Stanford University Prison Experiment

[geek]

Hey guys and gals, I'm just wondering how many of you have heard of this? I have before, and my friend made a short video about it, but I had never really checked it out until earlier today. I'm interested on how other people feel about it, so I'm hoping at least 10 of you should interest and read the article. The website has 15 or so questions you can answer, I pulled out 5 I'm interested in hearing the answers for, so please, if you don't mind, read the "slide show" and answer these questions. I will warn you, however, some of the content is just weird, and it is time consuming.

First, heres the link: http://www.prisonexp.org/

Here are the 5 questions I want some people to answer.. (I will also be answering these questions)

1. What police procedures are used during arrests, and how do these procedures lead people to feel confused, fearful, and dehumanized? Should these be changed, or do you think they're in need of change?

2. What prevented "good guards" from objecting or countermanding the orders from tough or bad guards? Would you have the ability to step in and stop a "guard" from beating a "prisoner", or would you just let it go on?

3. After the study, how do you think the prisoners and guards felt when they saw each other in the same civilian clothes again and saw their prison reconverted to a basement laboratory hallway? Do you think they became friends or enemies, or would that even be possible at this point?

4. If you were a guard, what type of guard would you have become? How sure are you?

5. Was it ethical to do this study? Was it right to trade the suffering experienced by participants for the knowledge gained by the research? Do you think it would be allowed to go on today?

I guess I have a question as well, that isn't from the site. If you were an "average joe" in 1971, do you think you would have volunteered for this experiment, knowing what could possibly happen? What would be the main factor driving you to do it or not to do it?

PS - please reply if you're interested - and you can edit that post later with answers. I guess right now I'm seeing who is interested in it :) Thanks a ton

[EnderX]

I, too, have just recently read this "article" and found it very interesting. I had always heard about it and thought it was stupid that people would be "brain washed" in a sense. But the more I read the details of the experiment, I felt stupid of the way I had thought. It is amazing how much people prize their individuality.. and how it can be robbed of you. I will answer these questions as more people show interest.

[Gwendylyn Post]

I've heard about this from a long time ago :) It's a classic case study of roles of domination/submission in an environment. The part that is always most surprising is that they were told to act like prisoners and guards, but nothing more. Everything they did was a reaction to what they thought prisoners and guards were supposed to do - all expectations.

I don't have the time now to answer the questions fully (maybe tomorrow.. after this essay) but...

(#4) Knowing what I know, and my own personal political issues involving prisons and prisoners, I would not have ended up like the other guards who became violent and empowered with their fake authority. Next term I'm going to be volunteering at a prison (education & rehabilitation program) so I think I may be an exception to the average person.

(#5) I do know that the experiment is never allowed to be reproduced, because once they discovered that it brought harm upon people - including one person's nervous breakdown - it is considered unethical. That is why they called it off so soon - only a week I think out of a planned month... can't remember (I should just look it up :p)

[EnderX]

They planned it for 2 weeks but ended it after only 6 days.

[geek]

1. What police procedures are used during arrests, and how do these procedures lead people to feel confused, fearful, and dehumanized? Should these be changed, or do you think they're in need of change?

2. What prevented "good guards" from objecting or countermanding the orders from tough or bad guards? Would you have the ability to step in and stop a "guard" from beating a "prisoner", or would you just let it go on?

3. After the study, how do you think the prisoners and guards felt when they saw each other in the same civilian clothes again and saw their prison reconverted to a basement laboratory hallway? Do you think they became friends or enemies, or would that even be possible at this point?

4. If you were a guard, what type of guard would you have become? How sure are you?

5. Was it ethical to do this study? Was it right to trade the suffering experienced by participants for the knowledge gained by the research? Do you think it would be allowed to go on today?

1. I don't really have an answer for this one.. I haven't seen this like I've seen the rest, which is one of the reasons i asked this question - because I don't really know.

2. I think the "good guards" wouldn't jump in to protect the "prisoners" because they were afraid of the "bad guards", and were afraid of how they would respond to that. Emotionally, the good guards may have been jumping out, trying to protect them, but physically they were afraid of what would happen to them if they did something about it. This "theory" is very common amongst people who aren't trained to be self-disciplined. Kind of like in a bank robbery, none of the civvies do anything but sit there like a typical hostage, whereas if an off-duty cop were in there he would know what to do. It all depends on how you're trained to think.

