Stanford Prison is a simulated prison created by Zimbardo, where a few randomly selected subjects serve as prisoners and guards, and they completely restore the real prison life. As the experiment progressed, the guards gradually lost control and used their power to mentally control the prisoners, and the prisoners collapsed one after another. The results of this experiment are thought to shed light on the powerful influence of social situations on people: human nature is fragile, and anyone can become a demon as long as the environment allows.
Perhaps because it touched on the ultimate topic of human good and evil, the influence of this experiment transcended academic circles and became the subject of numerous books, documentaries and films. The famous Stanford Prison experiment, which was examined under a magnifying glass, was also controversial.
At first, the controversy revolved more around the ethical issues of the experiment, however, in 2018, the French scholar Tibert le Tuccien raised strong doubts about the authenticity of the Stanford prison experiment by interviewing many of the parties involved in the experiment and collecting information. Among the allegations involved were the fear of the "prisoner" as a kind of play, not out of fear of the guards.
How does Zimbardo explain this? The following is authorized by Zhanlu Culture, excerpted from the Oral History of Zimbardo, with deletions, and the title is added by the editor.
The original author | [U.S.] Philip Zimbardo
Excerpts | Liu Yaguang
Oral History of Zimbardo, by Philip Zimbardo, translated by Tong Huiqi/Chen Siyu, Zhanlu Culture | Zhejiang Education Publishing House, March 2021
01
The details of the prison experiment: from role-playing to actual drama
The entire experiment was actually simulated pretrial detention, with "prisoners" waiting to finally go to court. We know that pretrial detention can last for days or weeks. This was the mentality of the "prisoners" at the time: I had done something wrong and was probably about to pay the price. When they were transferred from the police station to the "prison" in Jordan Building, they still wore blindfolds, did not know who was driving, and thought they were still in a police car. They were just taken straight away and got in our car without verbal communication. From the time of registration, until the "prisoner" was taken to the back seat of the car, no one spoke. Graduate student Craig Henny drove the car, curtis Banks sat in the back seat, and the two said only, "No speech." One by one, they brought out the "prisoners" and escorted them to the basement of Jordan's building. Soon, the "prisoners" were standing there naked. They were stripped naked and checked for lice so as not to carry bacteria. Prison guards would make fun of the prisoners' bodies and taunt them. It is also the beginning of the routine process of humiliation that "prisoners" will endure day and night for the next week.
The process begins almost immediately. For each "prisoner," the process lasts 10 to 20 minutes. There are 9 "prisoners" in total, and each person completes the procedure for about half an hour, so it takes half a day in total. We started at about 10 a.m. and didn't take all 9 "prisoners" into custody until 4 p.m. After that, they put on their uniforms and were locked up in a cell. There were three cells there, formerly the student office in the basement of jordan building. Three "prisoners" are held in each cell. David Jaffy came out and shouted, "Get in line! I am your warden. Then he stated the rules: "The rules here are as follows..." The study officially began. Jaffe was very harsh, it was unbelievable. He made a really deep impression on me because he was just an undergraduate and had just taken on this role in this situation.
When agreeing to participate in a study on prison life, many "inmates" thought they were just living in a cell, playing guitar, playing cards, and killing time. Isn't serving a sentence a time?' Now, the "prison guards" let them count, do push-ups, give them all kinds of orders, and do humiliating things. The "prisoners" felt that this was not what they had signed off to do. But the "prison guards" do this naturally, and that is the idea of each "prison guard" on duty. Think about it, this is your prison, your "prisoner", as long as it is within the purview, everything is under your control. If the "prisoner" escapes, it's your fault, the experiment is over, the research is over. You have to maintain "law" and order, and that's a big deal. Prisons are about power: the power that the guards have, and the power that the "prisoner" wants to seize in various ways. On the other hand, we made a recording of our first meeting with the "prison guards." The core of the meeting was very clear, giving them control, but not allowing them to inflict harm.
Stills from the movie Stanford Prison Experiment (2015).
