watch tHe skies

Derren Brown’s The Heist show the other night was most interesting because of it’s use of Milgram’s classic experiment. A famous scientific experiment of social psychology, many believe it to be unethical to perform nowadays given the potential for lasting psychological damage that could be inflicted on the test subjects. This brought me to recall other psychological experiments that could now be considered unethical. This is the first in an irregular series of articles on classic psychological experiments arguably considered unethical. First up - The Stanford Prison Experiment.
The Stanford Prison Experiment
The study was funded by the US Navy to explain conflict in its and the Marine Corps’ prison systems. the intention was to test the hypothesis that prison guards and convicts were self-selecting, of a certain disposition that would naturally lead to poor conditions in that situation.

Participants were recruited via a newspaper ad and offered $15 a day to participate in a two-week “prison simulation.” Of the 70 respondents, 24 men were selected, those deemed to be the most psychologically stable and healthy. These participants were predominantly white, middle-class young males.

The group was divided in half at random into an equal group of “prisoners” and “guards”. Interestingly, prisoners later said they thought the guards had been chosen for their larger physical size, but in reality they had been picked by a fair coin toss and there was no objective difference in stature between the two groups.

The prison itself was run out of the basement of the Stanford Psychology Department, which had been converted into a mock jail. University staff took the senior roles of the jail.

Guards were given wooden batons and a khaki, military-style uniform they had chosen themselves at a local military surplus store. They were also given mirrorshade sunglasses to prevent eye contact. Unlike the prisoners, the guards were to work in shifts and return home during off hours, though at times many would later volunteer for added duty without additional pay.

The day before the experiment, guards attended a brief orientation meeting, but were given no formal guidelines, other than that no physical violence was permitted. They were told it was their responsibility to run the prison, which they could do in any way they wished.

The experiment very quickly got out of hand. Prisoners suffered — and accepted — sadistic and humiliating treatment at the hands of the guards, and by the end many showed severe emotional disturbance.

After a relatively uneventful first day, a riot broke out on day two. Guards volunteered extra hours and worked together to break up the revolt, without supervision from the research staff. After this point, the guards tried to divide the prisoners and pit them against each other by setting up a “good” cell block and a “bad” cell block, to make the prisoners think that there were “informers” amidst their ranks. The efforts were largely effective, and there were no further large-scale rebellions.

Prisoner “counts”, which had initially been devised to help prisoners get acquainted with their identity numbers, devolved into hours-long ordeals, in which guards tormented the prisoners and imposed physical punishments including long bouts of forced exercise.

The prison quickly became unsanitary and inhospitable. Bathroom rights became privileges which could be, and frequently were, denied. Some prisoners were made to clean toilets using their bare hands. Mattresses were removed from the “bad” cell, and prisoners were forced to sleep on the concrete floor without clothing. Food was also frequently denied as a means of punishment. Prisoners endured forced nudity and even homosexual acts of humiliation.

Prisoners began to show severe acute emotional disturbances. One prisoner developed a psychosomatic rash all over his body upon finding out that his “parole” had been turned down. Uncontrollable crying and disorganized thinking were common among the prisoners. Two of the prisoners suffered such severe trauma that they were removed from the experiment early and replaced.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 10th, 2006 at 7:33 pm and is filed under psychology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.