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His student Christina Maslach (born 21 January 1946) critique of the Stanford prison experiment persuaded investigator Philip Zimbardo (later her husband) to stop the experiment after only six days in 1971. The experience also shaped Maslach's later career, particularly her interest in occupational burnout as a response to unavoidable stress. In 1997 she was awarded US Professor of the year.
During the Stanford Prison Expereiment Prisoners and guards had rapidly adapted to their roles, stepping beyond the boundaries of what had been predicted and leading to dangerous and psychologically damaging situations. Zimbardo himself started to give in to the roles of the situation. He had to be shown the reality of the study by Christina Maslach, his girlfriend and future wife, who had just received her doctorate in psychology.[13] Zimbardo reflects that the message from the study is that "situations can have a more powerful influence over our behaviour than most people appreciate, and few people recognize [that]."
He began with the assumption that the abusers were not "bad apples" and were in a situation like that of the Stanford prison study, where physically and psychologically healthy people were behaving sadistically and brutalising prisoners.
The power of the uniform syndrome: Status profiling: Research suggests simply wearing a police uniform changes the way the brain processes information
Date: February 10, 2017, McMaster University
Summary: Simply putting on a uniform, similar to one the police might wear, automatically affects how we perceive others, creating a bias towards those considered to be of a low social status, new research from a team of cognitive neuroscientists suggests. New research from a team of cognitive neuroscientists at McMaster University suggests that simply putting on a uniform, similar to one the police might wear, automatically affects how we perceive others, creating a bias towards those considered to be of a low social status.
Zimbardo became absorbed in trying to understand who these people were, asking the question "are they inexplicable, can we not understand them". This led him to write the book The Lucifer Effect.[14]
The Lucifer Effect
Main article: The Lucifer Effect
The Lucifer Effect was written in response to his findings in the Stanford Prison Experiment. Zimbardo believes that personality characteristics could play a role in how violent or submissive actions are manifested. In the book, Zimbardo says that humans cannot be defined as good or evil because we have the ability to act as both especially at the hand of the situation. Examples include the events that occurred at the Abu Ghraib Detention Center, in which the defense team—including Gary Myers—argued that it was not the prison guards and interrogators that were at fault for the physical and mental abuse of detainees but the Bush administration policies themselves.[22] According to Zimbardo, "Good people can be induced, seduced, and initiated into behaving in evil ways. They can also be led to act in irrational, stupid, self-destructive, antisocial, and mindless ways when they are immersed in 'total situations' that impact human nature in ways that challenge our sense of the stability and consistency of individual personality, of character, and of morality."(Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect, p. 211)
Stanford Prison Experiment, a social psychology study in which college students became prisoners or guards in a simulated prison environment. The experiment, funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research, took place at Stanford University in August 1971. It was intended to measure the effect of role-playing, labeling, and social expectations on behaviour over a period of two weeks. However, mistreatment of prisoners escalated so alarmingly that principal investigator Philip G. Zimbardo terminated the experiment after only six days.
More than 70 young men responded to an advertisement about a “psychological study of prison life,” and experimenters selected 24 applicants who were judged to be physically and mentally healthy. The paid subjects—they received $15 a day—were divided randomly into equal numbers of guards and prisoners. Guards were ordered not to physically abuse prisoners and were issued mirrored sunglasses that prevented any eye contact. Prisoners were “arrested” by actual police and handed over to the experimenters in a mock prison in the basement of a campus building. Prisoners were then subjected to indignities that were intended to simulate the environment of a real-life prison. In keeping with Zimbardo’s intention to create very quickly an “atmosphere of oppression,” each prisoner was made to wear a “dress” as a uniform and to carry a chain padlocked around one ankle. All participants were observed and videotaped by the experimenters.
Stanford Prison Experiment
Stanford Prison Experiment
On only the second day the prisoners staged a rebellion. Guards then worked out a system of rewards and punishments to manage the prisoners. Within the first four days, three prisoners had become so traumatized that they were released. Over the course of the experiment, some of the guards became cruel and tyrannical, while a number of the prisoners became depressed and disoriented. However, only after an outside observer came upon the scene and registered shock did Zimbardo conclude the experiment, less than a week after it had started.
The Stanford Prison Experiment immediately came under attack on methodological and ethical grounds. Zimbardo admitted that during the experiment he had sometimes felt more like a prison superintendent than a research psychologist. Later on, he claimed that the experiment’s “social forces and environmental contingencies” had led the guards to behave badly. However, others claimed that the original advertisement attracted people who were predisposed to authoritarianism. The most conspicuous challenge to the Stanford findings came decades later in the form of the BBC Prison Study, a differently organized experiment documented in a British Broadcasting Corporation series called The Experiment (2002). The BBC’s mock prisoners turned out to be more assertive than Zimbardo’s. The British experimenters called the Stanford experiment “a study of what happens when a powerful authority figure (Zimbardo) imposes tyranny.”
The Stanford Prison Experiment became widely known outside academia. It was the acknowledged inspiration for Das Experiment (2001), a German movie that was remade in the United States as the direct-to-video film The Experiment (2010). The Stanford Prison Experiment (2015) was created with Zimbardo’s active participation; the dramatic film more closely followed actual events.