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DURING THE SUMMER of 1971, 24 volunteers living near Stanford University were interviewed, selected, and arrested.
They’d all responded to a simple newspaper ad calling for male college students whom, it said, would get $15 a day to participate in a “psychological study of prison life” that summer.
At the fake prison built for the study, the volunteers were randomly divided into fake prisoners and fake guards.
Designed to last two weeks, the experiment was cut short after just six days.
In other words, it went horribly wrong.
The disturbing scenario that unfolded has been made into a new film, “The Stanford Prison Experiment”, which comes out Friday, July 17.
The Stanford Prison Experiment is based on a study designed and led by Stanford psychology professor Philip G. Zimbardo.
For years after it came out, psychology professors used the study as a reference to show how people are naturally inclined to abuse power — or in other words, how ordinary people can become monsters.
Just 48 hours after the experiment began, the fake guards began abusing their power, screaming at the fake prisoners and even beating them.
Shortly afterwards, two “prisoners” appeared to have psychotic breakdowns and asked to be released.
As more information about the study came out, however, some of its claims were questioned. There’s evidence, for example, that Zimbardo told the volunteers how to act and thus directly influenced the study outcomes — a big no-no as far as social-science research is concerned.
Now, the experiment itself is pretty controversial; some psychology professors even refuse to include it in their textbooks.
Several things went wrong. Here’s what happened:
After seeing the film, I watched some footage of the real experiment. The two are shockingly similar.
There’s one particularly disturbing instance where a guard commands a prisoner to walk “like Frankenstein” and profess his love for another prisoner. It happened almost exactly as it’s portrayed in the film.
Another disturbing detail that the film gets right is the guard they begin calling “John Wayne”.
In the experiment, one of the volunteers who gets designated as a guard, Dave Eshelman, develops an entire persona linked with his role: He puts on a southern accent, starts calling the prisoners “boy”, and leads the rest of the guards in verbally abusing the prisoners.
Later on in interviews, Eshelman said he was trying to mimic the role of the sadistic prison warden portrayed by Strother Martin in the movie “Cool Hand Luke”.
“What came over me was not an accident,” Eshelman told Stanford Magazine.
It was planned. I set out with a definite plan in mind, to try to force the action, force something to happen, so that the researchers would have something to work with.
Because the “John Wayne” guard takes such a front-and-center role in the film, it seems like almost all of the guards (with one exception) took their role to the extreme that he did.
In reality, out of the 11 participants who became guards, only a few actually began verbally or physically abusing the prisoners. The problem, then, was the sample size: With only 24 participants, even a small number of people acting a certain way would influence the entire outcome.
These days, such a small sample size would likely render the entire experiment moot, New York University psychology professor Eric Knowles told Business Insider: “In that small of a group, all it takes is one person to influence the rest of the participants. And then it’s hard to tell what is causing the outcomes you’re seeing. Is it the situation? Or is it just that one person? What would the situation have been like if he weren’t there?”
Plus, as psychologist Peter Gray has argued, many of the participants — especially the guards — may have simply been doing what they thought the researchers wanted them to do. Since Zimbardo and the others basically told the guards to act cruelly, they did so.
“I often wonder to what extent did those people feel like actors in a play?” said Knowles.
Carlo Prescott, the ex-convict in the film who Zimbardo consults with on the experiment, says this himself in an article he wrote afterwards for the Stanford Daily called, “The Lie of the Stanford Prison Experiment”:
To allege that all these carefully tested, psychologically solid, upper-middle-class Caucasian ‘guards’ dreamed this up on their own is absurd. How can Zimbardo … express horror at the behavior of the “guards” when they were merely doing what Zimbardo and others, myself included, encouraged them to do at the outset or frankly established as ground rules?
As he’s since admitted, Zimbardo clearly told the guards how he wanted them to act before the experiment even began. Here are some of his exact words (as he remembers them, at least) about what he told the guards, from his recent book, “The Lucifer Effect”:
‘We cannot physically abuse or torture them,’ I said. ‘We can create boredom. We can create a sense of frustration. We can create fear in them, to some degree. We can create a notion of the arbitrariness that governs their lives … They’ll have no privacy at all … They will have no freedom of action. They will be able to do nothing and say nothing that we don’t permit. We’re going to take away their individuality in various ways.’In general, what all this should create in them is a sense of powerlessness. We have total power in the situation. They have none.’
To recruit volunteers for the experiment, Zimbardo and his team posted an ad in the newspaper calling for volunteers for a “study of prison life”.
That alone may have jump-started what psychologists call “selection bias”, or choosing only a certain subset of volunteers that’s not accurately representative of the population as a whole.
The wording of the ad, for example, could have drawn certain kinds of people, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Vice President of Programs for the Public Understanding of Science and Technology Doron Weber told Business Insider. (The Sloan Foundation, a science research nonprofit, provided grants to help fund the film.)
“When they advertised for the experiment by calling for volunteers with the newspaper ad, they called it a ‘prison study,’ so who do you think is going to volunteer for that study? Likely people who have a predisposition to do so, people who could also have a predisposition to sadism or whatever, rather than just a bunch of neutral volunteers.”
The film alludes to the controversy Zimbardo’s experiment is met with, but doesn’t go any further than that. In reality, the controversy Zimbardo’s study drew from other researchers in the field was pretty intense.
Beyond Zimbardo getting directly involved in the experiment and the ad calling for volunteers having the words “prison life” in it, the experiment lacked a control, the group in an experiment that gets subjected to all the parts of the experiment except the variable. (In this case, the control could have been a group of students kept in the same conditions as the fake prisoners and guards, only without their titles and assigned roles, for example.)
This is important because it means the researchers likely weren’t testing what they thought they were testing. While Zimbardo claims they were testing the situation of prison life, they may really simply have been testing how well the guards took on the role that the researchers gave them.
“As far as saying what’s going to happen when you put person A in situation X, it doesn’t tell you all that much,” says Knowles.
Despite its exaggerations (it is a movie, after all) the film is a fairly accurate portrayal of the simulation that Zimbardo and his coresearchers created. It also sheds some light on the incredibly fine line between hard research and the “tainting” effects of real life.
Plus, it provides some insight into how people change their behavior when trying to please someone in a position of power — be they the psychologists leading the study or the subjects asked to pose as fake prison guards.
- Erin Brodwin
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Pass that diving bell on sir john rogersons quay every day on the way too work and always wondered what it was! Explains the name of the street adjacent to it too. Good work Journal.ie. interesting little article.
you’d think the Dublin Council would stick a little sign post beside it with some info, I always wondered too. It’s quite interesting.
The diving bell was made in Grendons foundry in Drogheda where Scotch Hall shopping centre is now, right beside the Viaduct bridge mentioned in the caption. They were going to scrap it until protests from a group of conservationists forced Dublin County Council to restore it and display it where it is now.
I’ll tell you what’s a Dublin curiosity: The place is a complete dump.
The British gave the Irish their modern cities and as soon as they left, the Irish made a complete balls of the place. Out will the old Georgians and in with the concrete tat.
If you want to see a massive planning disaster on a monumental scale, go to Dublin.
The ugliest citiy in Europe just keeps getting uglier.
Think you are getting confused with Belfast, now that is a complete dump.
Dublin didn’t suffer years of bombings and terrorism, Mark.
Having said that, urban planning in Belfast is 100 times better than Dublin.
It takes people with appreciation and aesthetics for architecture to keep a city in shape – something people in Dublin lack in general.
Your right Dublin did not suffer years of terrorism like Belfast, it was just blown apart by the British army. Dublin is the biggest most beautiful Georgian city in the world. Sure it has got a few ugly buildings, what big city doesn’t. Im from London we have alot of ugly buildings. But i totally disagree with your comments. I visit Dublin many times and it has alot of beautiful architecture.
You must be blind then, Mark. The complete historical fabric of Dublin has been destroyed by corrupt councilors and developers over the past 50 years.
And you can’t expect the British army to just stand around while a bunch of yobs run riot.
When i said it was just blown apart by the British army, i was talking about Dublin, just before the Irish kicked them out. There has been some bad planning decisions in Dublin over the last 50 years i agree. But the city has some beautiful areas. The reason why the city gets millions of tourists every year. If you want to see very bad planning come to many english towns and cities we have alot of ugly ones unfortunately.
Belfast is nowhere near as nice as Dublin.
You’ve overlooked Glasgow in your assessment of Europe’s ugliest cities but then again it’s not really the point,you’re merely here to stick it to the Taigs.
Much of Georgian Dublin is still standing,i doubt you’ve ever set foot south of the border,let alone in Dublin.
When one has hatred for a place or people they tend to hate everything about the country and wish it was not there. It is a sad way to live a life. Dublin is a beautiful city just like London, both have there downsides what big city doesn’t. But as far as big cities go in the UK and Ireland they are the best we have. Even if a few disagree.
Nice article, love finding out about quirky things in cities. Also, sound for including an explanation on what a crows foot mark is…there is one on the stone gate into my house and although I guessed that it was something to do with measurements, I never really knew what it was for.
Work in that diving bell was horrific. The men suffered greatly health wise from the pressure . In fact it shortened there life considerably. Another fantastic sight to see was the Dublin dry docks in Dublin port the older of which was recently filled in to make space for containers. I had the pleasure to work in these docks and it is such a shame to see it filled in.
Now theres some really interesting things about Ireland that give an insight into history and link modern day
Those crow’s foot benchmarks are to be found all over Ireland. They were put on things like stone bridges or at the base of granite entrance piers. You could locate them from the OS Maps. A good number of them can still be found around the country.
Fantastic article.
Really enjoyed this thank you a nice way to start Sunday
Re Pic 7 – pity the lump of meteorite that fell in Tipperary in 1865 wasn’t a whole lot bigger.
Great article. St. Andrews Resource Centre has published a booklet explaining the full history of the diving bell: “Dublin’s Diving Bell – A History”. I’m not sure if it’s still available.
The Diving Bell on Sir John Rogersons Quay was actually saved by St. Andrews Resource Centre Pearse Street in Partnership with Dublin Port and others. The City Council were not involved and the space on the Quay was given by the DDDA. The whole project was written about in a book published by the St. Andrews Heritage Project in 2003. The book is available free from St. Andrews in Pearse Street and it gives the History of the Diving Bell and details of the the project to restore it. For more information on this fascinating piece of Irish and Dublin’s history contact:
Betty Ashe 01 6771930.
1st pic isn’t 51 Stephens green, that’s on Stephens green south, think it’d the dept of foreign affairs building.
Hi Barro – you’re absolutely right so I went and snapped a pic of number 51 on my way into work today to give people an idea of which building it is, should they happen to be passing by. It’s the last pic in the slideshow there now.
Cheers, Susan
This is a good answer to the lack of Dublin “discoverability” in the “Why does Dublin have no fountains” blog post at http://blog.likeplace.ie
You think? Fountains do not make cities. We have fountains in trafalgar square, they are off most of the year. What traveller wants to see the same in every city they visit. How boring. I like the way Dublin has the beautiful old georgian street lights. Then you travel to smithfield and you have something completely different, funky and arty, something you would see in new york. Thats what is great about Dublin and its districts. Many european cities especially along the med are very similar. I like difference, unique. Not boring and mirror image of somewhere else.
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