Stanford prison experiment

The **Stanford Prison Experiment** (SPE) was a psychology experiment to see the effects of becoming a prisoner or a prison guard on human behaviour and psychology. The experiment ran from 15 to 21 August 1971. It was  led by Dr Philip Zimbardo at Stanford University. In the experiment, 24 student volunteers were assigned to be either a ‘guard’ or a ‘prisoner’ in a fake prison at the flip of a coin, and Zimbardo was the prison superintendent. They were paid 15$ a day. The experiment was intended to run for two weeks. Some of the guards quickly became authoritarian and began psychologically torturing the prisoners. For this reason, the experiment had to be stopped after only six days. Five prisoners left the experiment early, because of severe psychological stress. Zimbardo concluded that certain situations can cause good people to behave in a way that they normally would not have predicted.  

Those volunteers selected to be "guards" were given uniforms specifically to de-individuate them. They were also instructed to prevent prisoners from escaping. The experiment officially started when "prisoners" were arrested by real Palo Alto police. Over the following five days, psychological abuse of the prisoners by the "guards" became increasingly brutal. Psychologist Christina Maslach visited to evaluate the conditions. She was upset to see how study participants were behaving and she told Zimbardo. After this, Zimbardo ended the experiment on the sixth day.

The Stanford Prison Experiment is used in many introductory psychology textbooks to show the impact of power and authority on human behaviour. 

In his book, The Lucifer Effect, Zimbardo explained that he told the participants how they were supposed to behave:We can create boredom. We can create a sense of frustration. We can create fear in them, to some degree. We can create a notion of the arbitrariness that governs their lives, which are totally controlled by us, by the system, by you, me.…They’ll have no privacy at all, there will be constant surveillance—nothing they do will go unobserved. They will have no freedom of action. They will be able to do nothing and say nothing that we don’t permit. We’re going to take away their individuality in various ways.…In general, what all this should create in them is a sense of powerlessness. We have total power in the situation. They have none. (pp. 55)The fact that Zimbardo was both the head researcher and the prison superintendent added to the demand characteristics because the 'guards' wanted to please the 'superintendent', and the overlap between the superintendent and the head psychologist means the participants would have followed demand characteristics more strongly.

Peter Gray publicly stated why he hasn’t included the SPE in his introductory psychology textbooks, explaining that by remaining silent when the guards abused the prisoners, Zimbardo was approving of their methods of intimidation. And the guards who were less assertive were instructed to be ‘tougher’- For example, Warden Jaffe (one of Zimbardo’s student research associates) said to one of the ‘nicer’ guards,“The guards have to know that every guard has to be what we call a ‘tough guard.’ The success of this experiment rides on the behavior of the guards to make it seem as realistic as possible”

## Movies about the events
There has been a lot of interest for the events in the media. At least the following movies were made:
*A German movie (*Das Experiment*/*The Experiment*), of 2001; based on a book by Mario Giordano
*A US movie of 2010 (also called *The Experiment*)

## References