conclusion, what he publicly said about the experiment before his official paper about the experiment, and thus popular understanding of the Stanford prison experiment, would believe that “we all have an innate capacity for tyranny or victimhood.” However, objectors have brought up how the prison guard’s abuse was enabled by the environment they were in, one that encouraged it. (A follow-up experiment also noted that people who reached out to an ad about a “prison experiment” were naturally more predisposed to authoritarianism than those who responded to an ad without those words.) Zimbardo suggested behaviors that made the structure of the “prison.” Thus, after BBC experimenters recreated the experiment with results that show the prisoners rebelled more with the hope of social mobility, Ph.D. in psychology and writer, Maria Konnikova, concluded instead that: 

“[O]ur behavior largely conforms to our preconceived expectations. All else being equal, we act as we think we’re expected to act—especially if that expectation comes from above. Suggest, as the Stanford setup did, that we should behave in stereotypical tough-guard fashion, and we strive to fit that role….Prisons aren’t blank slates. Guards do indeed self-select into their job….The lesson of Stanford isn’t that any random human being is capable of descending into sadism and tyranny. It’s that certain institutions and environments demand those behaviors—and, perhaps, can change them.”

There was a 2015 film, The Stanford Prison Experiment, that dramatized the events of the experiment, created with the consultation of Zimbardo. 

 

ICONOGRAPHY & CATCHPHRASES

Much of the iconography from the Stanford Prison Experiment merely simulates an actual prison environment, including jailed cells, prisoner numbers, and khaki-ed guards. A unique visual icon, though, is the stocking that was wrapped around the prisoner’s head to simulate a shaved head and minimize each individual’s personality and individuality. An iconic line from the experiment was a remark by a witness to the experiment, a graduate student who said, “Say, what’s the independent variable in this study?”, which prompted Zimbardo to question his own actions in unquestioningly accepting the role of prison warden.

 

REFERENCE MEDIA

REFERENCE VIDEO: The trailer for the film, The Stanford Prison Experiment (2015), which dramatizes the events of the experiment.