I’m a little short of time for blogging today, but this is fascinating stuff: video of the Stanford Prison Experiment is now on YouTube. In case you haven’t heard of Dr. Phillip Zimbardo’s infamous psychology experiment, here’s a quick recap by Jake Young at the blog Pure Pedantry:
The experiment randomly assigned male undergraduate students to participate in a two week mock prison. They were randomly assigned to be guards and inmates. However, things went horribly wrong. The guards faced a rebellion by the inmates. One inmate had a psychotic break. In essence, the participants began to buy into their assigned social roles. Dr. Zimbardo did nothing to stop this from happening. At day 6 he was convinced to stop the experiment early by his graduate student Christina Maslach. (At the time they were dating. They are now married.)
Scientific American’s blog goes into a little more detail about what happened [with paragraphs reformattted by me]:
Here’s a cursory summary of the Stanford Prison Experiment: The basement of the Stanford psychology department was converted into a makeshift prison environment–old offices became cells, a closet became a room for solitary confinement and a room at the end of the corridor (or yard) became the guards’ room. Twenty-four male, college students , found to have no previous psychological problems, were selected for the study and then, by flip of a coin, assigned to be either prisoners or guards.
After a relatively playful first day of settling into their roles, the prisoners became cagey and insolent and the guards became controlling and sadistic. On day two, one prisoner–who is now a prison psychologist–began acting out a psychotic episode, which then became a real nervous breakdown, and had to be excused from the experiment. At least one other prisoner also had to leave under somewhat similar circumstances, which usually began with them being punished for acting out.
A new prisoner was brought in a few days into the experiment. He was a beacon of non-conformity whose actions — refusing to eat sausage served to him at multiple meal times — and subsequent punishment, having to tell another inmate he loved him and many hours in solitary confinement eventually led to the termination of the experiment after six days. It was supposed to last two weeks.
Throughout all of this — save at least two occasions when he intervened and allowed prisoners to leave or offered them a plea bargain — Zimbardo just stroked his fine beard and watched as his the players he’d cast in this situational quandary began to take really inhabit their roles. The professor seemed to be overwhelmed and himself too caught up — he admits as much now — in his multiple roles as principal investigator, prison superintendent and responsible adult to notice the ethical grey area, into which the experiment had waded. It wasn’t until a female grad student sitting in his office while he rapturously watched the prison’s hidden camera feed essentially called him a monster that he realized a line (or several) probably had been crossed.
If you want even more on the experiment, you can consult its Wikipedia entry.
The experiment is both horrifying and fascinating at the same time, which is probably why it’s found its way into popular culture by way of a book, a Veronica Mars episode, and a movie co-written by Christopher “The Usual Suspects” McQuarrie. Frankly, I’m surprised it hasn’t yet been turned into a plotline for Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the college years) or The Office.
I could go on, but there’s work to be done clearing brush out here in the internets, so I’ll simply include the videos below and open up the debate in the comments.
YouTube has a ten-minute limit on videos, so the video on the experiment is broken into five pieces, which appear below: