A replication study of the Stanford Prison experiment by the BBC, prisoners revolted and established power-sharing commune, for it to be later turned into a draconian regime
Philip Zimbardo showed in Stanford Prison Experiment that those designated position as guard would comply to commands to commit cruelties toward prisoners. Another thing that puts the results into question involves science’s gold standard, independent replication. If you redid the Stanford Prison Experiment, down to matching the brand of the guards’ socks, would you get the same result? Any study this big, idiosyncratic, and expensive would be difficult to match perfectly in the replication attempt. Moreover, Zimbardo actually published remarkably little of the data about the Stanford Prison Experiment in professional journals; instead he mostly wrote for the lay public (hard to resist, given the attention the study garnered). Thus there’s only really been one attempted replication.
The 2001 “BBC Prison Study” was run by two respected British psychologists, Stephen Reicher of the University of St Andrews and Alex Haslam of the University of Exeter. As the name implies, it was carried out (i.e., among other things, paid for) by the BBC, which filmed it for a documentary. Its design replicated the broad features of the Stanford Prison Experiment. As is so often the case, there was a completely different outcome. To summarize a book’s worth of complex events: Prisoners organized to resist any abuse by the guards. Prisoner morale soared while guards became demoralized and divided. This led to a collapse of the guard/prisoner power differential and ushered in a cooperative, power-sharing commune… Which lasted only briefly before three ex-prisoners and one ex-guard overthrew the utopians and instituted a draconian regime; fascinatingly, those four had scored highest on scales of authoritarianism before the study began. As the new regime settled into repressive power, the study was terminated.
Thus, rather than a replication of the SPE, this wound up being more like a replication of the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution: a hierarchical regime is overthrown by wet-nosed idealists who know all the songs from Les Mis, who are then devoured by Bolsheviks or Reign of Terror–ists. Importantly, the ruling junta at the end having entered the study with the strongest predispositions toward authoritarianism certainly suggests bad apples rather than bad barrels.
References
- Sapolsky, Robert. (2017). Behave Chapter 12. Hierarchy, Obedience, and Resistance (p. 530). New York, NY: Penguin Random House.
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Type: 🔴 Tags: Psychology / Social Psychology Status:☀️