One of the most infamous psychological studies
ever conducted was the Stanford Prison
Experiment. It's mentioned in almost every
intro to psychology textbook. They tend to focus on
how unethical it was, and are less critical
of its supposed conclusion. August 14th, 1971. Palo Alto, California. Twelve young men are rounded
up from their homes by police, placed under arrest, and brought to
a makeshift prison in the basement
of Stanford University. It all begins as a study on
the psychol
ogy of prison life, led by Stanford psychology
professor Dr. Philip Zimbardo. 24 volunteers-- 12 guards
and 12 prisoners. --have agreed to spend
the next two weeks recreating life
in a correctional facility. [guard] The prisoners are booked
and stripped nude. They're no longer
individuals, forced to wear smocks,
stocking caps and shackles. Identified only by
their prisoner numbers. The guards quickly adapt
to their new profession. Given anonymity by
their mirrored sunglasses
, some of them start to control
the meager food rations, restrict prisoners'
bathroom use. And, as tensions rise, so do their cruel methods. Within just six days
of the planned two-week study, conditions are so bad that the entire operation
is shut down. [man] Goddamn it... The study makes international
headlines. Zimbardo's fame skyrockets, and his conclusions are taught
to students worldwide, used as a defense
in criminal trials and are even submitted
to Congress to explai
n the abuses
inflicted at Abu Ghraib. The study brings up
a question just as important then
as it is today: is evil caused
by the environment, or the personalities in it? Zimbardo's shocking conclusion is that when people
feel anonymous and have power over
depersonalized others, they can easily become evil. And it occurs more often
than we'd like to admit. But while it's true that people
were mean to each other during the Stanford
Prison Experiment, what if what truly caused
that
behavior wasn't what we've always
been told? The Stanford Prison Experiment has always had
its controversies. But a wave of recent
revelations have pushed it back
into the spotlight 47 years later. Today, I'm going to speak
with journalist Ben Blum, whose recent writings
have brought criticism of the experiment
to a larger audience than ever before. How did you get involved in
the Stanford Prison Experiment in the first place? Well, my involvement
was quite personal. Like everyon
e,
I had kind of absorbed the basic lesson
of the experiment through the cultural ether. And then my cousin Alex
was arrested for bank robbery. This was a team of mostly
military guys with AK-47s. Alex was the driver. He was a 19-year-old
U.S. Army Ranger. And it was a superior of his
on the Rangers that organized and led
the bank robbery. Alex thought the whole thing
was a training exercise. He was just so brainwashed
in this intense Ranger training that when a superior proposed
this bank robbe
ry, he took it as just one more kind
of tactical thought experiment. Then Dr. Philip Zimbardo
participated in his legal defense. Zimbardo submits a letter
to the court, advocating leniency
in sentencing on the grounds that Alex, my cousin,
had been so transformed by the social environment
of the Ranger battalion that he participated
in the bank robbery without exercising
his own free will. Well, how did that affect
Alex's sentencing? He received an extraordinarily
lenient sentence of 16 months.
So Zimbardo was a family hero. But over time, Alex,
finally he did admit to me, you know what, I knew this was
a bank robbery by the end, and I just didn't have the moral
courage to back out. Oh, wow. Alex, myself and our
whole family came to view
the Zimbardo argument as a way to shirk personal
culpability, and to put all the blame
on the situation. So you start looking at the Stanford Prison
Experiment in particular. You reached out to Dr. Zimbardo
himself, as well as some of those
who partici
pated. What did you learn? I learned,
to my deep surprise, that quite a number
of the participants had stories of their experience
that completely contradicted the official narrative. Which is, look,
these regular people, good people,
came together, and because of the situation,
became evil. [Ben]
Right. Zimbardo has claimed
that the guards were put in the situation, and then the kind of hidden
wellspring of sadism that apparently lies
in all of us unfolded organically. [Zimbardo] There was an o
rientation meeting
for the guards. They had been told
quite explicitly to oppress the prisoners. That falls under the heading
of what psychologists call demand characteristics. Experimental subjects
tend to be motivated to give experimenters
what they want. [Michael]
Demand characteristics occur whenever participants
being studied act differently
than they normally would because they've guessed
what hypothesis is being tested and feel that a certain kind
of behavior is being demanded. Th
ere was a recording
of explicitly correcting a guard who wasn't being tough enough. So a conclusion
you could make from the Stanford
Prison Experiment is that when you tell people
to be cruel, they'll do it if you tell them it's for a greater good,
like science. -Right.
