Philip Zimbardo showed in Stanford Prison Experiment that those designated position as guard would comply to commands to commit cruelties toward prisoners
One prominent study on authority is the Stanford Prison Experiment led by Philip Zimbardo in 1971. Twenty-four young male volunteers, mostly college students, were randomly split into a group of twelve “prisoners” and twelve “guards.” The prisoners were to spend seven to fourteen days jailed in a pseudo-prison in the basement of Stanford’s psychology department. The guards were to keep order.
Tremendous effort went into making the Stanford Prison Experiment realistic. The future prisoners thought they were scheduled to show up at the building at a particular time to start the study. Instead, Palo Alto police helped Zimbardo by showing up earlier at each prisoner’s home, arresting him, and taking him to the police station for booking—fingerprinting, mug shots, the works. Prisoners were then deposited in the “prison,” strip-searched, given prison garb, along with stocking hats to simulate their heads being shaved, and dumped as trios in cells. The guards, in surplus military khakis, batons, and reflective sunglasses, ruled. They had been informed that while there was no violence allowed, they could make the prisoners feel bored, afraid, helpless, humiliated, and without a sense of privacy or individuality.
And the result was just as famously horrific as that of the Milgram experiment (Stanley Milgram had shown that people would continue to shock someone who missed an answer to a question to deadly levels if ordered to by authority). The guards put prisoners through pointless, humiliating rituals of obedience, forced painful exercise, deprived them of sleep and food, forced them to relieve themselves in unemptied buckets in the cells (rather than escorting them to the bathroom), put people in solitary, set prisoners against each other, addressed them by number, rather than by name. The prisoners, meanwhile, had a range of responses. One cell revolted on the second day, refusing to obey the guards and barricading the entrance to their cell; guards subdued them with fire extinguishers. Other prisoners resisted more individualistically; most eventually sank into passivity and despair. The experiment ended famously. Six days into it, as the brutality and degradation worsened, Zimbardo was persuaded to halt the study by a graduate student, Christina Maslach. They later married.
References
- Sapolsky, Robert. (2017). Behave Chapter 12. Hierarchy, Obedience, and Resistance (p. 527). New York, NY: Penguin Random House.
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Type:🔴 Tags: Psychology / Social Psychology Status:☀️