The Stanford prison trial is an attempt to investigate the psychological effects of perceived power, focusing on the struggle between prisoners and prison officers. It was conducted at Stanford University between 14-20 August 1971, by a research group led by psychology professor Philip Zimbardo using students. It was funded by the US Navy Research Office as an investigation of the causes of the difficulties between guards and prisoners in the United States Navy and the United States Marine Corps. This experiment is a topic covered in most of the introductory psychology textbooks (psychology books).
Guards and prisoners were randomly selected from volunteer students. Some participants developed their roles as officers and authoritarian actions imposed and eventually subjected some detainees to psychological torture. Many of the detainees passively receive psychological abuse and, at the request of the officer, actively harass other prisoners who try to stop him. Zimbardo, in his superintendent role, let the harassment continue. Two of the prisoners left mid-trial, and the entire exercise was abandoned after six days following the objections of graduate student Christina Maslach, who postponed Zimbardo (and later married). Certain parts of the experiment were filmed, and footage footage is publicly available.
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Zimbardo and his team aim to test the hypothesis that the inherent personality traits of prisoners and guards are the main cause of abusive behavior in prison. Participants were recruited and informed that they would participate in a two-week prison simulation. The team selected 24 men whom they considered the most psychologically stable and healthy. The participants are mostly white and middle class. The racial and fiscal demographics of the prisoners are currently unknown. The group is deliberately chosen to exclude them against a criminal background, psychological disorder, or medical problem. They all agree to participate in a period of 7 to 14 days and receive $ 15 per day (about $ 94 by 2018).
The experiment was conducted in a 35-foot (10.5 m) section of the Jordan Hall basement (Stanford psychology building). The prison has two fabrication walls, one at the entrance, and another on the cell wall to block the observations. Each cell (6 ÃÆ'â € "9 feet, or 1.8 ÃÆ'â €" 2,7 m), contains only a cot for the prisoners. Instead, the guards lived in very different environments, separate from the prisoners. They are given rest and relaxation, and other comforts.
Twelve of the 24 participants were assigned the role of prisoners (9 plus 3 alternatives), while the other 12 were assigned guard roles (also 9 plus 3 alternatives). Zimbardo took on the role of inspector, and assistant undergraduate researcher as the role of the warden. Zimbardo devised an experiment to induce disorientation, depersonalization, and deindividuation in participants.
The researchers conducted an orientation session for the guard the day before the experiment, as long as the guards were instructed not to physically injure prisoners or to hold food or drink. In the research recording, Zimbardo can be seen talking to the guard: "You can create in custody of boredom, fear to a certain extent, you can create the idea of ​​arbitrariness that their lives are really controlled by us, by your system, you, me , and they will have no privacy... We will take their individuality in various ways Generally what causes all this is a sense of helplessness, that is, in this situation we will have all the power and they will not have it.
The researchers provided guards with wooden sticks to establish their status, apparel similar to the actual prison guards (khaki shirts and pants from local military surplus stores), and mirrored glasses to prevent eye contact. The inmates wore uncomfortable hats, unfit suitcases and stocking hats, and chains around one ankle. Guards are ordered to summon detainees with assigned numbers, sew their uniforms, not by name.
The prisoners were "arrested" in their homes and "prosecuted" with armed robbery. The local Palo Alto police department assisted Zimbardo with the arrest and performed a full reservation procedure on the prisoners, including fingerprinting and mug shooting. The prisoners were transported to artificial prisons from the police station, where they were ransacked and given their new identities.
A small artificial prison cell was formed to hold three prisoners each. There was a small corridor for the prison yard, a closet for solitary confinement, and a bigger room across from the prisoners for the guards and guards. The prisoners had to stay in their cells and pages all day and night until the end of the study. The guards worked on a three-person team for eight hours shift. The guards are not required to remain in place after their shift.
Maps Stanford prison experiment
Results
After a relatively smooth first day, on the second day the prisoners in Cell 1 blocked their cell doors with their beds and took off their stocking caps, refusing to go out or follow the guard's instructions. Guards from other shifts volunteered to work extra hours of work, to assist in subduing insurgency, and then attacking detainees with fire extinguishers without being supervised by research staff. Finding that handling nine cell pairs with just three guards per shift is a challenge, one of the guards suggested they use psychological tactics to control them. They set up a "privilege cell" where prisoners not involved in the riots are treated with special rewards, such as high-quality food. The "special" prisoners choose not to eat food with sympathy with their fellow prisoners.
