An Analysis of the Stanford Prison Experiment

The Stanford Prison Experiment
It’s August 17th, 1971. A young Stanford student in Palo Alto is spending time with his family when the police knock on the door. A family member answers, and through the door steps the local police, armed with an arrest warrant. They arrest this Stanford student in front of his family and parade him out the front door in sight of his neighbors for armed robbery and burglary, cuffing him and putting him in the back of a squad car. The offender is transported to the local police station, where he is booked and fingerprinted before being moved to a holding cell. After some time he is pulled from his cell and transported to his final destination – not just any prison, but Stanford County Prison. He is in fact not

a criminal; rather he is one of 24 students that signed up for a psychology experiment run by Stanford psychologist Phillip Zimbardo. (Konnikova, 1)
All 24 men had been solicited by a newspaper ad to take part in a prison experiment and randomly were chosen to play guards or prisoners. The goal: to determine how these men would react and behave toward one another in their randomly assigned prison roles over the course of two weeks. Could this environment transform the students who played the role of guards into people who perform and enjoy perpetrating acts of cruelty, and students who played the role of inmates into obedient, dehumanized husks? The answers, as it turned out, were frightening; one of the most controversial psychological experiments of all time, the experiment proved so volatile it was shut down after just six days.
The transformation of these previously well-adjusted and well-educated students and peers was alarming. Within 24 hours the guards had not only taken to their roles as supervisors of the prison, they quickly escalated their behavior to abusing their student inmate counterparts. The inmates mainly responded to the abuse with a strangely docile acceptance. What phenomenon was at work that could cause the behavior of the guards to turn so aggressively violent, and for the prisoners to turn so docile and obedient? What anomaly had such an effect that the expected reactions of the warden (played by an undergraduate student) and super-intendent (played by the head of this experiment, Phillip Zimbardo) allowed such abuse to take place in their faux prison?
For Zimbardo and the psychology community at large, the reactions of the guards and prisoners appeared to be further proof of a psychology theory developed a decade earlier by Stanley Milgram called obedience theory. Zimbardo himself said, “This research represents one of the most extreme experimental demonstrations of the power of situational determinants in both shaping behavior and predominating over personality, attitudes and individual values. As such it extends Stanley Milgram’s research on obedience to authority.” (Zimbardo, 1)
In 1961, Stanley Milgram setup his obedience experiment with the intentions of discovering the depth of obedience in every-day people when prompted to take action by a perceived authority figure.

Like Zimbardo, Milgram invited participants to take part in a memory study through a newspaper ad. When the participants arrived they were introduced to a supposed fellow participant who was in fact a plant and part of the experiment. Both were asked by a man in a white coat which of them would like to be the teacher, and which would like to be the learner. The participant would unknowingly always be chosen to be the teacher. The teacher was then made to strap the learner into an electric chair, then told by the man in the white coat to secure nodes to the learner’s body that would act as a conduit for electricity to flow from the teacher’s switch to the learner’s body. The teacher was then led into a separate room and was only allowed to communicate with the learner through an intercom system, preventing any visual communication or observation. The experiment called for the teacher to recite words to the learner in a specific order. The learner would then recite them back perfectly, or suffer the consequences of an electric shock with any mistake made. All would go well the first few rounds; the teacher reciting the words, the learner reciting them back, a rhythmic sort of contentment developing between them. Finally, however, the learner would inevitably make a mistake. This is

where the experiment became interesting and people displayed unexpected behavior. The teacher would be told by the man in the white coat, who observed the teacher with a blank stare, to execute a shock to the learner. With each mistake the force of the shock would increase, the intensity quickly ratcheting up and beginning to send the learner into screams of fear and pain. The teacher, increasingly concerned for the safety of the learner, might waiver a bit; they might look to the man in the white coat, this vague entity of authority, for guidance. They would be told to continue. Higher and higher the voltage would go as the learner increasingly made mistakes, and with each mistake pay an increasing price. The learner would begin to beg, plead for the experiment to stop, and the teacher would tell the man in the white coat, this ambiguous, ghostly authority figure, “He’s had enough, he wants the experiment to end. We should stop now.” The response of the man in the white coat would always be spoken with remote indifference. “The experiment must continue.” The teacher might try to bargain with the man in the white coat, to reason with him, but would only receive that same, stoic, empty response. “The experiment must continue.” And so often, it would. The teacher would continue to push the button, again and again, sending bullets of searing pain into this stranger, this tormented voice, until finally the learner would let out a final, blood curdling scream of agony before going silent. The teacher would look to the man in charge, this dull and pale man wearing a white coat, who would respond, “Consider silence a wrong answer.” And so on it would go, the teacher increasingly detached from reality, mechanically following the orders of this man they just met, continuing to send surges of electricity into a man they had only just met.
For 65% of experimental teachers the scenario played out this way, all the way to the point where they sent shocks so potent they killed the learner on the other end. The teacher was just an ordinary person; a bank teller, a carpenter, a nurse. Ordinary people doing extraordinary harm to their experimental counterpart. Of course after the experiment ended, the learner would come out, completely unharmed by the supposed electric shocks; no one was physically harmed during these experiments. But the teachers, they knew the truth of their capacity for evil; they were capable of harming another human being to the point of killing them simply by being ordered to do so by an apparent authority figure.
Zimbardo knew of Milgram’s experiments, and knew of the capacity for obedience it proved in its subjects.

The prison experiment was meant to function in much the same way, the prevailing idea being that with no direction, the guards would become the teachers and begin to wield their inherent authority and power over the prisoners, or learners. To essentially prepare both sides for the roles they would play in the prison, Zimbardo instructed the guards to strip the prisoners naked on arrival to the prison before being fitted with chains and given a simple one piece prison gown to wear, with no underwear provided. This humiliation perpetrated by the guards and accepted by the prisoners set the tone for the experiment. The guards wore khaki pants and official looking uniforms, were geared with night sticks and whistles and as a finishing touch wore mirrored sunglasses to hide their eyes from prisoners. (Konnikova, 1) The guards worked in shifts of 8 hours and maintained constant watch on the prisoners. All of this created a sense of authority for the guards both in the eyes of the prisoners as well as their

own.
Within the first 24 hours the guards began to exhibit overly aggressive behavior toward prisoners, forcing the prisoners to perform petty tasks and were increasingly domineering and tyrannical. The prisoners were at times rebellious at the beginning of their incaceration but became increasingly obedient over the course of the experiment. As the prisoner’s obedience increased, the demands of the guards escalated. Bathroom access was frequently denied, and some prisoners were stripped and subjected to sexual humiliation to further demonstrate the control the guards held over them. (Explorer) As all of this unfolded, the warden and Zimbardo, the prison super-intendent, ignored the actions of the guards and allowed their activities to continue to escalate. Ultimately on the sixth day it was an outsider to the experiment, Christina Maslach, who upon observing guards forcing prisoners to wear paper bags as they went to the bathroom at the end of the night, confronted Zimbardo and alerted him to how deep he himself had fallen into the experiment. Initially surprised and angered, Zimbardo denied that he had lost control of his own experiment. Later that night after some reflection on the experiment and his own behavior, Zimbardo terminated the project, saying of Maslach, “She challenged us to examine the madness she observed, that we had created and had to take responsibility for.” Zimbardo also pointed out that of the 50 external observers that had visited the faux prison over the course of those six days, Maslach was the only one to raise concerns regarding what she observed. (STLCC)
Upon review it appears that clearly the reactions of the guards and prisoners in the Stanford prison experiment supported Milgram’s obedience theory. However, there are several