Stanford Prison Experiment

A Masterclass In Self Deception

Yes You Can Fool Most Of The People For Over 30 Years


Stanford Prison Experiment. A Masterclass In Self Deception. Yes You Can Fool Most Of The People For Over 30 Years. Photo of students involved playing at guards and prisoners.


The set up of the Stanford Prison Experiment is well known as is the outcome and the conclusions for which this study is so well known and it has been made into a movie.







Stanford Prison Experiment - The Traditional Presentation Of Its Significance


    The presented and (until recently) accepted conclusion of this study is that it provides clear evidence of the situational contamination and corruption of ordinary good people to the extent that they will become perpetrators of evil.


According to Zimbardo this is evidenced by how the students who were fulfilling the role of prison guards - and thus put in a position of relative power over their prisoners - turned into monsters and abused the students playing the role of prisoners. 

Things got so out of hand that the 14 day experiment had to be cut short and was terminated after 6 days because the "guards" quickly became sadistic and the "prisoners" broke down.

  • The results of this study have been extensively used many times by Zimbardo and others over the past 50 years as a  validation of the situational perspective of how good people are transformed into perpetrators of evil.
  • This study has been used as an explanation of the prisoner torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, in Iraq,  in 2003 that was perpetrated by US army personnel.


    "Evil is intentionally behaving [badly], or having the power to cause others to act [badly].

    Evil is knowing better and doing worse. In the face of overwhelming situational forces it is rare for a person to resist publicly." [Zimbardo]


Philip Zimbardo appeared as expert witness for one of the accused soldiers, Ivan "Chip" Frederick, who was subsequently found guilty and received an 8 year prison sentence.

The thrust of Zimbardo's expert testimony was that Frederick's behaviour was the result of:

  • The appalling situational dynamics created by a service-man working in an environment for which he was not trained, who was grossly overworked and under supported in extremely difficult and dangerous conditions.
  • The ethos of the post 9/11 "War on Terror" with the approval and enactment of the 2006 Military Commissions Act, permitting controversial practices expediting the interrogation and prosecution of terror suspects and in effect permiting the torture and abuse of suspects.
  • The rhetoric about the "War On Terror" from then President George Bush junior and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

The Official Line - The "Bad Apple Theory"

The official line espoused by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld laid the  blame for the atrocities at Abu Ghraib on a few "bad apples." This is the standard official response of deflecting any responsibility or blame away from the political and military leaders and the system they created and supported and placing the blame unfairly and squarely on the shoulders iof the service people at the bottom of the heap.


Zimbardo's Response - It's The "Bad Barrel" and The "Bad Barrel Maker"

In counterpoint to this line Zimbardo pointed to the corruption of ordinary people within the context of powerful situational forces brought about and implicitly condoned by the political and military leaders who through their policies caused and allowed the situation to happen.

Zimbardo reframed this situation as the "bad barrel", and the political and military leaders as the "bad barrel maker".


    "The 'bad apple' theory is what every administration uses to protect itself". [Zimbardo]


Recommended Further Reading:

A Situationist Perspective on the Psychology of Evil - Understanding How Good People Are Transformed into Perpetrators  [Zimbardo]






The Use Of Stanford Prison Experiment Data To Enable Navy PsychOps To Break Terror Suspects

Before we get into reviewing the criticisms of the Stanford Prison Experiment it is worth noting that this study was funded by the US navy who had first access to all of the study data and who later used  the material for PsyOps in prisoner interrogation...

This is a noteworthy fact as the relationship between psychology and the security state is an ambiguous relationship to put it mildly.

See: The Complicity of Psychology in the Security State

This symbiotic relationship between Zimbardo and the Navy may go some considerable way to explaining why he was so keen to create a study that proved what he wanted it to, and to declare it's findings and conclusions prior to undertaking and publishing structured analysis and receiving peer review.

