[wordup] The Stanford Prison Experiment

[Adam Shand]

From: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001450

Philip Zimbardo on the Psychology of Evil

Philip Zimbardo, the creator of the famed Stanford Prison Experiment 
(don’t worry, I’ll describe it later), is giving a lecture on terrorism 
and Abu Ghraib.

Zimbardo notes that he was a high-school classmate of Stanley Milgram, 
perhaps the best-known social psychologist. Milgram was the one who 
conducted the classic experiments on obedience to authority. He would 
invite a subject in and explain to them that they were helping him 
research the effects of memory. A confederate would be hooked up to an 
electrical chair in another room. The subject would then be asked by 
the lab-coat-wearing experimenter to give increasingly large electric 
shocks to the confederate as punishment for getting the memory 
questions wrong. In response, the confederate would scream in agony, 
ask to be let out, shout that he had a heart condition, and finally 
just stop responding.

At the time, conventional wisdom was that only a few people — the 
sadists — would would go all the way, following the orders to increase 
the voltage even after the confederate stopped responding. Milgram 
quickly proved conventional wisdom wrong: 65% followed their orders and 
went all the way. As Zimbardo notes, the popular theory of the time was 
largely dispositional: people do things because that’s their nature. 
Milgram provided clear evidence of situationism.

Milgram went on to do other pioneering research, including the small 
world experiment, where he would give people in Kansas a note for a 
friend in Cambridge, MA and ask them to get it there simply by passing 
it through friends. Milgram found that, again despite conventional 
wisdom of the time, it usually only six intermediaries to make it, 
which of course gave rise to the phrase “six degrees of separation”.

Sadly, Milgram died of a heart attack at only 51.

Milgram likely moved on from the obedience experiments because they 
were highly controvertial — many considered them seriously unethical, 
even though Milgram went to great lengths to inform the subjects the 
true purpose of the experiment afterwards and make sure they were 
alright. Zimbardo, however, follows that same path.

Milgram did a number of variants on the Obedience experiments — moving 
subjects closer to their victims, trying the experiments in an office 
building away from the prestige of Yale, using women instead of men — 
but most had little or no success in lowering compliance rates. Two 
things, however, did change compliance rates. First, if the subject saw 
other subjects resisting, they became willing to resist as well. 
Second, if the subject did not throw the switches directly, but simply 
supervised someone who did, they became far more willing to continue.

The two discoveries clearly have larger societal messages (just a few 
people resisting can help mobilize others, but increasing 
bureaucratization can increase compliance in the name of evil), which 
of course have been confirmed by larger societal studies.

For this, Zimbardo draws the concept of the “good guard” — the man who 
doesn’t hurt anyone but simply does his job and doesn’t interfere with 
the hurting. The good guards, Zimbardo notes, are key to the whole 
thing because if they showed signs of resistance the bad guards would 
likely begin to resist too. (Again, it’s not hard to extrapolate this 
to society.)

Zimbardo continues surveying the research and lays out the ten lessons 
he’s drawn from it on how to get people to commit evil:

1.  	Create an ideology where the ends justify the means
2.  	Get a contract from the subjects where they agree to comply
3.  	Give participants meaningful roles with clear social value
4.  	Have the rules be vague and changing
5.  	Relabel actors and actions (“order control”, not guards; 
“monsters”, not people)
6.  	Diffuse responsibility so subjects don’t feel liable
7.  	Start small but slowly increase the requirements, step by step
8.  	Make the leader seem compassionate at first
9.  	Permit verbal dissent (“I don’t want to do this; I feel bad”) as 
long as subjects continue complying
10.  	Make it difficult to exit

Further experiments find that people’s inhibitions will be lowered if 
they or the subjects are “deindividualized” (e.g., they wear uniforms 
and masks; the subjects wear bags over their heads). In numerous 
experiments, this doubled the harm participants would voluntarily 
commit. (Anthropological studies confirm this, finding that cultures 
with costumes and masks are more violent.)

Similarly, changing how people think of their actions is key. In one 
experiment, where the experimenter called the victims “nice guys” the 
amount of punishment subjects inflicted went down. But when he called 
them “monsters” it went up.

Zimbardo put together all that he had learned into one experiment, the 
Stanford Prison Experiment, to see how far things could go. Volunteer 
subjects were recruited and half assigned to be prisoners and half 
assigned to be guards so that there would be no differences between the 
two groups. The prisoners were arrested at their home and taken to 
recently-redecorated basement of the Stanford Psychology department, 
where they were imprisoned.

There were no windows, so prisoners could not gauge time. Prisoners 
were strip-searched and forced to wear dress-like clothes. They were 
given leg shackles, a constant reminder of their status. Guards were 
given uniforms and mirror sunglasses (so no one could read their 
emotions) as well as minimal requirements or training.

On only the second day of the experiment, the prisoners tried to 
resist. Guards responded by calling in reinforcements, attacking the 
prisoners with fire extinguishers, placing the leaders in solitary 
confinement, and harassing the rest. They also created a privileged 
cell for the prisoners who most resisted the rebellion, with special 
benefits. The next day, they reversed things, putting some of the 
leaders in the privileged cell (to imply the leader had sold out).

Soon enough, prisoners began going crazy. Guards became so evil and 
violent that the study had to be prematurely ended.

The relevance to Abu Ghraib should be obvious. And, sure enough, 
Zimbardo got a chance to testify before the court trying one of the Abu 
Ghraib guards, arguing that his sentence should be lowered because, as 
his research had shown, few could have resisted the powerful 
situational influences, which were surely even more powerful at a real 
prison with (presumably at least some) real criminals.