In fact, I'm pretty sure I've said that corporal punishment is not allowed or accepted. But I didn't pre-empt the psychological punishment, which was obviously worse. At the end of the first day, I said to the staff, "It doesn't seem to work." The students laughed, and the "prison guard" said, "Hey, let's take it seriously." I remember meeting with Banks, Jaffey and Henny and saying, "Look, it doesn't work. We've put in a lot of time and effort so far, but if that continues like this, we may have to give up research tomorrow. ”
The next morning, however, the "prisoners" in two of the three cells began to rebel. They locked themselves in their cells, tore off their prisoner numbers, removed their hoods, and began cursing "prison guards." This happens at the end of the evening shift. Why is that? We don't know. Fundamentally, they are protesting that they are being treated inhumanely. They don't want to just be numbered, they don't want to be without a name, they don't want someone to tell them what to do. They say it's not something they signed off on, it should just be going through prison life, not being humiliated and degraded. The "prison guard" on duty came to me and asked, "What should we do?" I said, "This is your prison, what do you want to do?" They said, "We need reinforcements." We can't handle it ourselves! ”
We called out all 12 "prison guards." "Prisoner" No. 8612 took the lead in the revolt. He kept screaming and cursing. He wanted to humiliate the "prison guard." He later became the first person to have an emotional breakdown 36 hours after the study began. These rebellious "prisoners" blocked themselves behind the cell doors. Out of nowhere, they found a rope and tied the door tightly so that the "prison guard" could not open the door. Next, they began shouting and cursing at the "prison guards" in this safe zone. I said, "Oh my God, this is a disaster!" The "prisoner" in the lead shouted at a small "prison guard": "You little bunny cub! I'm going to beat you up when I go out!" The prison guard replied, "Well, I'll wait!" "It's a personal vendetta, not a role-play.
One "prisoner" said, "Hey, I'm going to squash you when I go out!" The "prison guard" said, "Really? We walked and looked. When all 12 "prison guards" were dispatched, they broke through the "prisoners' blockade, rushed into the cell, stripped all the "prisoners" of their clothes, and tied up several of them. The confinement room was a cupboard in the hallway, which originally contained only some old file boxes, and we took the boxes out. It is a cabinet about 1.2 meters wide, 3 meters high and 0.9 meters deep. The "prison guards" locked two "prisoners" inside, including the leader 8612 and another. They could only lie on the ground. There was only one cell — no one in Cell 1 resisted. It was a "good cell."
Next, the "prison guard" immediately said, "Well, great, all of you have lost the privilege of eating!" You don't have dinner to eat, and Cell 1 will get special food. They let the "prisoners" in Cell 1 out and enjoyed special food. The "prisoners" in other cells shouted, "Don't eat! Don't eat! We want to unite! This incident broke the unity between the "prisoners" because the "prisoners" in Cell 1 did eat food. That's when the transformation happened, and a "prison guard" said, "You know what? These 'prisoners' are dangerous, and we must control them. At this point, it became a prison run by psychologists, not a prison experiment conducted by psychologists. The prison must be dominated by power to prevent another revolt. The "prison guard" in charge of the next shift said, "How can you guys let such a thing happen?" Are you stupid! The "prison guards" on night duty must then become very brutal to prove that they are so powerful that they can control all the "prisoners."
For me, it was an amazing surprise. We said, "Well, all of a sudden something starts to happen. There's no need to stop the study, we'll let it go and see what else happens. "I'm not worried about how things are going, the only thing that worries me is physical violence." The prison guards "rushed into the cell and pulled the "prisoner" out. I didn't want to go in that yard again.
For me, it's exciting. There are things going on that I can't imagine. Then it all became clear. During the shift change, each shift of "prison guards" would tell the successor: "This guy has caused us a lot of trouble." Let those two be smarter. Then, one of the three "prison guards" in each class automatically became the leader, which we called the No. 1 "prison guard." He would give more orders, impose punishments, and decide what activities the "prisoners" should do. And what about the other two "prison guards"? Of the three, Number 3 is always more passive and willing to side with the prisoners. This "prison guard" does not like to punish "prisoners" and usually prefers to go to dinner and try not to stay in the yard. So the No. 2 "prison guard" became the key. If he supports the lenient "prison guard", then this class will be more "moderate"; but if the No. 2 "prison guard" follows the strong "prison guard", then this class has a strong negative force. As a result, in each class, the No. 2 "prison guard" chose to follow the power. Power is interesting, power is strong. You take control of the situation, tell others what to do, and they do it. In real life, if you order someone to do something, they'll say, "Who cares about you?" Good bye! ”
So usually there is a strong "prison guard" and his accomplices, and the third "prison guard" is a "good prison guard", but it is only a passive good, and never stops the "bad prison guard" from doing those negative things. The "good guards" could have half-jokingly stopped the "bad cops" by saying, "Hey, we're only paid $15 a day, which isn't a lot for an 8-hour job." Why don't we sit in the prison guard district and play cards? Really, no one has ever told another person like this: "We don't have to do that." Why exhaust yourself all the time? We can play for a while and have some fun. "No one has ever said that. As I said, they are passive "good jailers.". They don't do bad things with their own hands, but they don't stop other "prison guards" from doing bad things. To get the idea of the "prisoner", we listened to the cell with a hidden microphone connected to the tape recorder. It turned out that almost all of the conversation was about the current situation: how to plan the escape, bad food, which "prison guards" were terrible, which "prison guards" could soften.