Zimbardo and other psychologist and professionals from muiltple related disciplines have had, and continue to have, ongoing relationship with the Navy and Homeland security.

See: https://www.chds.us/coursefiles/press/cipert.html

The links between the Stanford Prison Experiment and Abu Ghraib are not direct as a causation of the PsychOps involvement in Abu Ghraib,  nevertheless they are distinctly co-relational.



    "The military told me they used the SPE tapes to train people not to behave like our guards. I used to quote that as a good outcome of the research.

    Now I know they also used it to train interrogators to break people.

    I had no idea they were doing that" [Zimbardo to: Times Higher Education Supplement - Gold 2007]








Review Of Criticisms Of The Stanford Prison Experiment



There is an overwhelming large amount of material now in the public domain in the form of published articles and commentary on new and more extensive data that became available c20 years ago, and referencing in-depth professional reviews that challenge the accepted presentation of the validity of the study.

Here is a cross-section of some of this material. I would particulaarly draw your attention to the evaluation and criticisms detailed in the review by the American Psychologiical Assocation and the response and rebuttal by Philip Zimbardo.

I have included a summary of key points from the text of each article.


ARTICLES

Inside the twisted experiment that turned students into evil sadists

He was out to answer one of the basest questions about human nature: Are we inherently good or evil? Does everyone, no matter how rich, educated or privileged, harbor a boundless capacity for sadism?

If so, can the uneven power structure of a given institution awaken a monster?

Zimbardo knew that this experiment could be a career-maker.

“I think Zimbardo wanted to create a dramatic crescendo, and then end it as quickly as possible,” prison guard John Mark told Stanford Magazine.

“He knew what he wanted and then tried to shape the experiment — by how it was constructed, and how it played out — to fit the conclusion that he had already worked out. He wanted to be able to say that college students, people from middle-class backgrounds — people will turn on each other just because they’re given a role and given power . . . I think that was a real stretch.”

And then there was Zimbardo’s prison expert, the SPE’s chief consultant Carlo Prescott, who in 2005 described himself in the Stanford Daily as “an African-American ex-con who served 17 years in San Quentin for attempted murder.” Zimbardo mined him for information.

Prescott wrote that all of the abuses perpetrated by the guards were his ideas, based on his time at San Quentin: “To allege that all these carefully tested, psychologically solid, upper-middle-class Caucasian ‘guards’ dreamed this up on their own is absurd.”

Even before those involved with the SPE spoke out, Zimbardo was criticized by the field’s most prominent thinkers. In 1973, famed German psychologist Erich Fromm tore the experiment apart.

In his book “The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness”, Fromm wrote that the SPE was contaminated from the beginning: The “prisoners” were arrested by real officers; they were made to wear clothing unlike any true inmates; the volunteers were self-selecting, and all of one class and race (save one Asian participant); most guards did not abuse the prisoners, and in fact some displayed acts of kindness.

Most crucially, all were aware they were in a mock prison, and were unduly subjected to “overt demand characteristics” — knowing what was expected of them and playing to those very expectations.





The Lifespan of a Lie - The most famous psychology study of all time was a sham. Why can’t we escape the Stanford Prison Experiment?


It was late in the evening of August 16th, 1971, and twenty-two-year-old Douglas Korpi, a slim, short-statured Berkeley graduate with a mop of pale, shaggy hair, was locked in a dark closet in the basement of the Stanford psychology department, naked beneath a thin white smock bearing the number 8612, screaming his head off.

“I mean, Jesus Christ, I’m burning up inside!” he yelled, kicking furiously at the door. “Don’t you know? I want to get out! This is all fucked up inside! I can’t stand another night! I just can’t take it anymore!

It was a defining moment in what has become perhaps the best-known psychology study of all time. Whether you learned about Philip Zimbardo’s famous “Stanford Prison Experiment” in an introductory psych class or just absorbed it from the cultural ether, you’ve probably heard the basic story.

