This article is about the psychology experiment.

For the American punk band, see Stanford

Prison Experiment (band). For the 2015 film, see The Stanford Prison Experiment (film).
The Stanford prison experiment (SPE) was a study of the psychological effects of becoming a
prisoner or prison guard. The experiment was conducted at Stanford University on August 14
20, 1971, by a team of researchers led by psychology professor Philip Zimbardo.[1] It was funded
by the U.S. Office of Naval Research[2] and was of interest to both the U.S. Navy and Marine
Corps as an investigation into the causes of conflict between military guards and prisoners. The
experiment is a classic study on the psychology of imprisonment[3] and is a topic covered in most
introductory psychology textbooks.[4]
The participants adapted to their roles well beyond Zimbardo's expectations, as the guards
enforced authoritarian measures and ultimately subjected some of the prisoners to psychological
torture. Many of the prisoners passively accepted psychological abuse and, at the request of the
guards, readily harassed other prisoners who attempted to prevent it. The experiment even
affected Zimbardo himself, who, in his role as the superintendent, permitted the abuse to
continue.[5][6] Two of the prisoners quit the experiment early, and the entire experiment was
abruptly stopped after only six days, to an extent because of the objections of Christina Maslach.
Certain portions of the experiment were filmed, and excerpts of footage are publicly available.

Contents
[hide]

1 Goals and methods

2 Results

3 Conclusions

4 Criticism

5 Comparisons to Abu Ghraib

6 Similar studies
o 6.1 BBC prison study
o 6.2 Experiments in the United States

7 In popular culture

8 See also

9 Footnotes

10 References

11 External links

Goals and methods[edit]

Zimbardo and his team aimed to test the hypothesis that the inherent personality traits of
prisoners and guards are the chief cause of abusive behavior in prison. Participants were
recruited and told they would participate in a two-week prison simulation. Out of 75 respondents,
Zimbardo and his team selected the 24 males whom they deemed to be the most psychologically
stable and healthy.[7] These participants were predominantly middle class.[8] The group was
intentionally selected to exclude those with criminal backgrounds, psychological impairments, or
medical problems. They all agreed to participate in a 714-day period and received $15 per day
(equivalent to $87 in 2015).
The experiment was conducted in the basement of Jordan Hall (Stanford's psychology building).
Twelve of the 24 participants were assigned the role of prisoner (nine plus three alternates),
while the other 12 were assigned the role of guard (also nine plus three alternates). Zimbardo
took on the role of the superintendent, and an undergraduate research assistant the role of the
warden. Zimbardo designed the experiment in order to induce disorientation, depersonalization,
and deindividualization in the participants.
The researchers held an orientation session for guards the day before the experiment, during
which they instructed them not to physically harm the prisoners. In the footage of the study,
Zimbardo can be seen talking to the guards: "You can create in the prisoners feelings of
boredom, a sense of fear to some degree, you can create a notion of arbitrariness that their life is
totally controlled by us, by the system, you, me, and they'll have no privacy ... We're going to
take away their individuality in various ways. In general what all this leads to is a sense of
powerlessness. That is, in this situation we'll have all the power and they'll have none."[9]
The researchers provided the guards with wooden batons to establish their status,[10] clothing
similar to that of an actual prison guard (khaki shirt and pants from a local military surplus
store), and mirrored sunglasses to prevent eye contact. Prisoners wore uncomfortable, ill-fitting
smocks and stocking caps, as well as a chain around one ankle. Guards were instructed to call
prisoners by their assigned numbers, sewn on their uniforms, instead of by name.
The prisoners were "arrested" at their homes and "charged" with armed robbery. The local Palo
Alto police department assisted Zimbardo with the arrests and conducted full booking procedures
on the prisoners, which included fingerprinting and taking mug shots. The prisoners were
transported to the mock prison from the police station, where they were strip searched and given
their new identities.

The small mock prison cells were set up to hold three prisoners each. There was a small space for
the prison yard, solitary confinement, and a bigger room across from the prisoners for the guards
and warden. The prisoners were to stay in their cells all day and night until the end of the study.
The guards worked in teams of three for eight-hour shifts. The guards did not have to stay on site
after their shift.

Results[edit]
This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article
by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and
removed. (December 2009)
After a relatively uneventful first day, on the second day the prisoners in Cell 1 blockaded their
cell door with their beds and took off their stocking caps, refusing to come out or follow the
guards' instructions. Guards from other shifts volunteered to work extra hours, to assist in
subduing the revolt, and subsequently attacked the prisoners with fire extinguishers without
being supervised by the research staff. Finding that handling nine cell mates with only three
guards per shift was challenging, one of the guards suggested they use psychological tactics to
control them. They set up a "privilege cell" in which prisoners who were not involved in the riot
were treated with special rewards, such as higher quality meals. The "privileged" inmates chose
not to eat the meal in commiseration with their fellow prisoners.
After only 36 hours, one prisoner began to act "crazy", as Zimbardo described: "#8612 then
began to act crazy, to scream, to curse, to go into a rage that seemed out of control. It took quite a
while before we became convinced that he was really suffering and that we had to release him."
Guards forced the prisoners to repeat their assigned numbers[11] to reinforce the idea that this was
their new identity. Guards soon used these prisoner counts to harass the prisoners, using physical
punishment such as protracted exercise for errors in the prisoner count. Sanitary conditions
declined rapidly, exacerbated by the guards' refusal to allow some prisoners to urinate or defecate
anywhere but in a bucket placed in their cell. As punishment, the guards would not let the
prisoners empty the sanitation bucket. Mattresses were a valued item in the prison, so the guards
would punish prisoners by removing their mattresses, leaving them to sleep on concrete. Some
prisoners were forced to be naked as a method of degradation. Several guards became
increasingly cruel as the experiment continued; experimenters reported that approximately onethird of the guards exhibited genuine sadistic tendencies. Most of the guards were upset when the
experiment concluded after only six days.
Zimbardo mentions his own absorption in the experiment. On the fourth day, some of the guards
stated they heard a rumor that the released prisoner was going to come back with his friends and
free the remaining inmates. Zimbardo and the guards disassembled the prison and moved it onto
a different floor of the building. Zimbardo himself waited in the basement, in case the released
prisoner showed up, and planned to tell him that the experiment had been terminated. The
released prisoner never returned, and the prison was rebuilt in the basement.