-Who would have thought? I think the study stands still
as a fascinating spur to further more careful research as a demonstration that should
make anyone curious as to how such extreme behavior
could arise in such a short time. T
he experiment could still
be useful, but it might need to be
reinterpreted. Its data might lead
to different conclusions than the one that we've been
telling for so many decades. Right. The flaws in the experiment that Ben and other critics
bring up call into question large
portions of the narrative surrounding the study. So I want to hear from someone
who was actually there. Dave Eshelman, the study's
most infamous guard, agreed to tell me
his side of the story. It's really an honor
to meet you. You're a living, walking piece
of psychology history. I'm never recognized in the
street or anything like that, although I still get
some hate mail. -Are you serious?
-Yeah, absolutely. Well, what do you say to them
when they react that way? I say, well, there's probably
a lot about that that didn't happen quite the way
it's been portrayed. Well, Dave,
before we go too far, I'd like to watch the footage
we have here so we can kind of talk about
what we see. [Dave]
That's me there,
by the way. -[Michael] Look at that look.
-[Dave] Mm-hmm. So how did you get involved with
a Stanford Prison Experiment? My father was a professor
at Stanford, and I was home for summer,
looking for a summer job. So I'm looking
through the want ads. $15 a day. You know,
in 1971 that wasn't bad. The way it was introduced
to the guards, the whole concept
of this experiment, we were never led to believe that we were part
of the experiment. We were led to believe
that our job was to get results
from
the prisoners, that they were the ones
the researchers are really studying. The researchers
were behind the wall. And we all knew
they were filming. And we can often hear
the researchers commenting on the action
from the other side of the wall. You know, like,
"Oh, gosh, did you see that? Here. Make sure you get
a close-up of that." Okay? So if they want to show
that prison is a bad experience, I'm going to make it bad. But how did you feel
doing stuff like that? Didn't you feel bad? I don't kn
ow if this
is a revelation to you, but 18-year-old boys are not
the most sensitive creatures. -Sure.
-My agenda was to be the worst guard
I could possibly be. -And it's pretty serious.
-Mm-hmm. This is my favorite part
of all the footage we have -from the experiment.
-Mm-hmm. It's you and a prisoner
confronting each other after the experiment. I remember the guy saying,
"I hate you, man." -Yeah.
-"I hate you." Each day I said, well,
what can we do to ramp up what we did yesterday? How can we bui
ld on that? Why did you want
to ramp things up? Two reasons, I think. One was because
I really believed I was helping the researchers
with some better understanding of human behavior. On the other hand, it was personally
interesting to me. You know, I cannot say that I
did not enjoy what I was doing. Maybe, you know,
having so much power over these poor,
defenseless prisoners, you know, maybe you kind of
get off on that a little bit. You weren't entirely following
a script from a director. Right
. But you also felt like Zimbardo wanted something
from you. -Yes.
-And you gave that to him. I believe I did.
I think I decided I was going to do a better job
than anybody there of delivering
what he wanted. But does that excuse me
from what I was doing? Certainly it started out
with me playing a role. So the question is, was there
a point where I stopped acting and I started living,
so to speak? The standard narrative is that
Dave Eshelman did what he did because when people
are given power, i
t's easier than we think
for abuse to happen. That may be true, but how predisposed
to aggression was Dave? I mean, he signed up
to something called a "prison study," after all. Also, his feeling
that cruelty was encouraged and helped the experiment,
may have affected his behavior. What I'd like to see is, in the absence
of outside influence, can anonymity, power,
and depersonalization alone lead to evil? To answer that question, I'd like to design a demonstration of my own. So I'm meeting
with Dr. Jared Bartels of William Jewell College, a psychologist who has written
extensively about the Stanford
Prison Experiment and how it is taught. I would love to do the Stanford
Prison Experiment again. You could probably make it
more ethical, but still find the same
conclusions. That's my hypothesis. I absolutely think
it's worthwhile. It's important.
