In this video I discuss the Stanford Prison Study conducted by Philip Zimbardo and colleagues at Stanford University. Psychologically-healthy college-aged male participants were randomly assigned to the roles of prisoners and guards for a 2 week study. The prisoners were arrested and brought to the basement of the psychology building and placed into mock cells. The guards were given sunglasses, uniforms, and batons and told to maintain authority over the prison during their daily 8 hour shifts. After 6 days the study was discontinued due to mistreatment and emotional breakdowns of the prisoners. This is often described as a demonstration of the power of the situation to transform people into sadistic guards or passive prisoners, though I describe several criticisms of these conclusions.
Haney, C., Banks, C., & Zimbardo, P. G. (1973). Interpersonal dynamics in a simulated prison. International Journal of Criminology and Penology, 1, 69–97: https://www.researchgate.net/publicat…
Peter Gray: Why Zimbardo’s Prison Experiment Isn’t in my Textbook: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/f…
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Video Transcript
Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In this video we’re going to look at another one of the most famous studies in social psychology and this is the Stanford Prison study conducted by Philip Zimbardo and colleagues at Stanford University. In this study, normal psychologically healthy college-aged male participants were randomly assigned to the roles of prisoner or guard for a 2-week study on prison life.
Now those who were assigned to be prisoners experienced mock arrests conducted by real police officers who handcuffed, them blindfolded them, put them in the back of real police cars, and then brought them to the psychology building at Stanford where they were fingerprinted, given a fake delousing, and then given short robes to wear as well as small ankle chains to remind them of their status as prisoners. They were then placed into cells that were converted classrooms in the basement of the psychology building, where they were told they would spend the duration of the study.
Those who were assigned to be guards received mirrored sunglasses to wear, as well as uniforms, and they also received small batons to remind them of their power and authority over the prisoners. They were told that they would work in eight-hour shifts each day and they would otherwise be free to go. Now Zimbardo played the role of the prison superintendent and at the beginning of the study he met with all of the guards and told them that their job was to break the will of the prisoners; to make them obedient and to maintain authority over the prison, and that they could do this in any way they saw fit, provided they avoided any physical violence against the prisoners.
Now the study was scheduled to last for two weeks but it was discontinued after just six days. This is because the guards mistreated the prisoners, forced them to engage in embarrassing behaviors, forced them to clean the toilets with their bare hands, and woke them up repeatedly throughout the night, forcing them to experience sleep deprivation. Several of the prisoners experienced emotional breakdowns within a matter of days.
Now this is widely regarded as a demonstration of the power of the situation; that here we had an extreme situation of this prison environment and this was able to transform these otherwise normal healthy boys into either sadistic guards who would mistreat others, or into passive prisoners who would obey the authority of the guards. But this explanation isn’t particularly nuanced; it doesn’t fully address the complexity of the situation. We might wonder why it is that some of the guards were more sadistic than others? If it’s really just about the power of the situation, we wouldn’t see these individual differences. We might wonder why some of the guards actually helped the prisoners. We also might wonder how much demand characteristics are playing a role here.
And this is one of the reasons why Peter Gray, who’s a textbook author and psychology professor, has written about why he does not include the Stanford Prison study in his textbook because he thinks it’s too much of a demonstration of demand characteristics rather than the power of the situation. Because he says the participants all knew that this was a study of prisoners and guards and as a result they most likely acted out the roles of prisoners and guards because they want to be good participants. And the demand characteristics are very strong in this situation and this brings us to a larger issue in social psychology and that is it a number of the classic studies in social psychology have pretty serious ethical and/or methodological flaws in them and yet they’re still held up as examples of how social psychological research is conducted.
I think the reason that these studies are so popular is they present narratives; they present stories that we can latch onto. They’re dramatic, you know, we asked questions about whether you would shock a stranger when we talk about the Milgram study, or whether you would become a sadistic prison guard in the case of the Stanford Prison study. And these stories and narratives capture our attention, they capture our imaginations, but what they don’t necessarily capture is the real complexity of psychological issues. They oversimplify things to whether or not you would murder a stranger with electric shocks, or whether you would mistreat a prisoner just because you were in that situation. I think this ignores some of the greater complexity of these types of psychological issues; they ignore individual differences, they ignore other factors that could be playing a role here.
So we want to maintain our skepticism and maintain a nuanced view of thinking about exactly what these types of studies mean and what conclusions we can really draw from them. I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!