Interestingly, there is almost no talk about the past and the future at all. These people don't know each other, but none of them have asked each other: What are you going to do when you go out? What school are you from and what major are you studying? What did you do this summer? These are the usual topics of conversation when you meet someone. In an eccentric way, the "prisoners" psychologically make the prison experience worse because they live directly in a negative moment. When they're alone and can fantasize, they can actually say, "Oh, when I get paid to participate in research, I'll do this, or buy that." "But all they're looking at is the negative information in the current situation." I'm really curious as to why they implicitly choose to live in the "now" time zone.
Because of this, when the study was over, I began to study the psychology of the view of time, how people live in different time zones, and whether overly focusing on whether the past, present, or future will have an important impact on life. I wrote a book, The TimeParadox, and began to study the psychology of the view of time. Today, an international temporal movement exists, with hundreds of researchers worldwide using the Zimbardo's TimePerspectiveInventory (ZTPI), the most reliable assessment tool for individual differences in temporal outlook. The new study, which began in 1972, is still gaining momentum decades later. Before going back to the study, it should also be mentioned that after we finished our study, Henny, Banks, and I only wrote two or three small articles, because for me, it was just an interesting demonstration, a follow-up to Stanley Milgram's research.
However, in the Stanford prison experiment, there was no authority to order "prison guards" to do bad things, they were just in a situation where your role forced you to prove your control over the "prisoners" by doing bad things. Role Reversal: From researcher to prison director, let's go back to the second and third days of the Stanford Prison experiment, where dramatic changes are taking place. The key incident occurred to "Prisoner" No. 8612, the first person to be arrested by Police in Palo Alto, who had an emotional breakdown 36 hours later. He screamed loudly and the whole person got out of control. This shocked us. Yet my adviser, Carlo Prescott, still thinks the "prison guards" are too tolerant of "prisoners" and sometimes suggests that they should be tougher. "In real prisons, they would knock prisoners on the head with batons," he said. If the prison guard is weak, he will be used by the prisoner to receive certain special treatment. If a prisoner cries, others will think he is a womanizer and will bully him together. ”
02
Repercussions and reflections on the Stanford Prison Experiment
There is a key in the Stanford prison experiment. The research program was originally two weeks long, and we were going to swap "prison guards" and "prisoners" in the second week, but I think "prison guards" would never agree, and I know that we insisted on less than two weeks because the experiment was too exhausting. But I would have stuck with it until Sunday, doing a full week. I had no idea what it meant to experiment 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
I should have recruited a much larger research team. However, even with a larger team, there is no guarantee that the study will last longer and that there will be no more escalation of violence. One of my criticisms to the Stanford Commission on Human Subject Research was that they should insist on having an inspector on the site of the study and that an official should have sounded the whistle earlier. Obviously, when the second "prisoner" collapses, the study should be forced to end. If Christina Maslach hadn't intervened on Thursday night and made me decide to terminate the study on Friday, I'd probably have run the experiment until Sunday. But as I said, mentally and physically, I knew I couldn't hold on any longer.