Zimbardo argued that the prisoners had internalized their roles, since some had stated they would
accept "parole" even if it would mean forfeiting their pay, despite the fact that quitting would
have achieved the same result without the delay involved in waiting for their parole requests to
be granted or denied.[12] Zimbardo argued they had no reason for continued participation in the
experiment after having lost all monetary compensation, yet they did, because they had
internalized the prisoner identity.
Prisoner No. 416, a newly admitted stand-by prisoner, expressed concern about the treatment of
the other prisoners. The guards responded with more abuse. When he refused to eat his sausages,
saying he was on a hunger strike, guards confined him to "solitary confinement", a dark closet:
"the guards then instructed the other prisoners to repeatedly punch on the door while shouting at
416."[13] The guards said he would be released from solitary confinement only if the prisoners
gave up their blankets and slept on their bare mattresses, which all but one refused to do.
Zimbardo aborted the experiment early when Christina Maslach, a graduate student in
psychology whom he was dating (and later married),[14] objected to the conditions of the prison
after she was introduced to the experiment to conduct interviews. Zimbardo noted that, of more
than 50 people who had observed the experiment, Maslach was the only one who questioned its
morality. After only six days of a planned two weeks' duration, the Stanford prison experiment
was discontinued.[12]

Conclusions[edit]
On August 20, 1971, Zimbardo announced the end of the experiment to the participants. The
experiment has also been used to illustrate cognitive dissonance theory and the power of
authority.
The results of the experiment favor situational attribution of behavior rather than dispositional
attribution (a result caused by internal characteristics). In other words, it seemed that the
situation, rather than their individual personalities, caused the participants' behavior. Under this
interpretation, the results are compatible with the results of the Milgram experiment, in which
ordinary people fulfilled orders to administer what appeared to be agonizing and dangerous
electric shocks to a confederate of the experimenter.[citation needed]
Shortly after the study was completed, there were bloody revolts at both the San Quentin and
Attica prison facilities, and Zimbardo reported his findings on the experiment to the U.S. House
Committee on the Judiciary.

Criticism[edit]
The guards and prisoners adapted to their roles more than Zimbardo expected, stepping beyond
predicted boundaries, leading to dangerous and psychologically damaging situations. One-third
of the guards were judged to have exhibited "genuine sadistic tendencies", while many prisoners
were emotionally traumatized; five of them had to be removed from the experiment early. After
Maslach confronted Zimbardo and forced him to realize that he had been passively allowing

unethical acts to be performed under his supervision, Zimbardo concluded that both prisoners
and guards had become grossly absorbed in their roles and realized that he had likewise become
as grossly absorbed in his own, and he terminated the experiment.[15] Ethical concerns
surrounding the experiment often draw comparisons to a similar experiment, conducted ten years
earlier in 1961 at Yale University by Stanley Milgram.[citation needed]
Because of the nature and questionable ethics of the experiment, Zimbardo found it impossible to
keep traditional scientific controls in place. He was unable to remain a neutral observer, since he
influenced the direction of the experiment as the prison's superintendent. Conclusions and
observations drawn by the experimenters were largely subjective and anecdotal, and the
experiment is practically impossible for other researchers to accurately reproduce. Erich Fromm
claimed to see generalizations in the experiment's results and argued that the personality of an
individual does affect behavior when imprisoned. This ran counter to the study's conclusion that
the prison situation itself controls the individual's behavior. Fromm also argued that the amount
of sadism in the "normal" subjects could not be determined with the methods employed to screen
them.[16]
"John Wayne" (the real-life Dave Eshelman), one of the guards in the experiment, said the study
placed undue emphasis on the cruelty of the guards, and that he caused the escalation of events
between guards and prisoners after he began to emulate a character from the Paul Newman film
Cool Hand Luke (1967). He further intensified his actions because he was nicknamed "John
Wayne", even though he was trying to mimic actor Strother Martin, who had played the role of
the sadistic Captain in the movie.[17]
What came over me was not an accident. It was planned. I set out with a definite plan in mind, to
try to force the action, force something to happen, so that the researchers would have something
to work with. After all, what could they possibly learn from guys sitting around like it was a
country club? So I consciously created this persona. I was in all kinds of drama productions in
high school and college. It was something I was very familiar with: to take on another
personality before you step out on the stage. I was kind of running my own experiment in there,
by saying, "How far can I push these things and how much abuse will these people take before
they say, 'knock it off?'" But the other guards didn't stop me. They seemed to join in. They were
taking my lead. Not a single guard said, "I don't think we should do this." - David Eshelman[18]
Also, researchers from Western Kentucky University argued that selection bias may have played
a role in the results. The researchers recruited students for a study using an advertisement similar
to the one used in the Stanford Prison Experiment, with some ads saying "a psychological study"
(the control group), and some with the words "prison life" as originally worded in Dr. Zimbardo's
Stanford Prison Experiment. It was found that students who responded to the classified
advertisement for the "prison study" were higher in traits such as social dominance, aggression,
authoritarianism, etc. and were lower in traits related to empathy and altruism when statistically
compared to the control group participants.[19]
The study has been criticized for demand characteristics by psychologist Peter Gray. He argues
that participants in psychological experiments are more likely to do what they believe the
researchers want them to do. The guards were essentially told to be cruel. However, it was

precisely this willingness to comply with the experiment's questionable practices that showed
how little was needed for the students to engage in such practices.[20]
Skeptical author Brian Dunning states:
Most of the Stanford guards did not exhibit any cruel or unusual behavior, often being friendly
and doing favors for the prisoners...The statistical validity of the sample of participants, 24 male
Stanford students of about the same age, has been called into question as being too small and
restrictive to be generally applicable to the population at large...(and the fact that) Zimbardo has
dedicated much of his career to the promotion of the idea that bad environments drive bad
behavior.[21]

Comparisons to Abu Ghraib[edit]