It's interesting. Probably the best approach is eliminate as best as possible
the demand characteristics by eliminating that
prisoner
/guard dynamic. Why do we even need to call one
group "guards" and one "prisoners"? There's a lot of expectations around those roles. Oh, I'm a guard? -I guess I should act like a
guard.
-Yeah, you're right. The cover story is really
important, and you want to hide the true
purpose of the experiment. Another piece of this
is the role of personality and personality traits. So the original ad
in the Stanford study asked for participants
for a study of prison life. You know, that's going to draw
c
ertain people that were more kind of disposed
to aggression. [Michael]
Because they saw the word
"prison" and thought, -"I want to be a part of that."
-Exactly. So when you get a group of kind of authoritarian-minded
individuals together, not surprisingly
they're going to create an authoritarian regime
and environment. So, for whatever it is that
we're going to do, we should evaluate
the personalities of the individuals. Right. So how do we give people
every opportunity to be as evil as they can
? I think you have
to have those elements that were assumed
to be influential in the Stanford study. What are those elements? You have to have
the depersonalization. You have to have anonymity. You have to have some power
differences. Can we elicit
some surprising behaviors in just a number of hours? If you kind of come back
to the Stanford study, there wasn't anything dramatic
that happened -in the first day of the study.
-Yeah. It was the second day
of the study when the guards started to
asse
rt their authority. That came about because
of prisoners testing and challenging the guards'
authority. [Michael]
Yeah, and that led to fear. That, like, wait a second,
these prisoners need to be -put more in check.
-Yeah. Yeah. So I think you still need
that provocation. Yeah. Something that is frustrating. Something that's going
to increase the participants' arousal. Right. All right, so, Jared, would you like
to spend some time now brainstorming a new design that peeks into the same
questions
? -Absolutely.
-Awesome. [Michael]
Jared and I sat down
with the Mind Field crew to begin the planning process. Will a person,
without any expectations or pushes in a certain direction
still be abusive or not? For this demonstration, we want to eliminate
all outside variables and really isolate
the three core elements of the Stanford Prison
Experiment. The first element
is anonymity. Subjects need to believe
that no matter how they behave, no one will know
it was them. This is whe
re people will be
coming in in the morning. This way, everyone's going to be
staggered when they come in. That's important,
because we don't want them to ever meet their teammates
face-to-face. The original experiment
gave guards anonymity by providing mirrored
sunglasses and uniforms. But we're taking it
much further. Our study will take place
in a room that is pitch-black. [Jared]
They'll be taken into this room. [Michael]
Ah. I would love to see how dark this room is going to be
tomor
row. [man]
Yeah, absolutely. -You ready?
-I'm ready. -Oh, yeah.
-[man] Right? [Michael]
This is uncomfortable. Despite the darkness, we will be able
to see everything, thanks to infrared cameras. The second element
is depersonalization. From the moment
the subjects arrive, they will only be identified
by number, not name. [woman]
So, come on in. To eliminate the demand
characteristics, we don't want our subjects
to know what we're studying. Follow the sound of my voice,
if you can.
All they'll be told
is that we are studying how they solve puzzles
in the dark. There is another team
in a different location. -who is also solving a puzzle.
-Okay. Because the words
"guard" and "prisoner" suggest certain
expected behaviors, we've done away with them and will simply give
our participants an unseen, distantly located
opposing team. We will measure
the cruelty predicted by the standard narrative of the Stanford
Prison Experiment by giving our participants a wa
y to exercise
the third element: power. What I'm going to show you next
is the system by which you can send them
a loud noise. -Okay.
-So if you want to... We've armed the teams
with a "distractor button" that they can press to blast
an extremely loud, jarring noise
into the other team's room. Everyone will have
a volume dial that ranges from level 1 to 12, and they'll be told
that anything below a 7 should be safe
for the other team's hearing. And each person
has their own control.