There’s just one problem: Korpi’s breakdown was a sham.

“Anybody who is a clinician would know that I was faking,” he told me last summer, in the first extensive interview he has granted in years. “If you listen to the tape, it’s not subtle. I’m not that good at acting. I mean, I think I do a fairly good job, but I’m more hysterical than psychotic.”

Now a forensic psychologist himself, Korpi told me his dramatic performance in the SPE was indeed inspired by fear, but not of abusive guards. Instead, he was worried about failing to get into grad school.

“The reason I took the job was that I thought I’d have every day to sit around by myself and study for my GREs,” Korpi explained of the Graduate Record Exams often used to determine admissions, adding that he was scheduled to take the test just after the study concluded.

Shortly after the experiment began, he asked for his study books. The prison staff refused.

The next day Korpi asked again. No dice. At that point he decided there was, as he put it to me, “no point to this job.”

First, Korpi tried faking a stomach-ache. When that didn’t work, he tried faking a breakdown.

Far from feeling traumatized, he added, he had actually enjoyed himself for much of his short tenure in the jail, other than a tussle with the guards over his bed.






Famed Stanford Prison Experiment was a fraud, scientist says


Not only was the Stanford Prison Experiment a sham, but it’s mastermind, Stanford psychology professor Philip Zimbardo, pushed participants towards the results he wanted...

Blum’s expose — based on previously unpublished recordings of Zimbardo, a Stanford psychology professor, and interviews with the participants — offers evidence that the “guards” were coached to be cruel.

One of the men who acted as an inmate told Blum he enjoyed the experiment because he knew the guards couldn’t actually hurt him.

“There were no repercussions. We knew [the guards] couldn’t hurt us, they couldn’t hit us. They were white college kids just like us, so it was a very safe situation,” said Douglas Korpi, who was 22-years-old when he acted as an inmate in the study.






The Real Lesson of the Stanford Prison Experiment


Taken together, these two studies don’t suggest that we all have an innate capacity for tyranny or victimhood. Instead, they suggest that our 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. Tell us, as the BBC experimenters did, that we shouldn’t give up hope of social mobility, and we act accordingly.

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.






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


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.

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.







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


Audio recording and interviews with those involved reveal the guards were coached into being mean or considered the experiment to be an “improv exercise.” Here is one of those recordings, via the Stanford archive. It’s pretty damning. You can hear David Jaffe, one of Zimbardo’s students who acted as the prison “warden,” chastising a guard for not being severe enough.

(The quality of the audio is not great. It is, after all, a nearly 50-year-old tape cassette recording. You can read the transcript below. Emphasis added.)








American Psychological Association - Debunking the Stanford Prison Experiment


I thoroughly recommend you download and read this professional critique.

Here is the abstract:

Debunking the Stanford Prison Experiment

Thibault Le Texier

Université de Nice Sophia Antipolis


The Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) is one of psychology’s most famous studies.

It has been criticized on many grounds, and yet a majority of textbook authors have ignored these criticisms in their discussions of the SPE, thereby misleading both students and the general public about the study’s questionable scientific validity.

Data collected from a thorough investigation of the SPE archives and interviews with 15 of the participants in the experiment further question the study’s scientific merit.

These data are not only supportive of previous criticisms of the SPE, such as the presence of demand characteristics, but provide new criticisms of the SPE based on heretofore unknown information. These new criticisms include:

  • the biased and incomplete collection of data,
  • the extent to which the SPE drew on a prison experiment devised and conducted by students in one of Zimbardo’s classes 3 months earlier,
  • the fact that the guards received precise instructions regarding the treatment of the prisoners,
  • the fact that the guards were not told they were subjects, 
  • the fact that participants were almost never completely immersed by the situation.


Possible explanations of the inaccurate textbook portrayal and general misperception of the SPE’s scientific validity over the past 5 decades, in spite of its flaws and shortcomings, are discussed.














