Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Study
Philip Zimbardo and staff created a mock prison in 1973 in a laboratory basement, using as subjects 21 healthy male undergraduate volunteers. Each person was to receive $15 a day for 2 weeks. Nine of the students were randomly selected to be "prisoners," while the rest were divided into three shifts of "guards," who worked around the clock.
Within a brief time, the "guards" and "prisoners" became totally absorbed in their respective roles. As the guards grew more aggressive, the prisoners became passive and apathetic. No sense of solidarity developed among them. They spent only a tenth of their conversation talking about subjects unrelated to imprisonment. The rest of the time they talked about escape, the quality of the food, and the causes of their discontent.
At first, it was an exciting game, but it quickly became an unpleasant way of living. An hour after the prisoners went to sleep, the guards abruptly woke them and made them line up and repeat their ID numbers. The guards made the prisoners do push-ups until they were exhausted. When the prisoners revolted, they were placed in solitary confinement and even made to clean toilets with their bare hands. The guards then began using psychological tactics, isolating and recombining prisoners until the prisoners no longer trusted one another. (If you can get your hands on the film taken of these incidents, it would be worthwhile to watch it.)
After only 6 days the experiment had to be halted. Even with his significant training in social psychology, Zimbardo was unprepared for the psychological influences that took total control of the social environment. He quickly became convinced that behavior does not exist in a vacuum, but is due to a complex variety of variables that psychologists have only begun to understand.
The Original Newspaper Ad and Photos of the "Inmates"Interpretation
This striking example of psychological research shows how the behavior of the individual can be shaped by the demands of the environment. The fact that prisoners are convicted criminals or that guards may be strict may have little to do with the brutalizing effect of prisons on both prisoners and guards. It also demonstrates how the study of psychology can shed light not only on questions about individual behavior, but also on questions of practical concern to society.
Ethics
Zimbardo still has mixed emotions about the ethics of his experiment. His experiment has been criticized by some social scientists, as was the obedience experiment of his high school classmate Stanley Milgram, for its treatment of human research subjects.
In Milgram's 1965 experiment, the subjects were led to believe that they were delivering ever more powerful electric shocks to a stranger, on the orders of a white-coated researcher. Most were distressed by the situation, but two-thirds delivered the highest level of shock � labeled "danger - severe shock." Like some of Zimbardo's guard subjects, some of Milgram's were anguished afterward by the revelation of their dark potential. When asked about the ethics of such research for a 1976 magazine profile, Zimbardo said that "the ethical point is legitimate insofar as who are you, as an experimenter, to give a person that kind of information about oneself. But my feeling is that that's the most valuable kind of information that you can have � and that certainly a society needs it."
He told Stanford Report that he believes the pendulum now has swung too far toward protecting research subjects at the expense of new knowledge that could help society. "Our study went though the human subjects committee then because they didn't know in advance, nor did we, that anything would happen. . . . Now [review committees] assume everybody is so fragile, that if you propose to tell a research subject he failed a test, it will damage his self-esteem forever. So most research now is paper and pencil tests. We ask people things like 'Imagine you were a guard, how would you behave?' "
He would prefer, Zimbardo said, that human subjects review committees at universities "allow some controversial things to be done but in a highly monitored way. Videotapes should be checked every day, and there should be the option of an independent overseer blowing the whistle at any time."
He told the Toronto symposium audience last summer that the prison experiment was both ethical and unethical.
It was ethical, he said, because "it followed the guidelines of the Stanford human subjects ethics committee that approved it. There was no deception; all subjects were told in advance that if prisoners, many of their usual rights would be suspended and they would have only minimally adequate diet and health care during the study," which was planned to last two weeks.
It was also ethical for him to continue, he said, in that more than 50 people came to look at the study in progress and did not register any objections before Maslach registered hers. Among those who did not intervene were parents and friends of the students who came to see them on the prison's visiting nights, a Catholic priest, a public defender, and "professional psychologists, graduate students and staff of the psychology department who watched on-line videos of part of the study unfold or took part in parole board hearings or spoke to [the study subjects] and looked at them."
But it was unethical, he said, "because people suffered and others were allowed to inflict pain and humiliation on their fellows over an extended period of time."
"And yes, although we ended the study a week earlier than planned, we did not end it soon enough."