After just 36 hours, an inmate starts acting "crazy," as Zimbardo explains: "# 8612 then started acting crazy, screaming, cursing, and going into an uncontrollable anger It took quite a while before we became convinced he was right "The guards forced the prisoners to repeat the assigned numbers to reinforce the idea that this was their new identity. The guards immediately used this number of prisoners to harass prisoners, using physical punishment as a protracted exercise for errors in the count of prisoners. Sanitation conditions declined rapidly, exacerbated by the refusal of the guards to allow some prisoners to urinate or defecate anywhere but in buckets placed in their cells. As punishment, the guards will not allow prisoners to empty the sanitation bucket. Mattresses are a valuable item in a prison, so the guards will punish the prisoners by moving their mattresses, letting them sleep on the concrete. Some prisoners were forced to bare as a method of degradation. Some guards became more violent as the experiment continued; researchers reported that about a third of the guards showed a genuine sadistic tendency. Most of the guards were upset when the experiment was stopped after just six days.
Zimbardo mentions his own absorptive capacity in experiments. On the fourth day, several guards said they heard rumors that the freed prisoner would return with his friends and free the remaining inmates. Zimbardo and the guards dismantled the prison and moved him to a different floor of the building. Zimbardo himself waited in the basement, in case the released prisoner appeared, and planned to tell him that the experiment had been stopped. The freed prisoners never returned, and the prison was rebuilt in the crypt.
Zimbardo argues that prisoners have internalized their role, as some say they will receive "parole" even if it means losing their wages, despite the fact that stopping will achieve the same result without delay involved in waiting for their parole request to be given or rejected. Zimbardo argues they have no reason to continue participation in the experiment after the loss of all monetary compensation, but they do so, because they have internalized the identity of the prisoners.
No. Prisoners. 416, a recently received prisoner, expressed concern about the treatment of other prisoners. The guards responded with more harassment. When he refused to eat his sausage, said he went on a hunger strike, the guard locked him in an "isolation cell", a dark cabinet: "the guard then ordered other prisoners to repeatedly punch the door while shouting at 416." The guards said he would be released from solitary confinement only if the prisoners handed over their blankets and slept on their bare mattresses, all of which except one was denied.
Zimbardo canceled an early trial when Christina Maslach, a graduate student in psychology whom she dated (and later married), objected to her prison conditions after she was introduced to an experiment to conduct an interview. Zimbardo notes that, over 50 people who have observed the experiment, Maslach is the only one who questions his morality. After just six days of the planned two-week duration, the experiment was stopped.
Conclusion
On August 20, 1971, Zimbardo announced the end of the experiment to the participants.
Experimental results support situational attribution of behavior over dispositional attribution (results caused by internal characteristics). It seems that the situation, rather than their individual personality, causes the behavior of the participants. Using this interpretation, the results match the Milgram experiment, in which random participants obey orders to manage seemingly dangerous and potentially deadly electric shocks to the shill.
This experiment has also been used to illustrate the theory of cognitive dissonance and the power of authority.
Shortly after the research was completed, there was a bloody uprising at both San Quentin and Attica prison facilities, and Zimbardo reported his findings on experiments to the US House Committee on Justice.
Participant behavior has been modified due to the fact that they are viewed as opposed to the hiding variable (Hawthorne effect). Even knowing they were observed, guards and prisoners acted differently than usual. Some guards feel the need to show their dominance even when it is not necessary.
Zimbardo instructed the guards before the experiment to disrespect the prisoners in various ways. For example, they should refer to a prisoner with a number and not a name. This, according to Zimbardo, is intended to reduce the individuality of the prisoners. Without control, prisoners learn that they have little effect on what happens to them, ultimately causing them to stop responding, and surrender. Quickly to realize that the guard is the highest in the hierarchy, the prisoners began to accept their role as a less important human being.
The strength of the study is that it has changed the way US prisons are run. For example, adolescents accused of federal crime are no longer placed before the court with adult prisoners, because of the risk of violence against them.
Criticism
Some guard behavior causes a dangerous and psychologically damaging situation. A third of the guards were judged to have demonstrated "genuine sadistic tendencies," while many prisoners were emotionally traumatized; five of them had to be excluded from the experiment earlier. After Maslach confronts Zimbardo and persuades him that he has been passively allowing unethical acts to take place under his supervision, Zimbardo concludes that both prisoners and guards have been absorbed heavily in their roles and realize that he too has become deeply absorbed in himself, and he stop the experiment. The ethical concerns surrounding experiments often draw comparisons for similar experiments, conducted ten years earlier in 1961 at Yale University by Stanley Milgram.