Philip Zimbardo’s Response to Recent Criticisms of the Stanford Prison Experiment — Stanford Prison Experiment


For a counter-view, I recommend you read Zimbardo's in depth response to the key points  of the various criticisms of his study.







Further reading on this site, linked articles:

Philip Zimbardo

The Lucifer Effect










English Chinese (Traditional) Russian French German Italian Spanish Vietnamese



LATEST ARTICLES

  1. Everything Is Connected And Why You Don't Feel It

    ...And Why It Matters As human beings we are skating on very thin ice with our sense of self and certainty about "how things are" and what we like to think of as reality:

    - What if everything we think…

    Read More

  2. Who Is In Charge Of Your Brain?

    How Not To Be Stupid. Who is in charge of your brain? This is not a silly questions. It matters because the outcomes that you experience in your life are determined by how you respond to the events th…

    Read More

  3. How To Be A Winner On A Very Large Scale

    The Incredible Benefits Of Selective Attention. This is not a typical article about how to be a winner. We are not going to talk about goal setting, the importance of habits, the power of focus and al…

    Read More

  4. The Metagame Approach To Life

    How To Achieve Your Biggest Objectives. The metagame approach to life is all about winning and achieving your biggest objectives by: - Understanding the bigger picture
    - Being better by doing things d…

    Read More

  5. Shantideva - The Way Of The Bodhisattva

    Walking The Path Of Compassion. Shantideva the 8th century Indian Buddhist sage is famous for his treatise "The Way of the Bodhisattva" delivered as an extended teaching to the monks of Nalanda monast…

    Read More

  6. Reframing History - Deconstruction And Discussion Not Destruction

    History is always about context, not imposing our own moral values on the past. For those of us fortunate enough to live within western democracies, we are living in an age where a vociferous and into…

    Read More

  7. Tao Te Ching - Connecting To Your True Source Of Power.

    How To Be Lived By The Tao. The Tao Te Ching is one of those books that many people read, few understand, and even fewer put into practice. The only way to know the Tao is to experience it, and it is…

    Read More

  8. How Things Really Are - The Inbuilt Design Flaws

    Chaos, Disorder And Decay Is The Natural Order Of Things. Nobody has the perfect life. We all struggle and strive to attain health, wealth and personal happiness. Yet these three big areas: our health…

    Read More

  9. Intuition Or Anxiety - Are There Angels Or Devils Crawling Here?

    How To Tell The Difference Between Intuition and Anxiety. How do you know whether the voice of your intuition is real or just the product of your inner anxiety? Several months ago I was having a drink…

    Read More

  10. What Is Truth - How To Tell A Partial Truth From The Whole Truth?

    How the truth and nothing but the truth is often not the whole truth. My great aunty Flo broke her arm and died. It is true that she broke her arm in 1923. It is also true that she died in 1949. But t…

    Read More

  11. Duality And Life Beyond Your Thinking Mind

    Duality and life beyond your thinking mind focuses on the limitations of time, foreground and background, duality and "stuckness". The first aspect of duality and life beyond your thinking mind focuse…

    Read More

  12. The Conscious Mind Is Limited - Be Aware And Be Prepared

    Being aware is the first stage of being prepared. The conscious mind is limited in so many ways. There are some who would argue that there is no such thing as conscious thought and that it is represen…

    Read More

  13. Your Inner Map Of Reality - Here's Why You Think The Way You Do

    The big picture of how your inner map of reality creates your feelings, thoughts, and behaviours. Your inner map of reality is based on the filters of your own ethnic, national, social, family and rel…

    Read More

  14. The Failure Of Cancel Culture - Suppression Not Engagement

    Why we need to wear our beliefs lightly and develop negative capability. Throughout history people have campaigned to fight beliefs, ideologies, and injustices that they perceived to be oppressive, di…