Okay. So they can't see
what you're doing. -You can't see
what they're doing.
-Okay. The intensity level
they select, as well as the frequency with
which they push the button, will be our indicator
of how aggressive the participants become
in this situation. Is it-- is it pretty,
like, terrible to hear? Well, I'll give you
a demonstration. Hey, Derek, could you play
level 3 for me? [loud, discordant horn] So that's a 3. It's pretty... -it's pretty loud.
-Yeah. Perfect. Participants wil
l be told
that when they or a member of their team
pushes a distractor button, the volume played
in the opponent's room will be determined by
the highest level selected on any of their
teammates' dials. This is to increase the feeling
of diffused responsibility. The question is,
will any of these participants take advantage of these factors
and act sadistically? Of course, we would never
want anyone to actually be harmed
in our experiments, so the other team? They don't exist.
Instead, Jared and I
will be the ones occasionally blasting
the group with noise at a safe level,
no higher than a 3. To see just how powerful
the situation can be, we selected participants who would not be predisposed
to sadism. We screened
our participants using the "Big 5
Personality Scale," "The Personality
Assessment Inventory," and picked those who scored
the highest in "moral" categories, like honesty
and conscientiousness. It looks like,
you know, they should be ab
le
to see each other. But it's pitch-dark. There are puzzle pieces
on the table in front of you. Thank you, and once I leave
the room you may begin. Okay, here we go. [man 1] [man 2] [man 1] I definitely don't think
they're conscious of the control panel
at this point. -No.
-They're trying to get focused
on the task here. [man 1] [man 2] [man 2] [laughter] [man 2] We picked people
who were most likely to have these kinds
of personalities. [man 1] [laughs] [woman] -Oh.
-She wants... [woman] All r
ight. [all] [man 1] -[high-pitched squeal]
-[woman] Did somebody do it
already? -I did.
-Yeah.
-Okay. -We should retaliate.
-Yeah, retaliate now. [loud, discordant horn] [all laugh] [horn blares] [laughter] [Michael]
Now, they're not retaliating against that most recent buzz. Shall we try again? [loud, discordant horn] Despite the factors making it
easy for them to do so, this team doesn't appear
to be turning evil. Now they are, like,
just deal with it. Just ignore it and keep
working toge
ther. They're not interested
in retaliating. [discordant horn blares] Over the course
of the two-hour study, we blasted them with noise
23 times. [woman laughs] But they only pushed the button
six times, and never above a level 5. They didn't seem
to abuse their power. Puzzle pieces down. What would happen
if we introduced demand characteristics that encouraged them
to act aggressively? Your team has been
randomly assigned an experimental condition. Although the other team will cont
inue working
on a puzzle, your team will not. Your only task is to operate
the distractors. Also, the other team's buttons
have been disconnected without their knowledge. You will not hear any sounds
if they buzz back at you. We introduce
the social roles, where there's a little bit
of power differential. We're kind of mimicking the
Stanford-like variables here. [Michael]
By now saying that the buzzer
is their "task," the participants may feel a greater license
to use it liberally. Similar
to how instructing
prison guards in the original experiment
to act tough may have encouraged
more use of force. [man 3] [woman] [man 1] Even though they were
given instructions to distract the other team,
these participants instead just started chatting
with one another. They know that they can be
distracting now, but they're not pushing the
button. No. [man 2] Oh. Okay. [woman] A couple of threes. [high-pitched squeal] Over the course of ten minutes, this group only pushed
the but
ton three times. Why do you think
they're so uninterested in blasting
the other team? Because we have individuals
who have been selected, really, with that predisposition,
right? These are individuals who shouldn't be interested
in retaliating. It was time to debrief
the participants on what we were
actually studying. [Michael]
I'm going to turn the lights on. Here I am. I'm Michael,
and this is Jared. We're going to debrief you on
what was really happening today. There are no other people.
