Dr. Behaviorson: Stanford Prison Experiment

M. C. Escher's "Circle Limit IV

Hey! This is Dr. Behaviorson. Now I’m back to tell you about interesting psychological phenomena in the human history. If you were asked to name a psychological experiment that you’ve heard, somebody might mention Stanford prison experiment. Why is this specific psychological experiment so deeply entrenched in people’s mind? Exactly, we would talk about some aspects related to the most famous psychological experiment in the human history ever, Stanford Prison Experiment. If you have read One Hundred Years of Solitude, you would definitely remember the beginning sentence of the book: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” Obviously, García Márquez set the tone of execution at the very beginning in order to color an atmosphere of solemnity. Similarly, Stanford psychologist, Phillip Zimbardo, decided to further investigate this condition. Therefore, what happened next was that twenty-four students got handcuffed at a loss and escorted to the pre-designed-and-constructed prison inside Stanford University.

Stanford County Prison

Let’s imagine this. If you were suddenly handcuffed and acknowledged that you had had huge crime beforehand, you would be extremely incredulous of what you had been told. But after many times you were “brainwashed”, you would become startlingly convinced and gradually accepted to the idea of your having committed a crime. In this aspect, the starting purpose of Stanford experiment is similar to that of Milgram Experiment, which aimed to turn people’s characteristic under certain pressure into the subject of the study. But the most important subject to study is not how people would be submissive to some pressured circumstance, but whether people would go astray and even be turned into “evil” under this circumstance. Therefore, in order to make people feel guilty, Zimbardo had made every possible detail sinful. Firstly, he forced every “prisoner” to wear the orange uniforms. Constrained by clothes marked by inferiority and wrongdoing, experimenters would feel inward cognition of being incriminated. So Zimbardo successfully turned experimenters de-individualize. Secondly, simulative prison was built on the campus of Stanford University. So when prisoners were trapped in the designed construction on the University campus, they would actually think themselves stay in the prison.

But you might ask how they got “evil” internally. They were just placed in the settings of prison and had no reason to become people who deserve sitting in the prison. Therefore, Zimbardo added some stimulating actions to make people feel guiltier. Firstly, he deprived prisoners’ sleep and harassed the prisoners from time to time. Needless to say, some experimenters were so annoyed that they shouted and screamed to protest. And even in the process of experiment, some experimenters became so deranged that they were dislodged so that Zimbardo feared of complete destruction of personality. Surprisingly, though Stanford prison experiment entailed a lot of ethical problems and even some experimenters were deeply psychological suffered in the process, no experimenters after the experiment had ever suffered any type of psychological disease.

Overall, this research was intended to find the purpose of finding out what happened when individuality and dignity were stripped away from a human. But it gradually involved into a sorrowful drama. Needless to say, the extent of experimenters’ forbearance of being deprived of freedom and basic human rights was a crucial threshold in the success of the experiment. And the peak of experimenters’ endurance could be investigated in the means of adding dehumanizing punishments. However, in the process of adding up these dehumanizing punishments, investigators stood not in the perspective of finding out people’s endurance but had been pushed to be indifferently insistent. What’s more, the excessive reality created has been overly exaggerated. Experimenters were instilled the idea that they were trapped in an unknown prison and ruthlessly and irrationally sentenced. Therefore, maybe people entered the position of extreme subordination not for their innate characteristics, but for demented aftermath of physical and mental pressure. Nevertheless, the contribution of this experiment is enormous so that it was acclaimed as the most distinguished experiment in the psychological history ever. But more importantly, the conclusion we arrived at is that people fall into the role their society has made for them. Provided with subordination, experimenters felt the way that they had been given to. If this trait was applied in a bigger context, we are situated in the place where society has given to. Workers in flow line production becomes inured and dependent of their jobs because they do not have greater abilities and opportunities. Aristocracies and hereditary middle-class would not suddenly fall to the bottom of the social structure because they are offered with majority of benefits. Perhaps bemoaning the unduly clarified categorization in the social structure is people’s usual sentiment, people’s intended psychology guides and makes them fit the fixed position.