Lynndie England pointing to a naked prisoner being forced to masturbate in front of his
captors[22]
When acts of prisoner torture and abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were publicized in
March 2004, Zimbardo himself, who paid close attention to the details of the story, was struck by
the similarity with his own experiment. He was dismayed by official military and government
representatives' shifting the blame for the torture and abuses in the Abu Ghraib American
military prison on to "a few bad apples" rather than acknowledging it as possibly systemic
problems of a formally established military incarceration system.
Eventually, Zimbardo became involved with the defense team of lawyers representing one of the
Abu Ghraib prison guards, Staff Sergeant Ivan "Chip" Frederick. He was granted full access to
all investigation and background reports, and testified as an expert witness in SSG Frederick's
court martial, which resulted in an eight-year prison sentence for Frederick in October 2004.
Zimbardo drew from his participation in the Frederick case to write the book The Lucifer Effect:
Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, published by Random House in 2007, which deals
with the striking similarities between his own Stanford Prison Experiment and the Abu Ghraib
abuses.[13]

Similar studies[edit]

BBC prison study[edit]

Psychologists Alex Haslam and Steve Reicher conducted the BBC Prison Study in 2002 and was
published in 2006.[23] This was a partial replication of the Stanford prison experiment conducted
with the assistance of the BBC, which broadcast events in the study in a documentary series
called The Experiment. Their results and conclusions differed from Zimbardo's and led to a
number of publications on tyranny, stress, and leadership. Moreover, unlike results from the
Stanford prison experiment, these were published in leading academic journals such as British
Journal of Social Psychology, Journal of Applied Psychology, Social Psychology Quarterly, and
Personality and Social Psychology Review. The BBC Prison Study is now taught as a core study
on the UK A-level Psychology OCR syllabus.
While Haslam and Reicher's procedure was not a direct replication of Zimbardo's, their study
casts further doubt on the generality of his conclusions. Specifically, it questions the notion that
people slip mindlessly into role and the idea that the dynamics of evil are in any way banal. Their
research also points to the importance of leadership in the emergence of tyranny of the form
displayed by Zimbardo when briefing guards in the Stanford experiment.[24][25]

Experiments in the United States[edit]

The Stanford prison experiment was in part a response to the Milgram experiment at Yale
beginning in 1961 and published in 1963.[citation needed]
The Third Wave was a 1967 recreation of Nazi Party dynamics by high school teacher Ron Jones
in Palo Alto, California. Although the veracity of Jones' accounts has been questioned,[26] several
participants in the study have gone on record to confirm the events.[27]
July/August 2011
COVER STORY

The Menace Within

What happened in the basement of the psych building 40 years ago shocked the world. How do
the guards, prisoners and researchers in the Stanford Prison Experiment feel about it now?

Stanford Prison Experiment

View photo album >>
By Romesh Ratnesar
It began with an ad in the classifieds.

Male college students needed for psychological study of prison life. $15 per day for 1-2 weeks.
More than 70 people volunteered to take part in the study, to be conducted in a fake prison
housed inside Jordan Hall, on Stanford's Main Quad. The leader of the study was 38-year-old
psychology professor Philip Zimbardo. He and his fellow researchers selected 24 applicants and
randomly assigned each to be a prisoner or a guard.
Zimbardo encouraged the guards to think of themselves as actual guards in a real prison. He
made clear that prisoners could not be physically harmed, but said the guards should try to create
an atmosphere in which the prisoners felt "powerless."
The study began on Sunday, August 17, 1971. But no one knew what, exactly, they were getting
into.
Forty years later, the Stanford Prison Experiment remains among the most notableand
notoriousresearch projects ever carried out at the University. For six days, half the study's
participants endured cruel and dehumanizing abuse at the hands of their peers. At various times,
they were taunted, stripped naked, deprived of sleep and forced to use plastic buckets as toilets.
Some of them rebelled violently; others became hysterical or withdrew into despair. As the
situation descended into chaos, the researchers stood by and watcheduntil one of their
colleagues finally spoke out.
The public's fascination with the SPE and its implicationsthe notion, as Zimbardo says, "that
these ordinary college students could do such terrible things when caught in that situation"
brought Zimbardo international renown. It also provoked criticism from other researchers, who
questioned the ethics of subjecting student volunteers to such extreme emotional trauma. The
study had been approved by Stanford's Human Subjects Research Committee, and Zimbardo
says that "neither they nor we could have imagined" that the guards would treat the prisoners so
inhumanely.
In 1973, an investigation by the American Psychological Association concluded that the prison
study had satisfied the profession's existing ethical standards. But in subsequent years, those
guidelines were revised to prohibit human-subject simulations modeled on the SPE. "No
behavioral research that puts people in that kind of setting can ever be done again in America,"
Zimbardo says.
The Stanford Prison Experiment became the subject of numerous books and documentaries, a
feature film and the name of at least one punk band. In the last decade, after the revelations of
abuses committed by U.S. military and intelligence personnel at prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan,
the SPE provided lessons in how good people placed in adverse conditions can act barbarically.

The experiment is still a source of controversy and contentioneven among those who took part
in it. Here, in their own words, some of the key players in the drama reflect on their roles and
how those six days in August changed their lives.
THE SUPERINTENDENT
Phil Zimbardo
Zimbardo joined Stanford's psychology department in 1968 and taught there until his retirement
in 2007.
The study was focused originally on how individuals adapt to being in a relatively powerless
situation. I was interested in prisoners and was not really interested in the guards. It was really
meant to be a single, dramatic demonstration of the power of the situation on human behavior.
We expected that we would write some articles about it and move on.

Courtesy Phil Zimbardo

Zimbardo.

After the end of the first day, I said, "There's nothing here. Nothing's happening." The guards had
this antiauthority mentality. They felt awkward in their uniforms. They didn't get into the guard
mentality until the prisoners started to revolt. Throughout the experiment, there was this
conspiracy of denialeveryone involved was in effect denying that this was an experiment and
agreeing that this is a prison run by psychologists.
There was zero time for reflection. We had to feed the prisoners three meals a day, deal with the
prisoner breakdowns, deal with their parents, run a parole board. By the third day I was sleeping
in my office. I had become the superintendent of the Stanford county jail. That was who I was:
I'm not the researcher at all. Even my posture changeswhen I walk through the prison yard, I'm
walking with my hands behind my back, which I never in my life do, the way generals walk
when they're inspecting troops.
We had arranged for everyone involvedthe prisoners, guards and staffto be interviewed on
Friday by other faculty members and graduate students who had not been involved in the study.
Christina Maslach, who had just finished her PhD, came down the night before. She's standing
outside the guard quarters and watches the guards line up the prisoners for the 10 o'clock toilet
run. The prisoners come out, and the guards put bags over their heads, chain their feet together
and make them put their hands on each other's shoulders, like a chain gang. They're yelling and
cursing at them. Christina starts tearing up. She said, "I can't look at this."