You are the only four here at
this moment. There was never another team
doing anything. [man 1] This is a study related to
the Stanford Prison Experiment. [man 1] The standard narrative
we hear about that experiment is that people
just become cruel. So, yeah, we're trying to see if
we get the nicest people we can, and we give them complete
anonymity and the ability to be cruel,
but never encourage them to, will they still do it? And you guys didn't. Did you have any suspicions
about what we were
studying or what was going on? Right, but I think
that's good. We just want to make sure
you don't think that what we're really
looking at is how high you turn
your own dial. That's really
what we're looking at. It was time to bring in our
second group of participants, who, like the first group,
were screened to be individuals with high morality
characteristics. Anything up to 7
should be safe. [laughs]
Yeah. [woman]
So once I leave, you can go ahead
and get started. [woman 1] [laughs]
Oh... [high-pitched squeal] Right off the bat she went to 7
and pushed the button. Yeah. [loud, discordant horn] [high-pitched squeal] [Michael]
Number two's pushing it at a 3. [discordant horn blares] [woman 1] Okay, here comes number two. [high-pitched squeal] Number two is still
at a volume 3. [Michael] This team seemed
more willing to retaliate. Let's see what will happen
if we continue buzzing them. Will they escalate
their behaviors? Derek, let's blast them again.
Number 3. [loud horn
] Okay, let's... All right, so two just pushed
at a 3. But she's not touching the dial. [Jared]
She's not. [loud, discordant horn] [woman 2]
It's just annoying. [blaring horn] [high-pitched squeal] [all laugh] It was clear
that participant number two was really the only one
hitting the distractor button, but it appeared that she only
did it in retaliation to our buzzes. So we decided to see
what would happen if we laid off. [man 1] It's been probably
four or five minutes, and we have n
ot blasted them
with the noise, and they haven't
played one either. I have a feeling like if we
never played a noise in their
room, they would never touch
the distractor button. [Jared]
Probably not at this point. In the end, we buzzed
this group a total of 44 times, and they buzzed us 38 times, 37 of which came
from number two but always in retaliation,
and never above a 5. All right, guys.
Puzzle pieces down. The situational factors
did not seem to be sufficient to make this group sad
istic. It was time
for phase 2. [woman 1] Yeah. -Oh, she...
-[high-pitch squeal] It looks like it's at 7. -Wow.
-Yeah, she's-- She's going nuts.
At a 7. So number three believes
there is no other team. That might explain why she was
just going nuts on the button, because she doesn't feel bad
about it. [buttons clicking] Okay, they're all pushing
the button a lot more. And they were told
this time that it was their
only task. [buttons clicking] [all laugh] What a difference
this has made. Just
like in the Stanford
Prison Experiment. If you tell people that they have a certain task
to do, they'll do it, even if it's going to mean
that they've been broken. The thing is, they never hit
upon what we really cared about, which is turning the dial
into an unsafe level. Yeah. [buttons click] [Michael] Hello, everyone.
I'm going to turn the lights on
in this room. [woman 1]
Okay. -And slowly...
-Ah, it hurts. ...you can look. So, hello. -I'm Michael,
and this is Jared.
-Hi. I'll give you time
to adjust your eyes. Today, you've been part
of a study where all we wanted was to see what would happen
when we put people in a room and gave them that feeling
of anonymity that comes from, well, if I crank my dial up
really high, no one will know
it's me. So you have this opportunity
to be cruel. I thought
I went nuts. Like, when the other person
was pressing-- Sure, but that's--
that's just in-kind retribution. As it turns out,
so far, everyone stays in that
"below 7 or under" range. -Yeah.
-
This final phase was us trying to ramp up
the demand characteristics. And I believe number one, right,
you did say at one point, "You've broken me.
I did it, fine." So I loved that phrase,
because it says "I didn't want to do this, but I'm doing it because I
believe it was expected of me." [all]
Thank you. Thanks. [Michael] After dismissing
our participants, Jared and I sat down
to discuss our results. Really fascinating. We brought in people who had
very different personalities than those Zi
mbardo chose. We put them in a situation that
did not demand things from them. And they behaved according
to that personality. I think we have some intriguing
support for the idea that it's more than just
the situation. We really saw personality
kind of shine through. For the most part,
they seemed to be aware -of where that line is...
