Subjects within the Stanford Prison Experiment may have been particularly high in aggressiveness, authoritarianism, and social dominance and lower for empathy and altruism
Philip Zimbardo showed in Stanford Prison Experiment that those designated position as guard would comply to commands to commit cruelties toward prisoners. Another reason this study is contested is that at the beginning of the study, volunteers were randomly assigned to be guards or prisoners, and the resulting two groups did not differ on various personality measures. While that’s great, what was not appreciated was the possibility that the volunteers as a whole were distinctive. This was tested in a 2007 study in which volunteers were recruited through one of two newspaper ads. The first described “a psychological study of prison life”—the words used in the advertisement for the SPE—while in the other the word “prison” was omitted. The two groups of volunteers then underwent personality testing. Importantly, volunteers for the “prison” study scored higher than the others on measures of aggressiveness, authoritarianism, and social dominance and lower for empathy and altruism. Insofar as both guards and prisoners in the SPE might have had this makeup, it’s not clear why that would have biased toward the famously brutal outcome.
References
- Sapolsky, Robert. (2017). Behave Chapter 12. Hierarchy, Obedience, and Resistance (p. 530). New York, NY: Penguin Random House.
Metadata
Type:🔴 Tags: Psychology / Social Psychology Status:☀️