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Excerpts from:

Scott A. McGreal MSc.

Unique—Like Everybody Else

Twilight of the Stanford Prison Experiment

The infamous experiment was even more deeply flawed than previously suspected.

Posted Sep 27, 2019

The infamous Stanford Prison experiment (SPE), conducted in 1971—in which Philip Zimbardo recruited young men to become either “prisoners” or “guards” in a mock prison, with disastrous results—has long drawn criticism for its sloppy methodology and the exaggerated conclusions about the psychology of evil that Zimbardo drew from it.

In the subsequent decades, Zimbardo has repeatedly claimed that the SPE illustrated the “power of the situation” in driving good people to behave in cruel and dehumanizing ways. However, critics of the SPE have long suspected that Zimbardo’s analysis was far from the truth.

In 2018, archival data about the SPE was made available online, which permitted a much more thorough investigation than has previously been possible of what really happened during this experiment. An analysis of this data by Le Texier (2019) shows that Zimbardo misrepresented his findings and that his conclusions about the “power of the situation” are untenable.

Zimbardo claimed that his experiment demonstrated that “individual behavior is largely under the control of social forces and environmental contingencies, things that occur, rather than some vague notions of personality traits, character, willpower, or other empirically unvalidated constructs” (cited by LeTexier, 2019). He even went so far as to claim that the SPE extended the work of Milgram, whose famous obedience experiments showed that people could be induced to deliver electric shocks to someone against their will at the behest of an authority figure.

Zimbardo actually claimed that the SPE showed that an authority figure was not even necessary to induce people to behave badly. Simply “having participants embedded in a social context where the power resided in the situation” was enough, as participants in his experiment supposedly adopted the roles they were assigned and acted accordingly. According to Zimbardo, aggression by those assigned to be guards was “emitted simply as a ‘natural’ consequence of being in the uniform of a ‘Guard’ and asserting the power inherent in that role” (Le Texier, 2019).

However, LeTexier’s analysis shows that Zimbardo had actually decided in advance what conclusions he wanted to demonstrate. For example, on only the second day of the experiment, he put out a press release stating that prisons dehumanize their inmates and therefore need to be reformed. Moreover, contrary to his repeated claims that participants in the experiment assigned to the role of guards were not told how to treat the prisoners and were free to make up their own rules, the archival data clearly show that the guards were told in advance what was expected of them, how they were to mistreat the prisoners, and were given a detailed list of rules to follow to ensure that prisoners were humiliated and dehumanized.

Furthermore, Zimbardo and his research team were highly assertive in ensuring that participants acted as “tough guards,” contrary to Zimbardo’s claims that they just fall naturally into their roles. For example, in the orientation session for guards on the first day of the experiment, Zimbardo’s assistant David Jaffe, who acted as a prison warden, even read out a list handwritten by Zimbardo entitled: “Processing in—Dehumanizing experience,” that included instructions like, “Ordered around. Arbitrariness. Guards never use names, only number. Never request, order.” This contradicts Zimbardo’s claims that dehumanizing behavior like calling the prisoners by their numbers rather than their names was something the guards came up with themselves. Additionally, after the experiment, some of the guards stated that either Zimbardo or Jaffe had directed them to act in specific ways at various times during the study.

Not surprisingly, some of the guards did mistreat the prisoners. Indeed, one guard, nicknamed “John Wayne” by the prisoners went out of his way to do so. More interesting though, is that some of the guards resisted mistreating the prisoners, despite being under considerable pressure to do so. For example, the archive contains an audio recording of a formal meeting between Warden Jaffe and a guard, John Mark, who had been unwilling to treat the prisoners harshly (Haslam, Reicher, & Van Bavel, 2019).^[1]

Read the rest here:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/unique-everybody-else/201909/twilight-the-stanford-prison-experiment?amp&__twitter_impression=true 

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