- The last of the three famous studies on conformity
and obedience is the Zimbardo Prison Experiment,
which is also known as the Stanford Prison Experiment.
This study was conducted by Philip Zimbardo
at Stanford University in 1971.
This experiment, like the other experiments
that we've talked about, like the Asch study
and the Milgram study,
was trying to figure out how conformity and obedience
can result in people behaving in ways that are counter
to how they would act on their own
and even counter to how they think that they would act.
And as before, the answer is complicated
because it will be assumed that only bad people
would do bad things, this isn't always the case
and certain situations can make otherwise ordinary people
behave in extraordinarily terrible ways.
The original goal of this study was to look at how
social norms and social conventions
might influence the behaviors of participants
who are playing the roles of prisoners and guards.
If you've ever talked about this study
in your psychology class,
you probably know the basic summary of it,
that the students who are randomly assigned to be
either prisoners or guards eventually got so caught up
in their roles that the study needed to be stopped early
but there's a lot more to it than that
because while the premise of the study is really disturbing,
the details of the study are even more so.
Let me state, right out front, that these participants
knew all about the study.
There was no deception here.
I also want to note that the people who participated
were the very definition of normal.
They were recruited by newspaper ads
and they were tested to make sure that they didn't have
any kind of medical or physical
or psychological problems.
They all had similar backgrounds,
they were middle-class students.
In the end, 18 students participated
and they were randomly assigned with a coin flip
to be either guards or prisoners
and, importantly, the participants all knew
that this assignment was random.
Zimbardo wanted to make this prison experiment
as real as possible for both the prisoners and the guards
so he actually had the participants in the prisoner
condition arrested at unexpected times
on what, to them, was a completely random day.
I don't mean that it was a fake arrest
like with students in fake police hats
putting them in the back of their friend's car,
I mean actual, real arrests
by the Palo Alto Police Department, who arrested them
and handcuffed them and fingerprinted them,
booked them, took a mugshot
and put them in an ill-fitting prison uniform.
After this, they were brought to the mock prison,
which was actually in the basement
of the Stanford Psychology building.
Each prisoner was given a number that they
were supposed to be referred to instead of their name
and they were given ankle chains to remind them
of their prisoner status, and they were put in mock cells.
They had mattresses in them but there weren't any things
like windows and there weren't any clocks
and the idea behind that decision was to try to separate
these prisoners from the outside world,
to at least simulate a prison environment.
Zimbardo had also met with the participants
playing the guards before the start of the experiment
and he had told them that they were not supposed
to physically harm the prisoners.
They could, however, try to create a situation that would
lead to fear or loss of privacy and control
or loss of individuality.
The guards were also given uniforms and they were given
batons, which were supposed to be for threats
of physical violence and not actual physical violence
and also mirrored sunglasses.
They were instructed to refer to the prisoners
by their numbers and not by their names.
Basically, these guards were basically free to do whatever
was necessary in order to maintain law and order
except for physically harm the participants.
So what happened?
Well, the first day of the study was pretty uneventful.
The prisoners really didn't seem to take it
all that seriously and the guards felt a little bit
awkward giving them orders and so nothing really happened
but then the participants who were the prisoners
started to get pretty tired of their situation
and so they started to rebel against the guards.
Specifically, some of them barricaded themselves
in their cell.
At this point, the guards had to decide what to do next.
Were they just going to let this go or were they
going to try to gain control over the situation?
In the end, the guards saw this behavior as an affront
to their authority, their fake authority,
and they began to fight back.
In response to this, the prisoners tore off their numbers
and they cursed at the guards and, at some point,
it isn't clear exactly when,
the guards started to see the other participants
as actual dangerous prisoners that needed controlling.
In response to what they saw was a threat from
these prisoners, they used fire extinguishers on them
and forced them to strip down.
In the end, the guards did regain some control
and the prisoners who rebelled were put in a closet
that was being used as solitary confinement,
which was big enough to stand
but the prisoners couldn't lie down or sit.
After only 36 hours, the prisoners started to break down
and I mean that pretty literally.
One prisoner started showing signs of depression
and uncontrollable rage.
He screamed and he cried and he yelled obscenities
and eventually had to be removed from the experiment.
He might have been the first but he wasn't the only one
who had a mental breakdown.
By the day three, the situation went even further.
Some of the participants decided to go on a hunger strike.
In response to this, all of the prisoners were forced
to repeat their numbers over and over again.
They were forcibly made to exercise, things like
doing push ups until they were exhausted.
Guards started to withhold bathroom privileges,
instead making them do their business in buckets
and then not allowing the prisoners to empty them.
They tried to make them turn on each other.
They tried to make them scream at each other.
They basically tried to break them down
and while all of this was going on,
while all of this was happening,
while prisoners were stripped naked
and put in solitary confinement in a closet,
Zimbardo was there.
I think that this is important
because Zimbardo is not a bad guy
but by taking on the role of the prison warden,
he involved himself in this situation.
I feel like this little tidbit of information has been lost
from the narrative of the study
because Zimbardo never realized that things had gone wrong.
After six days into the experiment, his girlfriend,
Christina Mazlach, who is now also a psychology
professor but at that time was a graduate student,
she came to visit the prison.
When she came down to the psychology basement,
she was so upset by what she saw,
so horrified by it, that she threatened to break up
with Zimbardo if he didn't stop the experiment.
This act, this outsider who Zimbardo really cared about
coming in and telling him that what was going on
was wrong, is what caused him to reevaluate the situation.
It's what brought him back to reality.
In the end, he decided to end the study early.
By the time this happened, by day six,
half of the prisoners had already been released
because of severe emotional breakdowns.
None of the guards left the study early.