I ran after her and we had this argument outside Jordan Hall. She said, "It's terrible what you're
doing to these boys. How can you see what I saw and not care about the suffering?" But I didn't
see what she saw. And I suddenly began to feel ashamed. This is when I realized I had been
transformed by the prison study to become the prison administrator. At that point I said, "You're
right. We've got to end the study."
[As the study was underway], there was an escape attempt at San Quentin prison and [former
Black Panther] George Jackson was shot and killed. Three weeks after that, there's the Attica
prison riot [in New York]. Suddenly, prisons are hot. Two government investigative committees
start hearings and I'm flown out to Washington to present to a congressional subcommittee on the
nature of prisons. I went from knowing nothing firsthand about prisons to being an expert. But I
worked hard to learn more. I visited a number of correctional facilities all over the country. I
organized a program for Stanford students to teach a course at a prison. For years I had an active
correspondence with at least 20 different prisoners.
It wasn't a formal experiment. My colleagues probably never thought much of it. But as a result
of the prison study, I really became more aware of the central role of power in our lives. I
became more aware of the power I have as a teacher. I started consciously doing things to
minimize the negative use of power in the classroom. I encouraged students to challenge me.
I think I became more self-reflective. I'm more generous and more open because of that
experience. I think it made me a better person.
THE WHISTLEBLOWER

Courtesy Christina Maslach-Zimbardo

Maslach.

Christina Maslach
Maslach, PhD '71, became a professor at UC-Berkeley. She and Zimbardo married in 1972.
They live in San Francisco.
I had just finished my doctorate and was about to leave Stanford to start my new job. Phil and I
had started dating. The prison study was never anything I was considering playing a part in.
During the first few days of the experiment, I did hear from Phil, but not in great detail. What I
was getting, though, was a sense that it was becoming a real prisonpeople were not just fooling
around but actually getting caught up in the situation. But it still wasn't evident to me what that
might mean.

At first Phil didn't seem different. I didn't see any change in him until I actually went down to the
basement and saw the prison. I met one guard who seemed nice and sweet and charming, and
then I saw him in the yard later and I thought, "Oh my God, what happened here?" I saw the
prisoners being marched to go down to the men's room. I was getting sick to my stomach,
physically ill. I said, "I can't watch this." But no one else was having the same problem.
Phil came after me and said, "What's the matter with you?" That's when I had this feeling like, "I
don't know you. How can you not see this?" It felt like we were standing on two different cliffs
across a chasm. If we had not been dating before then, if he were just another faculty member
and this happened, I might have said, "I'm sorry, I'm out of here" and just left. But because this
was someone I was growing to like a lot, I thought that I had to figure this out. So I kept at it. I
fought back, and ended up having a huge argument with him. I don't think we've ever had an
argument quite like that since then.
I feared that if the study went on, he would become someone I no longer cared for, no longer
loved, no longer respected. It's an interesting question: Suppose he kept going, what would I
have done? I honestly don't know.
The clearest influence the study had on me was that it raised some really serious questions about
how people cope with extremely emotional, difficult situations, especially when it's part of their
jobwhen they have to manage people or take care of them or rehabilitate them. So I started
interviewing people. I started with some prison guards in a real prison, and talked to them about
their jobs and how they understood what they were doing. At first I wasn't sure what I was
looking for. I was just trying to listen.
I interviewed people who worked in hospitals, in the ER. After a while I realized there was a
rhythm and pattern emerging, and when I described it to someone they said, "I don't know what
it's called in other professions, but in our occupation we call it 'burnout.'" And so I spent a good
chunk of my professional life developing and defining what burnout iswhat are the things that
cause it and how can we intervene and help people cope with it more effectively. All of that work
on burnout had some origins in the experience I had in the prison experiment.
People will sometimes come up to meat conferences, or maybe they're students who have
taken psychology classesand they'll say, "Oh my God, you're such a hero! What is it like to be
a hero?" And it's always a little surprising to me because it sure didn't feel heroic at the time. The
prison study has given me a new understanding of what "heroism" means. It's not some
egocentric, I'm-going-to-rush-into-that-burning-building thingit's about seeing something that
needs to be addressed and saying, I need to help and do something to make it better.
THE GUARDS

Dave Eshelman
The son of a Stanford engineering professor, Eshelman was a student at Chapman University at
the tiMe of the experiment. He was the prison's most abusive guard, patterning himself after the
sadistic prison warden (portrayed by Strother Martin) in the movie Cool Hand Luke. Today he
owns a mortgage business in Saratoga.
How many times have we found ourselves asking, "why did that person just do that?" We are
highly motivated to understand the behavior of others, as this helps us predict what they will do
next.
Making accurate attributions seems to be very important to people. This is probably a holdover
from our evolutionary past as hunter-gatherers. Our safety often depends on making quick and
accurate judgments of the intentions of other people. Is the person hitchhiking because he or she
is injured and needs help? Or is this a predator looking for a victim?
Our social relationships are also very dependent on our ability to make accurate attributions. If a
new friend is acting in a negative way, is this a temporary problem due to her current challenges
or is this a consistent pattern of behavior for her? Your conclusions in this case are likely to
determine whether you continue to interact with this friend.
Dispositional Attributions

When we make a dispositional attribution, we have decided that the main cause of a person's
behavior is his or her internal, personal characteristics. We're saying that the person behaved that
way because "that's the kind of person they are."
Situational Attributions

Making a situational attribution means that we believe a person's behavior is best understood as a
result of his or her circumstances. We might think that any sensible person would behave
similarly in the same situation.
Which Type of Attribution Is Correct?

Our behavior is always some combination of our personal characteristics and the situations in
which we find ourselves. However, some behavior is better understood in terms of disposition
while other behavior is better understood in terms of situation.
For example, we probably would not have a rich literature in personality if people did not have
individual differences that mattered. Facing similar situations, people can behave in very
different ways. In an emergency, some people panic, while others come forward to help.