After the experiment, we spent 6 hours explaining afterwards — two hours to the "prisoners," two hours to the "guards," and then we gathered everyone together. I was able to say, "This is an opportunity for moral re-education. We've all done some bad things, especially me. "I stated the guilt I felt because I didn't end my studies earlier and didn't intervene earlier. I have always restricted the use of corporal punishment by "prison guards", but I have not restricted them from using psychological punishment, and in a sense, psychological punishment is actually worse. I went on to say that while there are also a few "good guards" who do not mistreat "prisoners," they have never done anything to reduce the pain inflicted on "prisoners" by other "prison guards." Some "prisoners" did not collapse, but they also never comforted the collapsed "fellow prisoners". I said, "So, in a sense, we've all done bad things. But this does not explain the nature of us as individuals, because each of you is carefully selected by us, and the selection criteria are that you are normal, healthy, and outstanding in many ways. I'm willing to believe that I'm one of those people. ”
All of this reveals very significantly the power of context: the social environment is powerful enough to change the personality and social behavior of each individual, and its power has never been seen before this study. I said, "Each of us is an example. The implication of this study is that we should be aware that we are all vulnerable to the power of situations. "Being able to take the time to share this information makes me feel good. Two weeks later, we brought back as many study participants as possible because at the time, it took weeks to process the footage. The videotape at that time was 16 mm ampere film, and we had to edit the slides and clip the recording before the presentation. A month later, about 6 participants were brought back again because the study was reported in Chronolog, the show's predecessor to 60Minutes. A film crew went to Stanford's basement and my lab to photograph me, several "prisoners," and "prison guards."
The Lucifer Effect: How Good People Become Demons, by Philip Zimbardo, translated by Sun Peifei/Chen Yaxin, Life, Reading, and Xinzhi Triptych Bookstore, March 2010
Later the show aired, around October 1971. On August 20, 1971, the day after the study ended, there was a prisoner riot in San Quentin Prison. George Jackson, an African-American and political activist, is said to have orchestrated the escapes of six solitary prisoners. He had a gun and a key and released the prisoners in solitary confinement. They killed several prison guards and several informants among prisoners in solitary confinement.
Jackson is said to have tried to escape and was shot while climbing a wall more than 9 meters high in broad daylight. The incident became a hot topic, and Parks, the warden of St. Quentin Prison, was interviewed that night, and a reporter asked, "Is this related to the de-individuation of prisoners, as happened in the Stanford experiment?" He said, "No, that's bullshit!" They have no idea what they're talking about. A corresponding reporter from Chronology happened to see the news and contacted me: "Hey, do you have a video?" I replied, "Of course there is." So in October that year, a 20-minute video titled "819 Did Something Bad," featuring "prison guards" forcing "prisoners" to repeatedly shout in unison, narrated by the famous Clifton Garrick Utley. We became a hit. One incident occurred three weeks after August 20, at Attica Prison in New York, where inmates rioted over the killing of George Jackson. They almost occupied the prison for more than a month, and the matter became international news. Celebrities were also involved, and in the end, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller mobilized state police and killed nearly everyone inside the walls, both inmates and prison guards. Prison became a hot topic, and I was invited to Washington, D.C., to testify to the Senate Judiciary Committee, and to San Francisco.
I didn't know anything about prison, and those people were interested in the tactics I used. The warden of Saint Quentin, the warden of Attica, the leader of the Union of Prisoners, the leader of the Union of Prison Guards, these people know prisons well, but I know nothing. I just explained the power of situations from a social psychology perspective. I said, "If you allow it, here are some slides about my experiments that can be used to lay the groundwork." "After looking at the slides, everyone took my point of view. From beginning to end, people say "de-individuation as the 'prison guards' at Zimbabwe", not Stanford prison or experimentation. It felt fantastic. I gave a written testimony laying out my proposals for prison reform. I still have this document on file. None of this, however, has driven any meaningful reforms.
If there's anything worth mentioning, it's that by 2016, more than 2 million prisoners in the U.S. prison system have served sentences, which is a sad thing. In 1971, the number was about 700,000, which was already surprising to me. The United States is a nation of imprisonment. I had a conference at UC Davis Law School, and one guy said there were 20,000 people in Los Angeles County jails, most of them minorities, hispanics and Africans. They were arrested pending trial. Due to the large backlog of cases, many people even have to wait in prison for three or four months. The cells were overcrowded, with some of the two rooms housing 10 people or more. The system crashed.
No one really cares about this, all they care about is that the prison system costs taxpayers billions of dollars a year to run. To make matters worse, many states are now privatizing the prison system. Such a prison is for profit. A for-profit prison needs a lot of "clients," that is, a lot of inmates. Prison owners pressure judges and legislatures to deliver more sentences with longer sentences. Food in prison is poor and there is very little activity because they don't want to waste money. The situation is really, very sad.