Due to the questionable nature and ethics of the experiment, Zimbardo finds it impossible to keep traditional scientific control in place. He can not remain a neutral observer, because he influences the direction of the experiment as a prison supervisor. The conclusions and observations drawn by researchers are largely subjective and anecdotal, and this experiment is practically impossible for other researchers to reproduce accurately. Erich Fromm admits to seeing generalizations in experimental results and argues that a person's personality affects behavior when imprisoned. This is contrary to the research conclusion that the prison situation itself controls individual behavior. Fromm also argues that the amount of sadism in the "normal" subject can not be determined by the method used to filter it.
"John Wayne" (a real-life Dave Eshelman), one of the guards in the experiment, said that the research puts undue emphasis on the cruelty of the guards, and that he caused an escalation of events between guards and prisoners after he began imitating characters from the film of the year 1967 Cool Hand Luke . He further intensified his actions because he was nicknamed "John Wayne" by other participants, though he tried to emulate actor Strother Martin, who has played the captain role of a sadistic prison in the movie.
What happened to me was not an accident. It was planned. I set out with a definite plan in mind, to try to force action, force something to happen, so the researchers will have something to do. After all, what can they learn from the people sitting around like that is the country club? So I consciously created this persona. I was in all types of drama production in high school and college. It's something I know very well: to take on another personality before you step onto the stage. I'm running my own experiment there, saying, "How far can I push these things and how much abuse these guys will take before they say, 'stop that?'" But the other guards did not stop me. They seem to join. They lead me. Not one guard said, "I do not think we should do this." -David Eshelman
Also, researchers from Western Kentucky University argue that selection bias may play a role in the outcome. Researchers recruited students to study using ads similar to those used in the Stanford Prison Experiment, with some advertising saying "psychological studies" (control groups), and some with the words "prison life" as the original word in Dr. Stanford Prison Experiment from Zimbardo. It was found that students who responded to classified ads for "prison studies" were higher in traits such as social dominance, aggression, authoritarianism, etc. and lower in traits related to empathy and altruism when statistically compared to control group participants.
This study has been criticized for its demand characteristics by psychologist Peter Gray. He argues that participants in psychological experiments are more likely to do what they believe researchers want them to do. The guards are basically told to be cruel. However, it can be said that it is a willingness to comply with questionable practices in experiments that show how little is required for students to engage in such practices.
Skeptical Writer Brian Dunning states:
Most Stanford keepers showed no cruel or unusual behavior, were often friendly and did help for the prisoners... The statistical validity of the participant sample, 24 male Stanford students around the same age, has been questioned as being too small and limiting for is generally applicable to a widespread population... (and the fact that) Zimbardo has devoted most of his career to promoting the idea that bad environments encourage bad behavior.
Guards and prisoners play the role of their subjective, subjective authority. They may not act the same in real-life situations. In particular, the role of the environment and the authority they find in changing their actions.
Critics argue that not only is the sample size too minimal for extrapolation, but also has all experimental subjects being US male students who seriously undermine the validity of the experiment. In other words, it is possible that replicating experiments using different groups of people (with different aims and views in life) will produce very different results; that is, if the test subjects come from different socio-economic and psychological groups, different experimental results may have been produced.
Even Carlo Prescott, Zimbardo's "prison consultant" during his trial for having served 17 years at San Quentin for attempted murder, spoke out against the experiment publicly in an article he contributed to Stanford Daily, after he read about the ways in which Zimbardo and others use experiments to explain the atrocities that occur in real jails. In the 2005 article, entitled "The Lie of Stanford Prison Experiments", Prescott writes:
[...] ideas like bags placed over the heads of prisoners, inmates tied together with chains and buckets used in toilets in their cells are all my experiences in the old "Spanish Jail" section of San Quentin and who obediently I shared with the Stanford Prison Experiment braintrust months before the experiment began. To allege that all middle-class Caucasian class guards who were carefully tested, psychologically solid, dreamed of this in itself did not make sense. How does Zimbardo and, in proportion, Maverick Entertainment express horror to the "guard" behavior when they only do what Zimbardo and others, myself included, encourage them to do at the beginning or openly set forth as ground rules?
Like Zimbardo, Prescott also spoke before Congress on prison reform issues.
French researcher Thibault Le Texier, after archival investigations and testimonies published in 2018, concludes that the staging can not be meaningfully described as experimental and there is no real result to talk about.
