Philip Zimbardo (Stanford Prison Experiment) answers questions on Reddit (Link)
In March, a user on Reddit emailed psychologist Philip Zimbardo (leader of the Stanford Prison Experiment) to arrange an “IAmA” interview. Zimbardo agreed to answer the top 5 questions from this thread. Yesterday his answers were posted here.
The chosen questions touched on research ethics, what he originally expected to learn from the experiment, the role of psychoactive drugs in society, reading recommendations and more.
After responding, Zimbardo posed a question of his own to Reddit:
I ask you: Is it good that the Milgram and Zimbardo studies were done, or wrong? Should they be allowed to be replicated with interesting variations (such as female guards and prisoners) if institutional guidelines are imposed and followed? Or is it better for society not to know about the nature of the “dark side” of human nature?
The Stanford Prison Experiment has had more of an impact as a legend in popular culture than as an actual work of social science in the decades since it was conducted. Notice the capitals in “Prison Experiment.” It’s become the name of a punk band for Darwin’s sake.
Wikipedia says that the experiment violates modern ethical standards. So, if the results were ever replicable (I have my doubts), they won’t be replicated now.
I suspect that Stanford University undergraduates tend to come from very different backgrounds than the average prison guard or prison inmate. Also, the conditions of the experiment were sufficiently different from the real-world criminal justice system that I don’t think the experiment says much about “prisons.” On the other hand, if the results are valid—again, I have my doubts—it says something about Stanford. I’m wondering how much of this experiment was really the result of a lot of bright, high-achieving undergraduates guessing Professor Zimbardo’s password—he wanted dramatic results, and they obliged.
Zimbardo discusses the members of the experiment in his book the Lucifer Principle. They were from very different backgrounds than criminals, though they seemed to be very countercultural as well, which still makes the end result surprising. Regarding Zimbardo’s take on the whole thing (ethics & impact), I think he does cop to the experiment being unethical, and his behavior being unethical as well. I don’t know if it’s a case of being localized to Stanford, but I do completely agree that it’s a case of guessing the password; in fact, that’s pretty much how I read Zimbardo’s take on it. He was creating an environment where the password was the increasingly abusive behavior. That’s why he sees the experiment as being relevant to Abu Ghraib; guards were living up to an implicit password within the context of their roles on the nightshift. The next and more practical question would be whether or not the existence of such passwords is really universal.
There was an attempted replication that Zimbardo critiques in his book. That replication (which was a reality show, btw; so more confounds are present, though whether that’s anymore real than a Stanford LARP is up for debate) had very different results than Zimbardo’s. Prisoners there found some solidarity, which Zimbardo predicts would be broken by a more repressive prison structure. It’s at that point where I’m fine with the arguments staying observational and theoretical and not moving into experimentation. It’s not that I don’t think the study of humanity’s darker sides aren’t important, it’s just that I don’t think it’s acceptable to move into what would seem to be very unethical experimental setups.
Maybe not so much. If the Stanford undergraduate “guards” were part of the counterculture of 1971, their preexisting views of how a “prison guard” was supposed to behave would have been...unfavorable. When Zimbardo told them to role play a “prison guard,” the obvious interpretation would be “act like a fascist pig.” A non-countercultural blue collar kid from the same era, maybe one proud of his dad’s service in World War II, might have interpreted the instructions differently.
Point taken. And Zimbardo’s potential agenda can be questioned as well. Here’s an instruction from the wiki page:
“You can create in the prisoners feelings of boredom, a sense of fear to some degree, you can create a notion of arbitrariness that their life is totally controlled by us, by the system, you, me, and they’ll have no privacy… We’re going to take away their individuality in various ways. In general what all this leads to is a sense of powerlessness. That is, in this situation we’ll have all the power and they’ll have none.”
That seems like pretty loaded language to me. And it speaks to the password hypothesis. It also steps beyond what I would consider to be any sort of attempt at an ethical prison system. To say that it’s the unspoken “truth” of any prison situation is a huge leap made by Zimbardo.
Building on your blue collar kid example, if you moved the experiment to a service academy (West Point say), give the guards the instructions to uphold military code as they know it, assign an officer who was in charge of an actual prison to be the warden, and have the situation independently monitored, and I would guess you don’t get the same situation as the SPE. Zimbardo seems to acknowledge that the presence of clear rules is a mitigating factor, as he states numerous times that it was the laxness of the night shift at Abu Ghraib that led to the prisoner abuse (in his view). That’s a confound with the explicit instructions he gave in the situation he created.
It would be nice if this were true. It’s not entirely implausible, either.
Note that “it would be nice if this were true” should count as evidence against it actually being true, because humans are more likely to generate false positives for desirable hypotheses.
That’s why I said it.
I’m not his biggest fan, having read his report on the experiment he not only acted terribly unethically he also got absorbed in it himself. Its just a really bad thing for a scientist to do, and to do his work these days would almost certainly get him fired. Comparing the prison experiment to Milgrams experiments, which were controlled, safe, and repeatable, is frankly dishonest.
I appreciated the candor Zimbardo put into his book, but that candor underscores your criticisms. Milgram was far more rigorous in his controls, and in his ethics. If one were to “duplicate” Zimbardo, it would need to be done with confederates in the fashion of Milgram’s experiments, and would likely boil down to being an extension of Milgram.
I say that it was good that the studies were done. Society both deserves and needs to know about “the dark side of human nature”. Deserves, because I and every other individual deserve to know the truth about myself, and studies on what humans will do in such situations can illuminate that. Needs, because unless we all recognize our potential “darkness,” we can’t guard against it. I haven’t seen any studies on whether being familiar with the Milgram and Zimbardo studies makes one less susceptible to, for instance, shocking a person when told to, but I want to see one.
ETA: I know more about the Milgram experiment than the Zimbardo one, so while I mention both this comment mostly refers to the former.
i seriously think the experiment should not have been done.… because the they were jst college kids who were brutely treated… and i am sure they had a devastating effect on them
I’d encourage separating the “is it worth putting the experimental subjects through the experiment to get the resulting data?” question from the “is it worth the emotional costs of readers becoming aware of the resulting data for them to do so?”
My answer to the second is “YMMV, but it’s worth it for a substantial number of readers.”
My answer to the first is “it depends on the specific experimental protocol, but for a decently designed experiment, probably.”
Here’s an introductory video course in psychology by Zimbardo: http://learner.org/resources/series138.html
As I recall, one of the videos (probably 19) discusses the prison experiment.
It’s worth noting that because the original Reddit thread only got limited attention, several of the questions that were picked actually had negative karma.