Lessons from the Stanford Prison Experiment
Results, Applications and Criticisms of Zimbardo's Study
Sep 18, 2008
The Stanford Prison Experiment was conducted in the summer of 1971. Twenty four normal, healthy volunteers were assigned the roles of prisoner or guard in a mock prison for what was supposed to be a 2 week study. Due to an unexpected number of traumatic incidences and violent, destructive behavior the experiment was called off after just 6 days in order to prevent further psychological and physical trauma to the volunteers.
Stanford Prison Experiment Illustrates Human Behavior’s Dualistic Nature
An article titled “Demonstrating the Power of Social Situations via a Simulated Prison Experiment” that was released through the American Psychological Association summed up the Stanford Prison experiment’s results by concluding that the “Stanford Prison Experiment has become one of psychology's most dramatic illustrations of how good people can be transformed into perpetrators of evil, and healthy people can begin to experience pathological reactions - traceable to situational forces.”
Experiment Founder Psychologist P.G. Zombardo Analyzes Results
The drama of the Stanford Prison Experiment only served to underscore the importance of the lessons learned from it. One of the experiment’s founding psychologist, Dr. Philip Zimbardo, discussed how the results relate to general human psychology in his paper “Reflections on the Stanford Prison Experiment: Genesis, transformations, consequences.” Here, Dr. Zimbardo outlines what he deemed were the 10 most important psychological lessons from the Prison Experiment. Below in shortened version are the first 5 lessons:
- Some situations can exert powerful influences over individuals, causing them to behave in ways they would not, could not, predict in advance.
- Situational power is most salient in novel settings in which the participants cannot call on previous guidelines for their new behavior and have no historical references to rely on.
- Situational power involves ambiguity of role boundaries, authoritative or institutionalized permission to behave in prescribed ways or to disinhibit traditionally disapproved ways of responding.
- Role playing -- even when acknowledged to be artificial and temporary -- can still come to exert a profoundly realistic impact on the actors.
- Good people can be induced, seduced, initiated into behaving in evil (irrational, stupid, self destructive, antisocial) ways by immersion in "total situations" that can transform human nature in ways that challenge our sense of the stability and consistency of individual personality, character, and morality.
Dr. Zimbardo goes on to explain in his paper that based in this experiment’s results, it’s clear that prisons are inhumane and “a failed socio-political experiment.”
Practical Applications of the Stanford Prison Experiment
The Stanford Prison Experiment determined the importance of maintaining individuality, dignity and stable social guidelines in order to maintain a situation’s safety and predictability. The results armed psychologists with data supporting an ideology that some human behavior is based on a response situations rather than innate traits or previous personality. The experiment offered some conclusions to reasoning behind such horrors and torture brought on by Nazis during the Holocaust, and how such brutal behavior may have been, in some part, due to a natural response to a similar situation. (Though the behavior was still inexcusable).
Criticism of Zimbardo’s Experiment
Some psychologists, such as Erich Fromm, rejected Zimbardo’s Prison Experiment conclusion that some destructive human behavior is due to a situational response rather than innate traits or personality. In The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (Fawcett Books, 1973), Fromm points out the Prison experiment volunteers were only evaluated by themselves. In other words, each volunteer took a battery of personality and psychological tests to determine their normalcy, however, as Fromm points out, sadism and other destructive traits are often subconscious in the individual.