    Read More

  15. 4 Big Reasons Why We Get Stuck In Our Attempts At Personal Change

    Most People Spend Their Entire Life Imprisoned Within The Confines Of Their Own Thoughts. This first of the 4 big reasons why we get stuck is, in my view, the most important. The "self-help industry…

    Read More

  16. How Do I Change And Why Is It So Hard?

    We Would Rather Die Than Change, And We Usually Do In my experience, the vast majority of people who say they want to change don’t change. Most people reading this won’t change because they don’t real…

    Read More

  17. The Illusion Of A Separate Self - Windows 11 With Self Awareness!

    Beyond the content of your mind you are so much more than you think you are. When we talk of "myself" this is the conventional way of referring to our self image which is in fact the ego's constructio…

    Read More

  18. Finite And Infinite Games - Dazed, Confused & Ultimately Transcendent

    This is not an instruction manual, it is a wake up call! Over this past week I have read Professor James Carse's highly regarded "Finite And Infinite Games - A Vision Of Life As Play And Possibility"

    Read More

  19. The Gap And The Gain - How Your Brain Sabotages Your Happiness

    How Your Lizard Brain Sabotages Your Happiness We are hardwired to measure our progress in any and all areas of life where we have goals and aspirations. We can't not do it. But what we measure and ho…

    Read More

  20. How To Wake Up - 4 Simple Practices To Help You Wake Up Now

    So What Exactly Does It Mean to Wake Up - What Is "Enlightenment"? There is nothing magical, mystical or mysterious about waking up we’re actually having glimpses of enlightenment all the time. Enligh…

    Read More

  21. Situational Communication - Different Strokes For Different Folks

    Situational communication is about taking account of 3 often ignored factors about the other person. You are a situational communicator when you recognise that effective communication is not an event…

    Read More

  22. How To Influence Without Authority - 6 Key Tips

    The secret to how to influence without authority is that you get what you really want by giving other people what they really want. We live in an interconnected world and knowing how to influence with…

    Read More

  23. Change Questions To Change Your Outcomes

    Asking The Right Questions Is Critical For A Successful Change. Every time we initiate a significant change - whether in our personal life or in an organisation - we will most likely over-estimate our…

    Read More

  24. Group Culture - The Invisible Software That Rules Your Life

    Group culture is: "How we do things round here". We like to see ourselves as free agents making our own choices and living authentically but the reality is that The Matrix has many layers and we are u…

    Read More

  25. Why Getting From A to B Is Not Aways A Straight Line

    In circumstances of significant change, the progress from A to B will not be in a straight line. We run our lives largely on auto-pilot. In most circumstances your experience of getting from A to B is…

    Read More

  26. The Art Of Persuasion Planning For Success - Here's How To Do It!

    To be successful in the art of persuasion you must ensure that certain things happen. To be successful in the art of persuasion you must establish a framework of what has to happen to get you to that…

    Read More

  27. The Art Of Persuasion Advanced Communication Skills - Gaining Buyin

    Create The Environment Where They Want To Buyin to Your Proposal In order to build the win-win you have to uncover what it is that the other person really wants or needs, and to do that you have to as…

    Read More

  28. The Art Of Persuasion The One Fundamental Principle - Create A Win-Win

    The art of persuasion is based on the simple idea that you get what you want by enabling the other party to get what they want. Being a nice friendly person with good inter-personal skills may be a go…

    Read More

  29. Communication Persuasion And Change - Key Skills To Survive & Succeed

    It's not the strongest that survive, nor the most intelligent, but those who are most responsive to change, the most persuasive, and the best communicators. We are living in an age of unprecedented ch…

    Read More

  30. The Eisenhower Box - What Is Important Is Seldom Urgent

    What Is Important Is Seldom Urgent And What Is Urgent Is Seldom Important. The Eisenhower Box is a time management and decision-making model devised by President Dwight Eisenhower to help him prioriti…

    Read More



Get new posts by email:









Zen-Tools.Net





Support This Site