THE STANFORD PRISON STUDY

The Stanford Prison Study was created by Philip Zimbardo in 1971, held in the basement of Yale University’s psychology department building. Zimbardo wanted to see how well individuals could conform into their situation. 18 out of 75 applicants of college age males living in the US and Canada were selected for the psychological experiment, and paid $14 a day. All of the males were put through several diagnostic and personality tests, which confirmed that each of them were mentally sound. They were split up at random into two groups - prisoners and guards. The guards were told to use whatever force necessary to maintain law and order, and keep the respect of the prisoners. They had no training, and weren’t allowed to resort to physical assault. Each guard wore a pair of sunglasses (to prevent eye contact), and a khaki uniform. They worked in shifts of three which lasted 8 hours each. The prisoners wore a nylon cap (to imitate a shaven head), and a smock with no underclothes. Instead of their names, the prisoners were given numbers as a way to simulate the loss of identity. They lived in small cells, three prisoners to each, with no windows or clocks.

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On the first day, the guards and prisoners already began settling into their roles. The guards laid out rules, gave petty insults, intimidated, and harassed the prisoners. They had the prisoners do repetitions of mundane tasks such as push ups (at times with another prisoner sitting on them, or with a guard stepping on their back),  counts (reciting their fellow prisoners’ numbers and their own), and generally dehumanized. The behavior of the guards grew rapidly out of control over the next few days in a number of ways: by stripping and locking those who rebelled in solitary confinement; having prisoners clean toilets with their bare hands; removing some prisoners’ cots; having the prisoners wear paper bags on their heads, chained together, in a walk to the toilets; and having the prisoners do counts for hours on end. The prisoners were convinced that they couldn’t leave; to them, it really was a prison. There was an attempted escape among two of the prisoners, but was quickly put to a stop. During the experiment, five participants had to leave due to emotional distress. Things got so out of hand that the originally planned two week experiment was cut short to six days.

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Several of the participants were interviewed two months following the experiment. One of the mock guards stated that “I really thought I was incapable of this behavior...While I was doing it I didn’t feel any regret, I didn’t feel any guilt, it was only after, when I began to reflect on what I had done, did this behavior dawn on me… This was a part of me I hadn’t noticed before.”  However, this doesn’t account for all of the guards, some of whom were decent. The guards were split into three groups by Zimbardo; tough but fair guards, kind guards, and the arbitrary and harsh guards. One third of the guards showed sadistic behavior that couldn't be predicted in the preliminary tests.

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A prisoner who was interviewed reported that he felt his identity slipping away, felt himself becoming his number. "... it was a prison to me; it still is a prison to me. I don't regard it as an experiment or a simulation because it was a prison run by psychologists instead of run by the state. I began to feel that that identity, the person that I was that had decided to go to prison was distant from me – was remote until finally I wasn't that, I was 416. I was really my number.” Many prisoners seemed to have similar thoughts, almost all of them feeling a loss of identity, and a passing of time they couldn't perceive (because of the lack of windows and clocks).

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However, there are several factors that have slightly altered the outcome of the experiment. For one thing, Zimbardo, the conductor of the experiment, acted in a part of the experiment (as the warden). He was a bit too involved in it. Another thing to consider is from an excerpt of an interview of a guard, John Mark: “Zimbardo went out of his way to create tension. Things like forced sleep deprivation—he was really pushing the envelope. I just didn't like the whole idea of constantly disturbing people and asking them to recite their prisoner numbers in a count.” Some of the tension was fabricated as a base in order to drive the experiment, which otherwise may have turned out to yield few results.

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It seems that despite what we may think of ourselves, there are parts of us that only reveal themselves in certain situations. Some guards were unaccustomed to the amount of power they held, and found they liked it. This experiment concludes that normal people, everyday people, are capable of atrocities, like those of genocides, or the Holocaust. It opens our eyes to the social hierarchy that has influence over our behavior, in the instances of the prisoner. It also provides a prime example of deindividuation, especially in guards, in which people become so accustomed to their situation that they lose their sense of identity and personal responsibility. It makes us wonder about the true personalities of the people around us; more importantly, ourselves.