We can also find many situations that seem to override most personal differences. It is likely that
the participants in the famous obedience studies conducted by Stanley Milgram differed in
personality, yet the vast majority of them behaved very similarly during the experiment.
Disposition might explain the difference between people who did and did not obey, but
disposition alone might not tell us much overall about how people responded in this experiment.
The Correspondence Bias

Gilbert and Jones (1986) and Gilbert and Malone (1995) noted that we expect people's behavior
to "correspond" to their dispositions, even when we know for certain that their situation is a very
important determinant of their behavior.
In one classic example of this "correspondence bias," students were instructed to give pro-Castro
talks. Even though the students in the audience understood that the speakers were not given a
choice about their talks, they still attributed their speeches to their pro-Castro beliefs.
Psychologists believe that the correspondence bias results from a number of different factors.
First, we are somewhat consistent in our behavior due to personality. Second, we frequently
know very little about another person's circumstances. Our grumpy co-worker might have family
problems that influence his attitude at work. Finally, many people underestimate the power of
situational variables. They might think "I would never act that way," when in fact they might do
exactly the same thing as the people they're observing.
Does this mean that we do a poor job of making attributions about other people's behavior?
Although we do make errors, our errors are consistent with human behavior in general. Although
it is somewhat depressing, human nature is far more attuned to negative stimuli than to positive
stimuli. We are safer thinking negatively about a person whose behavior seems "off" to us than to
give the person the "benefit of the doubt" because we don't know much about his or her current
circumstances. Being more "open-minded" and "non-judgmental" is fine as long as you're not
giving rides to serial murderers.

Photo: Toni Gauthier

Eshelman.

I was just looking for some summer work. I had a choice of doing this or working at a pizza
parlor. I thought this would be an interesting and different way of finding summer employment.
The only person I knew going in was John Mark. He was another guard and wasn't even on my
shift. That was critical. If there were prisoners in there who knew me before they encountered
me, then I never would have been able to pull off anything I did. The act that I put onthey
would have seen through it immediately.
What came over me was not an accident. It was planned. I set out with a definite plan in mind, to
try to force the action, force something to happen, so that the researchers would have something
to work with. After all, what could they possibly learn from guys sitting around like it was a
country club? So I consciously created this persona. I was in all kinds of drama productions in
high school and college. It was something I was very familiar with: to take on another
personality before you step out on the stage. I was kind of running my own experiment in there,
by saying, "How far can I push these things and how much abuse will these people take before
they say, 'knock it off?'" But the other guards didn't stop me. They seemed to join in. They were
taking my lead. Not a single guard said, "I don't think we should do this."
The fact that I ramped up the intimidation and the mental abuse without any real sense as to
whether I was hurting anybody? I definitely regret that. But in the long run, no one suffered any
lasting damage. When the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, my first reaction was, this is so familiar to
me. I knew exactly what was going on. I could picture myself in the middle of that and watching
it spin out of control. When you have little or no supervision as to what you're doing, and no one
steps in and says, "Hey, you can't do this"things just keep escalating. You think, how can we
top what we did yesterday? How do we do something even more outrageous? I felt a deep sense
of familiarity with that whole situation.
Sometimes when people know about the experiment and then meet me, it's like, My God, this
guy's a psycho! But everyone who knows me would just laugh at that.
John Mark
Mark was about to begin his junior year at Stanford. He graduated in 1973 with a degree in
anthropology. He lives in the Bay Area and has worked for the last 18 years as a medical coder
for Kaiser Permanente.

Photo: Toni Gauthier

Mark.

I had spent my sophomore year at Stanford in France and returned to campus that spring. It was
one of the most pivotal times in my life. Over Thanksgiving of the year before, I went with a
friend to Amsterdam. You have to remember this is 1970, it was basically the '60s. We went to
one of those clubs where you could buy drugs. We bought hash and actually brought some back
with us, and I was caught at the French border. For a few hours I was told by French border
guards that I was going to prison. In the end they let me go, but I definitely had been scared out
of my wits.
When I saw this thing about a prison experiment, I thought I had some life experiences to bring
to it. I felt this was going to be an important experiment. I told them all about what I'd been
through and why it was important to me to be a prisoner. It was very disappointing to be assigned
to be a guard, but I did the best I could.
During the day shift, when I worked, no one did anything that was beyond what you'd expect in a
situation like that. But Zimbardo went out of his way to create tension. Things like forced sleep
deprivationhe was really pushing the envelope. I just didn't like the whole idea of constantly
disturbing people and asking them to recite their prisoner numbers in a count. I certainly didn't
like when they put a guy in solitary confinement.
At that time of my life, I was getting high, all day every day. I got high before I went to the
experiment; I got high on my breaks and lunch. I got high afterwards. I brought joints with me,
and every day I wanted to give them to the prisoners. I looked at their faces and saw how they
were getting dispirited and I felt sorry for them.
I didn't think it was ever meant to go the full two weeks. I think Zimbardo wanted to create a
dramatic crescendo, and then end it as quickly as possible. I felt that throughout the experiment,
he knew what he wanted and then tried to shape the experimentby how it was constructed, and
how it played outto fit the conclusion that he had already worked out. He wanted to be able to
say that college students, people from middle-class backgroundspeople will turn on each other
just because they're given a role and given power.
Based on my experience, and what I saw and what I felt, I think that was a real stretch. I don't
think the actual events match up with the bold headline. I never did, and I haven't changed my
opinion.

Photo: r.r. jones

Haney.

