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NEWS 9
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NEWS 9
Revealing the menace within
‘ Prisoners ’ meet ‘ Superintendent ’ Philip Zimbardo ( left ).
‘ Prisoners ’ meet with a priest , seen on CCTV ( below ).
The fallout of the 1971 Stanford prison experiment continues to divide .
Rachel Fieldhouse A WORLD-FIRST shyness clinic , an analysis of sexist Reader ’ s Digest jokes and perhaps the most infamous psychological study ever — all emerged from one man ’ s mind : Emeritus Professor Philip Zimbardo .
The psychologist died in October at his home in San Francisco , California , aged 91 .
He wrote hundreds of papers spanning cults , hypnosis , altruism and the psychology of evil .
In 1974 , he concluded that most of 1000 Reader ’ s Digest jokes were anti-woman , demonstrating how non-conscious sexist beliefs were maintained .
But he also led the notorious Stanford prison experiment , which as he eventually acknowledged , made its findings “ at the expense of human suffering ”.
In the decades after World War II as the full scale of the Nazi atrocities became clear , various researchers used field studies to examine the nature of extremism and evil .
With funding from the US Office of Naval Research , Professor Zimbardo was able to recruit 21 healthy male college students to stay in a mock prison in the basement of Stanford University ’ s psychology department in California .
The idea was simple . The mostly middle-class and white students received $ US15 a day ($ AU181 in 2024 ) to act as guards or prisoners — randomly assigned — for two weeks .
As Professor Zimbardo ’ s team wrote in the International Journal of Criminology and Penology : “ We witnessed a sample of normal , healthy American college students fractionate into a group of prison guards who seemed to derive pleasure from insulting , threatening , humiliating and dehumanising their peers .”
Professor Zimbardo ’ s conclusion was that people were not cruel because they were “ bad apples ”. They were influenced by their environment — in this example , an environment he had created .
The experiment
Three 1.8m by 2.7m cells were set up , sitting within a 10m 2 cell block , with separate guards ’ quarters and a closet for solitary confinement which was to be used for a maximum of one hour per offence .
The guards lived “ normal lives ” outside of their eight-hour shifts , but the prisoners stayed 24 hours a day .
On day one , real Palo Alto City police officers carried out mock arrests of the prisoners and handed them to a researcher , who blindfolded them and drove them to the mock prison .
The prisoners , who were given no clue as to what would happen , were stripped naked , sprayed with deodorant , given a uniform and escorted to a cell .
Each day , they received three bland meals and had three toilet visits under supervision from the ‘ guards ’.
Guards performed headcounts at least twice per day , sometimes at 2am .
The outcome
On day two , the prisoners barricaded themselves inside the cells .
The guards responded by blasting the prisoners with fire extinguishers , breaking through the barricades and forcing the ringleaders into solitary confinement .
On day three , the guards forced prisoners to defecate in buckets rather than toilets and
‘ The students fractionated into a group of prison guards who seemed to derive pleasure from insulting , threatening , humiliating and dehumanising their peers .’
refused to feed ‘ bad ’ prisoners .
On day four , one prisoner stopped eating and was put in solitary confinement for three hours — the limit should have been one hour .
By day five , half of the prisoners had left the study due to “ extreme emotional depression , crying , rage and acute anxiety ”, or in one a case , a body-wide “ psychosomatic rash ”.
While this happened , Professor Zimbardo acted as prison ‘ superintendent ’, advising the guards and meeting with prisoners .
He later told university alumni publication Stanford Magazine that by day three “ I had become the superintendent of the Stanford county jail … not a researcher at all .”
The researchers halted the study on day six because of the “ unexpectedly intense reactions ”.
But Professor Zimbardo ’ s wife said it unfolded a little differently .
Professor Christina Maslach — known for developing the Maslach Burnout Inventory — told Stanford Magazine that she saw the guards chain together prisoners ’ feet and put bags on their heads when bringing them out for a toilet break .
As one of his graduate students at the time , this prompted her to confront Professor Zimbardo .
“ I feared that if the study went on , he would become someone I no longer cared for , no longer loved , no longer respected ,” she said .
The pair married a year later , in 1972 , and remained together until Professor Zimbardo ’ s death .
The ethical breach
The study had ethics approval from the Stanford Human Subjects Review Committee , but its early termination led to stricter guidelines for human experiments .
It spurred the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research PAGE 10