Comparison with Abu Ghraib
When the acts of torture and torture of prisoners in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison were published in March 2004, Zimbardo himself, carefully observing the story, was struck by the similarity with his own experiments. He was dismayed by official military and government representatives who shifted allegations of torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib America's military prison to "some bad apples" rather than acknowledging the systemic problem of a formally established military detention system.
Finally, Zimbardo was involved with a defense team of lawyers representing one of Abu Ghraib's prison guards, Staff Sergeant Ivan "Chip" Frederick. He was given full access to all investigations and background reports, and testified as an expert witness in the SSG federal court of Frederick, which resulted in Frederick's eight-year prison sentence in October 2004.
Zimbardo withdraws from his participation in the Frederick case for writing the book Lucifer Effects: Understanding How Good Men Become Evil published by Random House in 2007, related to similarities between his own Stanford Prison Experiment and Abu offense Ghraib.
Ethical issues
This experiment was felt by many to involve questionable ethics, the most serious concern was that it was continued even after participants expressed their desire to withdraw. Despite the fact that the participants were told that they were entitled to leave at any time, Zimbardo did not allow this during the experiment. Zimbardo is faced with an ethical dilemma that the experiment may be able to return remarkable results if continued, but it can also affect the well-being of the participants if not stopped.
Since Stanford's probationary period, ethical guidelines have been established for experiments involving human subjects. The Stanford Prison Experiment leads to the adoption of rules to preclude any treatment that harms the participant. Before they are implemented, human research should now be reviewed and found by the institutional review board (US) or ethics committee (UK) to comply with ethical guidelines established by the American Psychological Association. These guidelines involve consideration of whether the potential benefits to science outweigh the possible risks of physical and psychological harm.
Post-experimental freezing is now considered an important ethical consideration to ensure that participants are not harmed in any way by their experience in an experiment. Although Zimbardo was in a question-and-answer session, they were several years after Stanford Prison Experiment. At that time many details were forgotten; Nevertheless, many participants reported that they did not experience lasting negative effects. The current standard specifies that the briefing process should take place as soon as possible to assess what psychological hazards, if any, may have been done and to rehabilitate the participants, if necessary. If there is an unavoidable delay in the debriefing, the researcher is obliged to take steps to minimize the danger.
Similar studies
BBC prison study
Psychologists Alex Haslam and Steve Reicher conducted the BBC Prison Study in 2002 and published the results in 2006. This is a partial replication of a Stanford prison trial conducted with the help of the BBC, which broadcast the event in a study in a documentary series called Trial i>. Their results and conclusions differ from Zimbardo and led to numerous publications on tyranny, stress, and leadership. The results are published in leading academic journals such as Journal of Social Psychology UK , Journal of Applied Psychology , Quarterly Social Psychology , and Social Personality and Psychology Reviews . The BBC Prison Study is now taught as a core study of the UK A-level Psychology OCR syllabus.
While the Haslam and Reicher procedure is not a direct replication of Zimbardo, their study provides further doubt on the generalities of its conclusions. In particular, it questions the idea that people are slipping without thinking to the role and the idea that the dynamics of crime in any way is superficial. Their research also points to the importance of leadership in the emergence of the tyranny of the form displayed by Zimbardo when guardian briefing in the Stanford experiment.
Experiments in the United States
The Stanford prison experiment was partly a response to Milgram's experiment at Yale in 1961 and published in 1963.
The Third Wave Experiment involves the use of authoritarian dynamics similar to the Nazi Party's mass control method in classroom settings by high school teacher Ron Jones in Palo Alto, California, in 1976 with the aim of demonstrating to the class in a clear manner how the German Public in World War II can act like that. Although the truth of the Jones account has been questioned, some participants in the study have gone on to confirm the incident.
In both trials, participants found it difficult to leave the study room because of the role assigned to them. Both studies examined human nature and the effects of authority. The subject personality has little effect on both trials despite tests before prison experiments.
Abu Ghraib and the experiment:
- BBC News: Has anyone abused prisoners?
- BBC News: Why everyone is not a torturer
- Ronald Hilton: Bad behavior of US soldiers and Stanford Prison Experiment
- Slate.com: Situasionist Ethics: The Stanford Prison Experiment does not explain Abu Ghraib, by William Saletan
- IMDb: Anonymous Stanford Prison Experiment Project
- VIDEO: Talk to MIT re: new book: The Lucifer Effect
- Psychology Articles for Undergraduate and A-Level Studies
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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