-Yeah. ...that they shouldn't cross,
and they didn't. None of them did. It was now time to speak
with the man himself, Dr. Philip Zimbardo, who I worked with
on last season's episode, "How to Make a Hero." Okay. Lisa, Bear,
you guys ready? For years, Dr. Zimbardo
has responded to criticisms of his famous study, always maintaining
that they aren't valid. I asked him about
whether his study is better seen
as one on the power of demands from authority, but he wasn't receptive
to that idea. I then told him about the study
we ran to get his reaction. I wanted to know what the
sufficient conditions might be to make anyone
do something evil.
And we struggled
to get that to happen. We couldn't get anyone
to be cruel. Just giving them anonymity,
and a dehumanized other, and the power
to hurt that other, they didn't take
advantage of it. Well, I mean,
maybe the problem was, here's a case where,
by picking people who were extremely
conscientious, extremely mindful, by selecting people
who are high on compassion, high on mindfulness, you broke the power
of the situation. In the Stanford
Prison Experiment, we had, I presume
, a relatively normal
distribution. We gave them
six personality scales. And we picked people who,
in the scales, who were mostly
in the mid-range. In that situation, some people behave cruelly,
evilly. Not everybody, but more
of the guards than not. So, again, I think that
your study is a demonstration of one way in which personality
dominates situation. -Ah.
-Where the personalities are-- so I would say
it's a positive result. The personalities
are special. Where does this
balance lie
between the personal, the disposition,
the personality, and the situation,
the environment? No, that's the big-- that's the ultimate question. Where is, you know,
how much of one and how much of the other...? Right. Zimbardo insists
that demand characteristics played little role
in his subject's behavior. Critics like Ben Blum
say they played a big role, that what happened
was what was asked for. If that's true, then the Stanford
Prison Experiment, like the classic Milgram stud
y,
still has an important lesson. People are quick to be cruel if an authority figure suggests
that doing so will serve a greater cause. In our test, we made sure that
such influences didn't exist. And not one participant
acted maliciously. Personality rose above
the situation. Learning how that happens
is vital if we want to improve conditions
where power is involved. So it's great that this debate
is still ongoing. And look, questioning methods
and interpretations is not a personal attack. It'
s how we improve
our confidence in what we know. And that's how science works. So stay curious,
never stop asking questions, and, as always,
thanks for watching. Hey, Mind Field.
Michael Stevens here. There is so much more
to satisfy your hunger for psychological knowledge
right on this show. Click below to check out
more episodes.
Comments
12:54 Michael is interviewing himself in 15 years.
I want to see the flipside of michael's experiment where they choose only people who are pre-disposed and see what happens before and after demand characteristics are introduced. I'd also love to see the most neutral individuals with no predisposition to either violence or kindness.
A weakness of this experiment is its lack of validity. While they reduced demand characteristics, normative social influence and conformity still played a part. Once one person pressed their button, the others may have felt inclined to press their control if they were nervous about being the first to do so out of fear of being seen as 'cruel'. While Vsauce was basing the groups on having similar personalities, no two people are the same and will have other aspects of themselves playing a part in their individual decision-making.
the noise experiment doesn't say much because the team knew that they were going to be buzzed too by the noise, meanwhile the guards in the prison knew they would suffer no consequences due to their actions and cruelty, and i think that these people from the noise experiment would have been more cruel if they were prison guards and would have also been dehumanized sooner or later
You need incentive for this to work. If you did this exact same experiment but said if they finished their puzzle before the other team they would get $1000 I guarantee you the results would be wildly different. Them incentive role is fulfilled in the Stamford prison experiment partly by Zambardo telling them to be more like a guard.... while not the same as monetary incentive its still gives the "guards" a reason to act like guards. This was missing from your experiment.
I'm surprised that nobody was suspicious of the 'up till level 7 it's not dangerous' thing. That they have been told they could bother the other team with a sound that could permanently damage someone's hearing should have made it obvious that it was fake. Maybe that's also why team 2 figured it out. After that experiment with the fake painful shocks and Stanford, a lot of ethical restrictions were made. I do think Michael's criticism of the Stanford experiment is totally valid.