THE RESEARCHERS

Craig Haney
A graduate student of Zimbardo's, Haney, MA '71, PhD '78, JD '78, was responsible for
overseeing the experiment and analyzing the data gathered from it. He went on to become a
professor at UC-Santa Cruz, a leading authority on the psychological effects of incarceration
and an advocate for prison reform.
What we thought we were going to find is that there would be subtle behavioral changes that
would take place over time. There were moments, in the course of deciding about whether to do
it, where we wavered. Not because we thought it would go too far or be too dramatic, but
because we weren't sure anything was going to happen. I remember at one point asking, "What if
they just sit around playing guitar for two weeks? What the hell are we going to do then?"
People have said to me, you must have known this was going to happen. We didn'tand we
were not naive. We were very well read in the literature. We just did not anticipate these kinds of
things happening. It really was a unique experience to watch human behavior transform in front
of your eyes. And I can honestly say that I try never to forget it. I spend a lot of time with real
prisoners and real guards, and having seen what I saw then, while a graduate student, gave me
respect for the power of institutional environments to transform good people into something else.
I also realized how quickly we get used to things that are shocking one day and a week later
become matter-of-fact. During the study, when we decided to move prisoners to different parts of
the prison, we realized that they were going to see where they were and be reminded they're not
in a prisonthey're just in the psych building at Stanford. We didn't want that to happen.
So we put paper bags over their heads. The first time I saw that, it was shocking. By the next day
we're putting bags on their heads and not thinking about it. That happens all the time in real
correctional facilities. You get used to it. I do a lot of work in solitary-confinement units, on the
psychological effects of supermax prisons. In places like that, when prisoners undergo the socalled therapy counseling, they are kept in actual cages. I constantly remind myself never to get
used to seeing the cages.
The prisoners in this study were a downtrodden lot by the end of it. Even the guys who didn't
break down were hurting. This was a really difficult experience. And for me that was a lesson,
too. Real prisoners learn how to mask their pain and act like it doesn't matter. The prison study
showed what it feels like for people who have not learned how to wear that implacable mask. I
try to talk to prisoners about what their lives are really like, and I don't think I would have come
to that kind of empathy had I not seen what I saw at Stanford. If someone had said that in six
days you can take 10 healthy college kids, in good health and at the peak of resilience, and break
them down by subjecting them to things that are commonplace and relatively mild by the
standards of real prisonsI'm not sure I would have believed it, if I hadn't seen it happen.

THE PRISONER
Richard Yacco
A community college student at the time, Yacco helped instigate a revolt against conditions in
Zimbardo's prison. He was released one day early from the study after exhibiting signs of
depression. After working in radio and television production, he now teaches at a public high
school in Oakland.
At the time I was debating: If I were drafted to fight in Vietnam, what would I do? Would I be
willing to go to jail? Since that was one of the considerations, I thought, well, a prison
experiment would give me some insight into what that would be like.
The first thing that really threw me off was the sleep deprivation. When they woke us up the first
time, I had no idea it was after only four hours of sleep. It was only after they got us up and we
did some exercises and then they let us go back to bed that I realized they were messing with our
sleep cycles. That was kind of a surprise from the first night.

Photo: Toni Gauthier

Yacco.

I don't recall exactly when the prisoners started rebelling. I do remember resisting what one
guard was telling me to do and being willing to go into solitary confinement. As prisoners, we
developed solidaritywe realized that we could join together and do passive resistance and
cause some problems. It was that era. I had been willing to go on marches against the Vietnam
war, I went on marches for civil rights, and was trying to figure out what I would do to resist
even going into the service. So in a way I was testing some of my own ways of rebelling or
standing up for what I thought was right.
My parents came on visitors' night. They were really concerned with the way I looked. I told
them that they're breaking up our sleep, that we weren't having the chance to take showers. My
appearance really concerned both of my parents, my mother especially.
When I asked [Zimbardo's team] what I could do if I wanted to quit, I was told, "You can't quit
you agreed to be here for the full experiment." That made me feel like a prisoner at that point. I
realized I had made a commitment to something that I now could not change. I had made myself
a prisoner.
I ended up being paroled by the "parole board." They released me Thursday night. That's when
they told me they were going to end the experiment the next day. What I learned later is that the

reason they chose me [to parole] is because they thought I'd be the next guy to break down. I was
surprised, because I never thought I was going through any kind of depression or anything like
that.
One thing that I thought was interesting about the experiment was whether, if you believe society
has assigned you a role, do you then assume the characteristics of that role? I teach at an inner
city high school in Oakland. These kids don't have to go through experiments to witness horrible
things. But what frustrates my colleagues and me is that we are creating great opportunities for
these kids, we offer great support for them, why are they not taking advantage of it? Why are
they dropping out of school? Why are they coming to school unprepared? I think a big reason is
what the prison study showsthey fall into the role their society has made for them.
Participating in the Stanford Prison Experiment is something I can use and share with students.
This was one week of my life when I was a teenager and yet here it is, 40 years later, and it's still
something that had enough of an impact on society that people are still interested in it. You never
know what you're going to get involved in that will turn out to be a defining moment in your life.

ROMESH RATNESAR, '96, MA '96, is deputy editor of Bloomberg Business Week.

Comments (1)

You must log in to comment.

I guess for me, I find it interesting that no one realized at the time, how a human will
adapt to a situation, and remove themselves from rationality. I believe there a people can
be controlled without much prevarication, and there are people who can just naturally fall
into the roll of power. This study, would not have been the same, it a personality test had
been done, and people would of been thrown into a roll that was opposite of there
personality!

Prisoners and Cognitive Dissonance

Filed under: Prison life skepticcon @ 5:09 pm

Tags: Carol Tavris, cognitive dissonance, criminal psychology, Elliot Aronson, Mistakes Were
Made, prisoners, recidivism
I just read an excellent book by a couple of social psychologists, Carol Tavris and Elliot
Aronson. Its called: Mistakes Were Made (but not by me). The subtitle is: Why We Justify
Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts.
The authors talk about cognitive dissonance, which for the purpose of this article is basically
the conflict a person feels when they do something bad. They think something along the lines of,
Im a decent, intelligent person; how could I have done something like this? Rather than admit
they made a mistake especially if its a grievous mistake that would cause them
embarrassment, shame, and guilt they find ways to reduce the dissonance by justifying the act.
For instance, if someone cheats on their tax return, they might say: Well, everyone does it, so
Id be a fool not to. Plus, the IRS screws us anyway, so we need to take a little bit when we
can. Or if someone cheats on their spouse or betrays a coworker, they might say: Well, they
deserved it for being such a bastard. Im not a bad person. Theyre the bad person because I
would never do something like this to a good person, would I? Its a natural response, a coping
mechanism that people have to avoid harmful feelings of inadequacy. After all, most people find
it difficult to admit that theyve done something really stupid and/or cruel.
So rather than take responsibility, they give excuses and invent justifications. Instead of
admitting they broke the rules by running a red light, they just give an excuse like, I was in a
hurry. Instead of admitting that they did something awful like have sex with one of their
underage students, they blame it on a frigid spouse and depression. For making anti-Semitic
remarks, they say the alcohol did it. For drunk driving, they blame personal problems in their
life. The news was recently chock full of people reducing their dissonance about the hateful,
ludicrous things Reverend Jeremiah Wright has said they say that its okay because he also
says many wonderful things about love and faith in Jesus.
Here in prison, we have quite creative methods of reducing our dissonance. Its rare for a
prisoner to state that he is here because he broke the law, committed a felony, or victimized
someone. Instead, they say, Its not my fault. He started it. I have an addiction. I cant get a
regular job. I cant finish school. I just caught up. I had to help out my buddy. This life is all I
know. I have an anger problem.
Its rarest of all for prisoners to admit that they deserve a harsh prison sentence. Even when they
take responsibility, they usually say something like: Okay, I broke the law, but my lawyer still
screwed me. The judge was unfair. I dont deserve this much time. I dont deserve to live
without having a steak and a beer every once in a while. The prison rules are too strict. Maybe
Im a criminal, but I still dont deserve this. Even robbers like me deserve freshly-squeezed
orange juice every morning. Theyre reducing dissonance, justifying their felonies as not that
bad in the larger scheme of things. Prisoners avoid the notion that they may deserve a lengthy,
difficult, and Spartan prison term at all costs. Indeed, nearly every single one thinks they deserve
better prison conditions and a shorter sentence.

