A new film, “The Stanford Prison Experiment,” is inspired by one of the darkest chapters in modern experimental psychology, according to a columnist for New Yorker.
Conducted in 1971, the elaborate experiment at role-playing supposedly showed that middle-class college students, divided into roles of prisoners and guards with little or no instructions, began almost immediately to behave in extremely abusive or submissive ways. It is cited as evidence of the savage impulses that lurk within us all.
But the columnist offers a contrary view.
Maria Konnikova wrote that the real lesson of the Stanford Prison Experiment is that extreme behavior flows from extreme institutions, not from human nature. “The lesson of Stanford (Prison Experiment) isn’t that any random human being is capable of descending into sadism and tyranny. It’s that certain institutions and environments demand those behaviors—and perhaps, can change them,” Konnikova wrote.
Konnikova writes a weekly column on www.newyorker.com focusing on psychology and science.
She said the confusion about what really happened in 1971 was the result of premature exposure. Konnikova said that the appeal of the experiment came from its seemingly simple setup, and the compelling initial results were quickly over-publicized. The publication of a “methodologically and analytically rigorous” report came later. By then it was too late.
The premature disclosure convinced people that the Stanford experiment underscored the findings of the earlier Milgram obedience study and showed “the ease with which regular people, if given too much power, could transform into ruthless oppressors.”
The Milgram study demonstrated that ordinary people, if encouraged by an authority figure, are willing to torture their peers with what they believed to be painful and potentially lethal levels of electricity.
However, Konnikova pointed out, the fake “Stanford County Prison” was a “heavily manipulated environment,” and the Stanford participants acted in ways that were largely predetermined by the experiment’s express goal, to evoke the experience of working and living in a brutal jail.
Professor Philip Zimbardo, the experiment’s lead investigator, set the guards’ priorities, including the booking procedures that were meant to “humiliate” and “emasculate” the prisoners. Zimbardo and another researcher also played the roles of the prison superintendent and warden.
In addition, the students self-selected to participate in “a psychological study of prison life,” she said. A 2007 study showed that people who chose to participate in prison studies were significantly more aggressive, authoritarian, Machiavellian and narcissistic.
In contrast, in a 2001 study that sought to replicate the Stanford experiment without the pre-set expectations, the prisoners rebelled and took control of the guards’ quarters on the sixth day. It became known as the BBC Prison Study.
“Taken together, these two studies don’t suggest that we all have an innate capacity for tyranny or victim-hood. Instead, they suggest that our behavior largely conforms to our preconceived expectations,” Konnikova said.
