The Stanford Prison Experiment, an experiment conducted by Stanford University psychology professor Philip Zimbardo and colleagues, recruited 24 mentally healthy volunteers to play police officers and prisoners in a completely simulated prison environment. And what kind of enlightenment does it bring us?
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="2" what > the Stanford Prison experiment?</h1>
The Stanford Prison Experiment was an experiment conducted by Professor Philip Zimbardo. Circumstances can gradually change a person's personality, while situations can immediately change a person's behavior. A mild-mannered gentleman can, in some cases, turn into a bloodthirsty maniac.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="4" > the stanford prison experiment:</h1>
In the summer of 1971, at Stanford University, psychology professor Philip Zimbardo and his colleagues built a simulated prison in the basement of the university and recruited 24 mentally healthy volunteers who were paid $15 a day, but had to complete 14 days of experiments. The volunteers were randomly divided into two parts, 12 acting as jingcha and another 12 acting as prisoners, with only 9 people per group and 3 reserves at the time of the experiment. The experiment simulated a real prison environment, in which prisoners were escorted to prison by "police car" and then searched, stripped naked, washed and disinfected, wearing prison uniforms (dress-like blouses) and shackles on their right feet.
Some of the equipment differs from those in real prisons in order to allow volunteers to quickly enter the role of prisoners. Similar to real prisons, inmate volunteers are not allowed to move freely after being held in prison, and 3 people live in a small cubicle and can only let the wind out in the corridor, each without a name but only a number. Volunteers who act as guards are not trained in how to be prison guards, but are told that they can do anything to maintain order and law in prisons. Guards work in groups of 3, each working for 8 hours, and three groups rotate.
On the first night of the experiment, the guards blew their wake-up whistles in the middle of the night and asked the prisoners to get up and queue up to verify that their authority had been established in the minds of the prisoner volunteers. When they punish prisoners, they order them to do push-ups (one of the most common corporal punishment measures used in real environments), and sometimes ride on prisoners to increase punishment. Early the next morning, the prisoners began to protest, opening the prison partition and blocking the prison door with a bed to prevent the guards from entering. The guards who changed shifts were very angry when they saw it, believing that the guards in the previous round were too kind to the prisoners. They spray prisoners with fire extinguishers, rip off prisoners' clothes, pull out those who have taken the lead in causing trouble and lock them up, and intimidate other prisoners. But the guards soon realized the problem, 3 people could not properly manage the 9 prisoners, so they found the 3 people with the least guilty of the rebellion, put them in a compartment alone, and gave them better treatment than other prisoners, who could wear normal clothes, brush their teeth, and eat better meals. Half a day later, they were put back in other prisons, and the three who took the lead in making trouble were also put in the preferential compartment. The prisoner then believed that the three men had benefited from informing, and distrust began to spread among the prisoners.
During this time, one prisoner was on the verge of a mental breakdown and the professor had to release him. Later, the guards overheard rumors of the prisoners escaping from prison: the previously released prisoners would lead a group of people to rescue them. So the guards and the professor worked out a plan to put the prisoner's head in place and move it elsewhere, and then stay alone in the vacated prison, waiting for the rescuers, and informing them that the experiment was over, and then transferring the prisoner back. From then on, the guards treated prisoners more harshly, often not allowing them to rest, doing all kinds of despicable work, and devoting out various ways to punish them. Sometimes guards wouldn't let prisoners go to the toilet, they had to use the buckets in the huts, and they didn't wash them on time, leaving the smell of the cells everywhere.
One prisoner, number #819, was seriously ill and wept when he saw the professor, saying he couldn't hold on any longer. The experimenter had no choice but to let him go and let him rest in the next room to help him get his personal belongings. At this time, the guards called all the prisoners to the corridor and began to line up and began to shout slogans: "819 is a bad prisoner, because he died." "When the professor came back he saw #819 crying with his head down, the professor asked him to go, but he refused, and he told the professor that he could not go because he wanted to prove to others that he was not a bad prisoner. The professor told him that you are not 819, your name is xxx. At this time, the volunteer suddenly realized and left the simulated prison. The professor organized a hearing for the prisoners and told them that if there was an opportunity to ask for bail, but they could not get the previous remuneration, whether they would choose bail, almost all the prisoners agreed to bail. After questioning, the professor said to consider the proposal and asked them to go back to their cells, but no one protested. At this time, as long as some of them proposed to interrupt the experiment, they would actually get the same result as bail, but all of them had already taken the experiment as real and did not know how to resist.
On the fifth day, the volunteer parents hired a lawyer. Because a priest came to the prison a few days ago to chat with the prisoners, simulating the work of the pastor in the real prison, the prisoners asked the priest to find a lawyer to rescue them. But when the lawyer arrived at the scene, he said that there was nothing he could do because it was just an experiment and the parents' rescue operation failed. But the experiment was terminated on the sixth day for two reasons. One experiment organizer found in the video that guards tended to treat prisoners more brutally at night, torturing them with all sorts of dirty tactics because they thought no one would pay attention to their behavior in the middle of the night. Another reason is that a visiting professor at Harvard University saw prisoners wearing shackles and shackles, unable to see anything in a bag over their heads, and being yelled at by the guards to run around in the toilet. She was rather shocked and strongly protested that the experiment could not be so abusive to volunteers. The professor only then woke up and then terminated the experiment. We may wonder why the psychology professor is so dull, but 50 people have visited the experimental prison before the protesting professor, and none of them have raised objections.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="11" > implications of the Stanford prison experiment:</h1>
Many people point out that the Stanford experiment itself has many flaws. For example, although the volunteers participating in the experiment were "ordinary people", but the newspaper advertisement for volunteers explicitly stated that a "psychological study on prison life" was to be conducted, could such a term have inadvertently screened the participants? To prove this, two other psychologists did another experiment in 2007. They each posted two volunteer recruitment ads, one with exactly the same language as Zimbardo's, and the other omitting the message "prison life." Later tests proved that the volunteers attracted by the former advertisement were significantly more aggressive, more arbitrary, more narcissistic, more controlling, and less sympathetic than the latter group of volunteers.
Even so, the experiment still has a lot to ponder. In real life, there is no shortage of real prisons like stanford simulation prisons, and many prison guards must be good sons, good husbands, and good fathers in their own lives, but they will also punch and kick prisoners and insult them. They may not even feel like they are doing evil at all, and disciplining prisoners may be only part of the job for them. And the genocide in Africa, the Nazi soldiers... There are countless real "Stanford prisons" in human history that are more cruel and shocking than Zimbardo's simulated prisons.
After the experiment, Zimbardo wrote a book, The Lucifer Effect: How Good Men Become Demons, and Lucifer was once God's favorite angel, holding the position of archangel, but then he raised the anti-flag and was cast out of heaven and fell into Satan. Zimbardo concludes that under certain social circumstances and inducements, good people can also commit atrocities, the line between good and evil is not insurmountable, and everyone has a devil in their hearts. However, it has also been suggested that the real significance of this experiment is to reveal that people will act accordingly because of the expectations that the environment has given them, so as to be consistent with the expectations of the outside world.