Ive been ranting about the need for prisoners to take personal responsibility for their actions for
a while, so this book hit home for me. It really causes you to examine the way you use
justifications and excuses in your life. I think every prisoner could benefit from reading it. I
wonder if a social psychologist has ever applied dissonance theory to prison inmates? I think it
would be an interesting case study.

Like this:
Like Loading...
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected from Attribution theory)
Jump to: navigation, search
This article possibly contains original research. Please improve it by verifying the
claims made and adding inline citations. Statements consisting only of original research
should be removed. (February 2015)
In social psychology, attribution is the process by which individuals explain the causes of
behavior and events. Attribution theory is the study of models to explain those processes.[1]
Psychological research into attribution began with the work of Fritz Heider in the early part of
the 20th century, subsequently developed by others such as Harold Kelley and Bernard Weiner.

Contents
[hide]

1 Background

2 Types
o 2.1 External attribution
o 2.2 Interpersonal attribution

3 Theories
o 3.1 Common sense psychology
o 3.2 Correspondent inference theory
o 3.3 Covariation model
o 3.4 Three-dimensional model

4 Bias and errors

o 4.1 Fundamental attribution error

o 4.2 Culture bias
o 4.3 Actor/observer difference
o 4.4 Dispositional attributions
o 4.5 Self-serving bias
o 4.6 Defensive attribution hypothesis

5 Application
o 5.1 Learned helplessness

6 Perceptual salience

7 Criticism

8 See also

9 References

10 Further reading

Background[edit]
Gestalt psychologist Fritz Heider is often described as the "father of attribution theory",[2] during
the early years of the 20th century.
In his 1920's dissertation Heider addressed the problem of phenomenology: why perceivers
attribute the properties such as color to perceived objects, when those properties are mental
constructs? Heider's answer that perceivers attribute that which they "directly" sense vibrations
in the air for instance to an object they construe as causing those sense data. "Perceivers faced
with sensory data thus see the perceptual object as 'out there', because they attribute the sensory
data to their underlying causes in the world."[3]
Heider extended this idea to attributions about people: "motives, intentions, sentiments ... the
core processes which manifest themselves in overt behavior".[4]

Types[edit]
External attribution[edit]

External attribution, also called situational attribution, refers to interpreting someone's behavior
as being caused by the situation that the individual is in. For example, if Jacobs car tire is
punctured he may attribute that to a hole in the road; by making attributions to the poor condition
of the highway, he can make sense of the event without any discomfort that it may in reality have
been the result of his bad driving.[citation needed]

Interpersonal attribution[edit]
Sometimes, when one's action or motives for the action are questioned, one has to give reasons.
Interpersonal attributions happen when the causes of the events involve two or more individuals.
[5]

Theories[edit]
Common sense psychology[edit]
From the book The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations(1958), Fritz Heider tried to explore
the nature of interpersonal relationship, and espoused the concept of what he called "common
sense" or "nave psychology". In his theory, he believed that people observe, analyze, and
explain behaviors with explanations. Although people have different kinds of explanations for
the events of human behaviors, Heider found it is very useful to group explanation into two
categories; Internal (personal) and external (situational) attributions.[6] When an internal
attribution is made, the cause of the given behavior is assigned to the individual's characteristics
such as ability, personality, mood, efforts, attitudes, or disposition. When an external attribution
is made, the cause of the given behavior is assigned to the situation in which the behavior was
seen such as the task, other people, or luck (that the individual producing the behavior did so
because of the surrounding environment or the social situation). These two types lead to very
different perceptions of the individual engaging in a behavior.[7]

Correspondent inference theory[edit]

Main article: Correspondent inference theory
Correspondent inferences state that people make inferences about a person when his or her
actions are freely chosen, are unexpected, and result in a small number of desirable effects.[1]
According to Edward E. Jones and Keith Davis correspondent inference theory, people make
correspondent inferences by reviewing the context of behavior. It describes how people try to
find out individuals personal characteristics from the behavioral evidence. People make
inferences on the basis of three factors; degree of choice, expectedness of behavior, and effects
of someones behaviors.[citation needed]

Covariation model[edit]
Main article: Covariation model

The Covariation model states that people attribute behavior to the factors that are present when a
behavior occurs and absent when it does not. Thus, the theory assumes that people make causal
attributions in a rational, logical fashion, and that they assign the cause of an action to the factor
that co-varies most closely with that action.[8] Harold Kelley's covariation model of attribution
looks to three main types of information from which to make an attribution decision about an
individual's behavior. The first is consensus information, or information on how other people in
the same situation and with the same stimulus behave. The second is distinctive information, or
how the individual responds to different stimuli. The third is consistency information, or how
frequent the individual's behavior can be observed with similar stimulus but varied situations.
From these three sources of information observers make attribution decisions on the individual's
behavior as either internal or external.
There are several levels in the covariation model: high and low. Each of these levels influences
the three covariation model criteria. High consensus is when many people can agree on an event
or area of interest. Low consensus is when very few people can agree. High distinctiveness is
when the event or area of interest is very unusual, whereas low distinctness is when the event or
area of interest is fairly common. High consistency is when the event or area of interest
continues for a length of time and low consistency is when the event or area of interest goes
away quickly.[citation needed]