Managers simply believe that guards should grasp their situation and learn to deal with the fear that they may be killed by prisoners at any time, but they have never considered setting up a reward system. For example, each prison guard could be in charge of several prisoners, and if they performed well each day, the prison guard would be rewarded. In this way, what the guards want is for the prisoners to behave well, not to punish them for their bad behavior. A lot of simple ideas are that you can't get into any prison system, so I'm not confident enough about whether my ideas are enough to have an impact on the U.S. judicial corrections system. However, I also know that my research has been applied in many prisons and in the military to discuss the power of situations, such as the SERE project in the military (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) ("Survive, Avoid, Resist, Escape"). Each armed force has an escape plan lesson, with some soldiers playing the role of prisoners trying to escape, while others play as prison guards. They would watch my documentary, QuietRage: The Stanford Preson Experiment, as a warning that people can cross the line despite the game.
In fact, in some cases, people do mistreat "captives." The program was launched after a war, when many captured American soldiers were said to have leaked secrets. According to the rules of the army, they should say nothing but names, ranks, and numbers, but it is rumored that some people in the Air Force do leak secrets. Because of this, the United States has introduced a national law that all military agencies must set up a program to train army, navy and air force soldiers to keep secrets. Soldiers will role-play in the project, simulating a very realistic interrogation. Apparently, in some cases, they crossed the line: in this "game", some female soldiers were on the verge of sexual abuse. I didn't get any immediate negative reactions to the Stanford prison experiment from my peers because I had only written a few professional articles.
My first article, "A Pirandello-style prison," was published in The New York Times Magazine. Luigi Pirandello, a Sicilian writer, proposed that man can create an illusion and make it a reality. I didn't write my own research into a book because I didn't think it was worth it. For me, this is just an illustration of the power of situations. Stanley Milgram, in obedience to autonomy, demonstrates the power of one individual to change another, and I want to make it clear: No, it's more than that. It's an institution, an environment. In this environment, many people are just playing a role, and no one says to punish others or do bad things. Because of his films, Milgram has been criticized a lot. Milgram always wanted to be a filmmaker, and he did. After completing his research, he almost immediately produced the documentary Obedience. In the film, the pain is very intuitive. I think that's the problem.
Viewers see someone painfully saying "I don't want to go on" while authority says "you have to go on." I think his films provoke more ethical critique than the experiments themselves. And I wasn't treated like that. After the study, two things happened. Many psychologists have contacted me and said, "If I could have trained your 'prison guards' in mindfulness, they certainly wouldn't have done that." "In fact, I actually submitted an application to the Stanford Human Subject Research Committee to do another experiment. The original experiment can be used as a control group, and we want to set up two or three more experimental conditions for psychologists to train "prison guards" in some way to make their behavior more humane. The point of this study is that we can eliminate the kind of negative results that were obtained in the Stanford prison experiment. The Human Subjects Research Committee asked, "Can you be sure that this is the result?" I said, "No." If the result is certain, then there is no need to do experiments. They said, "Then we can't allow experimentation." "It's really sad. The purpose of this experiment is to see if you can train "prison guards" not to succumb to the power of the situation. It's really important, but the Stanford Commission on Human Subject Research disagreed with the experiment.
After Milgram and my research, Stanford and all other research institutions became extraordinarily conservative. All studies that put pressure on participants, especially student participants, were banned, so much of the behavioral research could not be done. To make matters worse, in recent years, many social psychologists have given hypothetical scenarios: Imagine you're a prison guard, and what kind of behavior would you do in A, B, C, D? First, we know that that doesn't represent what you're actually going to do in that situation. Unless you're there, how do you know what you're going to do? Even then, however, the experimenter was not allowed to ask questions that might cause pain. For example, if I were doing a study on forgiveness and the subject was a woman, I asked, "Imagine you were sexually abused and we caught the abuser, in what case would you be willing to forgive him?" For example, he said so, or said that. "It's not allowed to do that because asking a woman to imagine herself being sexually abused will lead to pain." That is to say, there is now a whole field of study, a whole direction of psychological inquiry that has been stripped out, and you can't even get people to imagine, let alone put them in the position.
Another problem is that a large part of psychology today has developed into neuropsychology, where all results are in the brain, thus excluding attention to situations. We only care about what happens in people's brains, and the common way to study them is to put people in functional magnetic resonance imaging machines. Many researchers have shifted their focus from the fundamental questions of human nature to the brain to understand how the brain interprets situations.
Author | [U.S.] Philip Zimbardo
Edit | Shen Chan
Proofreading | Li Shihui
Source: Beijing News