3. I don't think that it would be possible for them to have a friendship at all. You're meeting 17 people in one day, and it appears that the person changes <at least mentally> each day, so you don't really know them at all. I think that afterwards, the participants would be somewhat "afraid" of the other participants, because they all knew sides of each other that none of them knew existed before. If it were me, I'm almost positive I wouldn't be able to maintain a friendship with somebody over those conditions.

4. Honestly, I don't really know. I don't like being in charge, I'd rather somebody else tell me what to do (in general), so I don't think I would have became a bad guard. I hope that I would have the discipline/will power to attempt stopping what was going on with the other guards and prisoners. I know if i just sat there and watched it, I wouldn't be able to take it. So, my conclusion on this one remains that I don't really know what I would be, I just know what I wouldn't become.

5. Was it ethical? I don't really think theres a problem with it. The people did volunteer for it, and they were fore-warned about the possibilities that they may encounter. I know warnings are nothing like the real experience, but they did have somewhat of a clue of what could happen. Another question to ask though, would be "Was it necessary to do this to learn what they learned?" To this, I say No, it wasn't necessary. I believe they could've manifested the same information by doing the study at a real prison with real guards/inmates. Do I think this type of thing would be allowed to happen again? No, probably not. Depends on who was doing it and how much they were paying the gov't. :p

Bonus Question: Would I do it? Hmm. I probably would've looked into it, and applied for it, but I don't think I would've expected to hear back from them. If I were one of the 24 (or however many) that passed all the tests/were accepted, I think I would do it. There really wouldn't be any driving factor, other than having something neat to do. I would probably have a hard time getting into it at first, though. I'm not very creative, and my imagination doesn't run that far. But I'm sure by the third day, when everything was getting crazy, you had no choice but to live the "prison" life.

[theophoretos]

i learned about this experiment long time ago in my developmental psychology class. the experiment was related to Lawrence Kohlberg's theory of moral development. i found this short introduction on the web:

http://tigger.uic.edu/~lnucci/MoralEd/overview.html

basically, some of the guards refused orders to abuse because they were on the higher stages of moral development, they had developed beyond the conventional stages. those that blindly followed orders were still stuck on the conventional stages. and of course, once you learn of this sort of experiments, it's unlikely that you will in the future just blindly follow bad orders, because you have already the ability to reflect on conventions. (this means that, of course, i'll never obey authority who tells me to torture people.)


i wrote something about kohlberg's theory too:

"Lawrence Kohlberg attempts to expand Piaget's four-stage developmental sequence of moral maturation beyond adolescence (to which the latter is restricted) by adding two additional stages that supposedly characterize the final moments of moral maturation of any individual. The developmental sequence consists now of six stages, divided into the three main stages of preconventional, conventional, and postconventional. Moreover, he obtains the last two stages (or rather the sixth, the most mature possible stage of moral reasoning) from John Rawl's Theory of Justice, this latest version of the Kantian ethic (as opposed to utilitarianism since John Stuart Mill and so on) in the tradition of analytic philosophy thus being grafted onto the empirically derived child-developmental sequence of Piaget. Such a justification of the product of a highly technical tradition of thinking through an empirical research on ordinary peoples -- now Kohlberg basically holds that all human beings of all cultures and all time, when passing beyond the conventional stage, will converge on John Rawl's Theory of Justice, which is thus agreeable by all when they have become "mature enough" -- could not be accepted without skepticism (see, for example, D. Locke, "A Psychologist Among the Philosophers", in S. Modgil and C. Modgil [eds.] Lawrence Kohlberg: Consensus and Controversy, Falmer Press, 1986), and my opnion is that, since analytic philosophy is a product of the Enlightenment in the Anglophonic world, Kohlberg's theory is suspect of being valid only within the perspective of contemporary Anglophones (Anglo-Americans). The only thing that can be universally and for all time true is the approximate developmental sequence of the three main stages of preconventional, conventional, and postconventional, "or egocentric, sociocentric , and worldcentric; or 'me,' 'us' and 'all of us'", to use Ken Wilber's words. (A Theory of Everything, Shambhala, 2001, p. 19)"

this is taken from my chapter on contemporary cultural feminism: http://www.geocities.com/theophoretos/culturalfeminism.html

[geek]

hm. That's pretty interesting, too. I checked out your site, you have a lot of amazing articles there, I'm very impressed.

[theophoretos]

hi geek, thanks for complimenting my website, that's very nice of you.;)