In 1971 Professor Philip Zimbardo and his
colleagues conducted an experiment
at Stanford University,
designed to look at how ordinary
men might be behave
if given the role of guards and prisoners.
Their research was ground breaking at the time,
but it also raised an enormous number
of questions for social psychology.
The subject
matter, outcomes and methods are all of
continuing interest to contemporary researchers.
Zimbardo carried out his study in the aftermath
of World War Two, and there was a lot of
interest and concern at that time about those events
and how that the events of the Second World War could have happened.
Also at that
time then, the aftermath of Vietnam, and again,
a lot of interest in the atrocities that took
place in that event and the murder of many
civilians
by soldiers in that war.
So there was a lot of interest amongst psychologists
in, in how the thing could have happened
and how ordinary people could have got drawn
into those events.
He was very concerned with the impact of social
roles and what they had on the way in which
humans behave.
And I think he was
very concerned
with
trying to understand
the impact of the social context.
So I think in terms of
his work, he was very
much concerned with
gearing
his research around what happens to people
when they take up particular social roles
and
when they become part of particular social
groups.
At the beginning of this study the prisoners
were arrested at their homes by real police officers
and were taken off to the local police
station.
Now this was not something which they had
signed up for and they were surprised,
understandably, by this event, and they asked
the police officers what was the relationship
between this event and their signing up for
a psychology study.
And the police officers refused to be drawn into this conversation.
So this was a very unsettling way of starting the study.
Zimbardo brought them to a mock up
of a prison which he created in the basement
of
the psychology department at Stanford University.
What he did then was to divide his group
into prisoners and into guards.
The guards
had a guard’s uniform and they had sunglasses and they had a stick,
and the prisoners wore
loose fitting smocks and sandals.
Now the prisoners spent 24 hours a day in this mock
prison, and the guards came and went doing shifts.
Part of what he was doing was observing what
was going to take place in this particular
context and how those roles as either prisoner
or guard, how they shaped
or sort of changed the way people behaved.
The guards now fell into their job,
some of
them liked it, some of them disliked it, but
it was a
job that they did.
They gave commands and
now what happened is the prisoners followed
them.
You can give me the blankets
and sleep on
the bare mattress,
or you can keep your blankets
and 416 will stay in another day.
They found ways to punish prisoners if they
misbehaved …
Let’s see if we can count backwards here
…
Let’s try that out.
Let’s see what goes on.
9 … 8 … 7 … 6 … 5 … 4 … 3 … 2
… 1
Oh that’s bad!
Hey, I don’t want anybody laughing.
It was certainly the case that initially the
prisoners did show some signs of disbelief
and
rebellion about what was happening.
This is unbelievable!
You took our clothes
…
Hands off the door.
But after a fairly short while they fell into
their roles, they became very submissive and
dependant, very powerless, and obviously showed
signs of stress and anxiety and depression.
Things had gotten so bad that we no longer
had a group of prisoners.
What we had were individuals believing they were prisoners, struggling for individual survival, no longer
caring about their other prisoners or their other fellow students.
Meanwhile the guards
got into their roles
and the level of violence escalated over a 
 period of days.
They began to humiliate and degrade
the prisoners and find every opportunity to
exert
their power and influence over the prisoners.
Some of them had prisoners clean out toilet
bowls with their bare hands.
They now taunt, humiliate, degrade the prisoners in front
of each other,
and they exert arbitrary control over
the prisoners.
This escalation of aggression was so extreme
that after a period of six days the experiment
had to be brought to a halt before the scheduled
time.
I think he showed something that
was important
at the time,
that, and I think it is about that notion that you know, because
it’s not about who you are internally that matters,
it’s about the social context in which you find yourself.
Zimbardo was wanting to move away from the
idea that we can explain extreme behaviour
by reference to individual personality characteristics,
and wanting to move instead towards an
explanation which focused on social structural
factors as an explanation for behaviour.
It’s about the groups to which you belong
and how you take on those group identities,
and
then in a sense become them.
Um, and I think that’s what he showed and I think that was
such a,
a radical way of looking at things at that particular time.
Zimbardo’s study had a very important impact
on methodological debate and particularly
ethical debate in social psychology at the
time.
This study really pushed at the boundaries
of
what people felt was acceptable for social
psychologists to do with their participants.
And
indeed, some people felt that he had gone
way beyond what was acceptable
to do in social psychology experiments.
There was therefore considerable debate following
this study and a few other very famous
studies,
about the ethics of experimentation
in social psychology and a much tighter scrutiny
following this
of the sorts of studies which people were conducting
and the guidelines
which they were using.
Professor Zimbardo’s experiment, like any
piece of social psychological research,
can be
examined to see how power relations are played out
-- and to see how knowledge is situated
in its historical and cultural context.
It can also be analysed by looking at the role of the individual and society or social groups,
and to see how people make choices and show agency.
Or how social structures determine
the outcome of events.