"It's so weird, there's no difference if you... close your eyes or open them, it's really weird." - this guy was my favorite
12:41 Michael: “I would love to do the experiment again.” Jared: (almost gets up and walks away)
I remember watching Vsauce as a kid, and now I realize this channel is the whole reason why I ended up developing such a passion for scientific research as an adult now. I feel like a kid all over again, thanks for making us curious.
I think the reason none of them were tempted to be cruel is because they couldn't see their victims suffer. They were completely unaware of the effect of their cruelty and thus had no passion for it. That's how cruelty works. You wanna have a personal reason to be cruel and you wanna see how badly you fucked someone up and that part was completely absent in these contitions where they couldn't see the "enemy" to which they would direct their cruelty at. I'm not saying they would have all become cruel otherwise but it definitely would have been more tempting.
The perspective Dave is able to have is amazing. He's able to discuss the influences to his behavior while still taking accountability.
It would be interesting to see if the test groups were not selected based on their compassion. Zimbardo said the Stanford experiment had a fairly average distribution of personality characteristics, which surely plays an integral role in the outcome of the experiment. The cloak of anonymity and demand characteristics obviously plays a huge role, but in this experiment the most aggressive behaviour we saw was retaliatory even if they COULD turn the volume up and intensify the frequency without repercussions in the second phase. Now, imagine if the test group had a more average distribution of characteristics AND more subjects. 4 people in a dark room becomes very intimate and even though you can't see eachother I assume they didn't TRULY feel completely anonymous due to the groups small size. An observation I made was that the subjects often told the group what they were doing. How high they turned it and "I'm not going to let go of the button....ok that's enough". Which tells me that these people sought feedback from the group about wether what they were going to do was acceptable or not. My hypothesis is that a bigger group creates a larger sense of anonymity and the need for feedback from the group would not be as strong. Another hypothesis is that in a group of more evenly distributed personality traits there would be someone that has less of a problem increasing the volume and intensity, which COULD result in others being more willing to accept using a higher volume and intensity as well. We've all probably heard or used some version of the "They did it, so I did it too" argument. We all want to conform(heard mentality) to a group regardless of if we feel anonymous or not and that need for conformity can make us do things we normally wouldn't do. The bystander effect also comes into play. The bigger the group the less likely someone are to intervene even if they consider it to be wrong. So no, EVERYONE isn't inherantly sadistic if given anonymity, power and instruction, but that doesn't mean they don't have it in them if someone around them "sets the bar". In other words, the experiment was flawed in the sense that subjects were intentionally selected and that helped to achieve a specific outcome, but it does tell us that anonymity, power and direction alone does not inherantly mean that the subjects will resort to abuse of power and sadism. If this expriment would have had larger test groups and a wider distribution of personality traits my hypothesis is that the results would have been very different. I'm not and expert, however I have studied psychology.
"Dr Zimbardo" sounds like some sketchy character from classical scooby doo and i love it
This video with it’s interview context is just as much part of Psychology History as the Experiment it’s self, Thank you Michael!
I did some time in a a prison facility. When I first went there they showed people how to live, how to have fun without crime. In 1989 something evil moved into the system, it grew cruel. They locked people down 23/7 for the first 30 to 60 days you were there. Mankind has dominated man to his injury. They have allowed the enemy to win. However, he only wins temporarily until he's exposed.
If anything, this video seems to confirm the Milgram "Obedience to Authority" experiments. I was also under the impression that part of the Stanford Prison experiment was about role expectations, which in some sense is similar to obedience to authority. (Being assigned a role is, essentially, being instructed to do what a person believes that role requires.)
The Stanford experiment was like a micro sample of what the naxys did to Germany after ‘33. The modern study used the best of a personality scale while Stanford used moderate to borderline. I like learning about this topic and psych in general including pharmaceutically. Nice video
As someone with autism, I've always wanted to know what these kinds of experiments would show about people that are neurodivergent. How would they act differently considering many of the common neurotypical behaviors don't apply to them
My favorite dude was the one going “There’s no difference if you close your eyes or open them.” 👁👄👁. ➖👄➖
that guy who was noted as the most neferious guard is such an evil guy