Tuesday, November 22, 2005

Stanford Prison Experiment

I just read the most incredible website today. It describes the Stanford Prison Experiment conducted in the early 1970's. A number of Stanford Psychology Students and Professors took normal volunteers from the school and community and designated half of them as guards and half of them as prisoners. They arrested the prisoners and placed them in a homemade prison in the basement of the psych department building. The "guards" were told to maintain control of the prisoners and were not given any rules for their conduct. Within 5 days the "prisoners" were experiencing extreme stress and had become incredibly submissive. The "guards," and even the experimenters (acting as the warden), on the other hand had become exteremely aggressive, vindictive, and cruel in attempting to maintain control of the prisoners. It was an intense experience for all of the participants:

"Less than 36 hours into the experiment, Prisoner #8612 began suffering from acute emotional disturbance, disorganized thinking, uncontrollable crying, and rage. In spite of all of this, we had already come to think so much like prison authorities that we thought he was trying to "con" us -- to fool us into releasing him.
When our primary prison consultant interviewed Prisoner #8612, the consultant chided him for being so weak, and told him what kind of abuse he could expect from the guards and the prisoners if he were in San Quentin Prison. #8612 was then given the offer of becoming an informant in exchange for no further guard harassment. He was told to think it over.
During the next count, Prisoner #8612 told other prisoners, "You can't leave. You can't quit." That sent a chilling message and heightened their sense of really being imprisoned. #8612 then began to act "crazy," to scream, to curse, to go into a rage that seemed out of control. It took quite a while before we became convinced that he was really suffering and that we had to release him."

The experiment really says a lot about human nature and the willingness of humans to treat each other with disdain and malice purely based upon the essentially irrelevant surrounding circumstances (in the experiment the only thing that created the behavior was the designation that each person was given).

The full website is well done and well worth the read.

link

It is also worth looking at the earlier controversial psych experiements that influenced the Stanford project--the Milgram Experiments.

link