Three-dimensional model[edit]
Bernard Weiner proposed that individuals have initial affective responses to the potential
consequences of the intrinsic or extrinsic motives of the actor, which in turn influence future
behavior.[9] That is, a person's own perceptions or attributions as to why they succeeded or failed
at an activity determine the amount of effort the person will engage in activities in the future.
Weiner suggests that individuals exert their attribution search and cognitively evaluate casual
properties on the behaviors they experience. When attributions lead to positive affect and high
expectancy of future success, such attributions should result in greater willingness to approach to
similar achievement tasks in the future than those attributions that produce negative affect and
low expectancy of future success.[10] Eventually, such affective and cognitive assessment
influences future behavior when individuals encounter similar situations.
Weiner's achievement attribution has three categories:
1. stable theory (stable and unstable)
2. locus of control (internal and external)
3. controllability (controllable or uncontrollable)
Stability influences individuals' expectancy about their future; control is related with individuals'
persistence on mission; causality influences emotional responses to the outcome of task.

Bias and errors[edit]

While people strive to find reasons for behaviors, they fall into many traps of biases and errors.
As Fritz Heider says, our perceptions of causality are often distorted by our needs and certain
cognitive biases.[11] The following are examples of attributional biases.

Fundamental attribution error[edit]

Main article: Fundamental attribution error
The fundamental attribution error describes the tendency to overvalue dispositional or
personality-based explanations for behavior while under-valuing situational explanations. The
fundamental attribution error is most visible when people explain and assume the behavior of
others. For example, if a person is overweight, a persons first assumption might be that they
have a problem with overeating or are lazy and not that they might have a medical reason for
being heavier set.[12]
The core process assumptions of attitude construction models are mainstays of social cognition
research and are not controversialas long as we talk about "judgment". Once the particular
judgment made can be thought of as a person's "attitude", however, construal assumptions elicit
discomfort, presumably because they dispense with the intuitively appealing attitude concept.[13]

Culture bias[edit]
Main article: Culture bias
People in individualist cultures, generally Anglo-America and Anglo-Saxon European societies,
value individuals, personal goals, and independence. People in collectivist cultures see
individuals as members of groups such as families, tribes, work units, and nations, and tend to
value conformity and interdependence. This cultural trait is common in Asia, traditional native
American societies, and Africa.
Research shows that culture, either individualist or collectivist, affects how people make
attributions.[14]
People from individualist cultures are more inclined to make fundamental-attribution error than
people from collectivist cultures. Individualist cultures tend to attribute a persons behavior to his
internal factors whereas collectivist cultures tend to attribute a persons behavior to his external
factors.[citation needed]
Research suggests that individualist cultures engage in self-serving bias more than do collectivist
cultures, i.e. individualist cultures tend to attribute success to internal factors and to attribute
failure to external factors. In contrast, collectivist cultures engage in the opposite of self-serving
bias i.e. self-effacing bias, which is: attributing success to external factors and blaming failure on
internal factors (the individual).[citation needed]

Actor/observer difference[edit]

People tend to attribute other peoples behaviors to their dispositional factors while attributing
own actions to situational factors. In the same situation, peoples attribution can differ depending
on their role as actor or observer.[15] For example, when a person scores a low grade on a test,
they find situational factors to justify the negative event such as saying that the teacher asked a
question that he/she never went over in class. However, if another person scores poorly on a test,
the person will attribute the results to internal factors such as laziness and inattentiveness in
classes. The actor/observer bias is used less frequently with people one knows well such as
friends and family since one knows how his/her close friends and family will behave in certain
situation, leading him/her to think more about the external factors rather than internal factors.
[original research?]

Dispositional attributions[edit]
Main article: Dispositional attribution
Dispositional attribution is a tendency to attribute peoples behaviors to their dispositions; that is,
to their personality, character, and ability.[16] For example, when a normally pleasant waiter is
being rude to his/her customer, the customer may assume he/she has a bad temper. The customer,
just by looking at the attitude that the waiter is giving him/her, instantly decides that the waiter is
a bad person. The customer oversimplifies the situation by not taking into account all the
unfortunate events that might have happened to the waiter which made him/her become rude at
that moment. Therefore, the customer made dispositional attribution by attributing the waiters
behavior directly to his/her personality rather than considering situational factors that might have
caused the whole rudeness.[17]

Self-serving bias[edit]
Main article: Self-serving bias
Self-serving bias is attributing dispositional and internal factors for success and external,
uncontrollable factors for failure. For example, if a person gets promoted, it is because of his/her
ability and competence whereas if he/she does not get promoted, it is because his/her manager
does not like him/her (external, uncontrollable factor). Originally, researchers assumed that selfserving bias is strongly related to the fact that people want to protect their self-esteem. However,
alternative information processing explanation came out. That is, when the outcomes match
peoples expectations, they make attributions to internal factors; when the outcome does not
match their expectations, they make external attributions.[11] People also use defensive attribution
to avoid feelings of vulnerability and to differentiate himself from a victim of a tragic accident.[18]
An alternative version of the theory of the self-serving bias states that the bias does not arise
because people wish to protect their private self-esteem, but to protect their self-image (a selfpresentational bias). Note well that this version of the theory can predict that people attribute
their successes to situational factors, for fear that others will disapprove of them looking overly
vain if they should attribute successes to themselves.[citation needed]
For example it is suggested that coming to believe that good things happen to good people and
bad things happen to bad people will reduce feelings of vulnerability[citation needed]. This belief

would have side-effects of blaming the victim even in tragic situations.[11] When a mudslide
destroys several houses in a rural neighborhood, a person living in a more urban setting might
blame the victims for choosing to live in a certain area or not building a safer, stronger house.
Another example of attributional bias is optimism bias in which most people believe positive
events happen to them more often than to others and that negative events happen to them less
than to minor others. For example, smokers on average believe they are less likely to get lung
cancer than other smokers.[19]

Defensive attribution hypothesis[edit]

Main article: Defensive attribution hypothesis
The defensive attribution hypothesis is a social psychological term referring to a set of beliefs
held by an individual with the function of defending themselves from concern that they will be
the cause or victim of a mishap. Commonly, defensive attributions are made when individuals
witness or learn of a mishap happening to another person. In these situations, attributions of
responsibility to the victim or harm-doer for the mishap will depend upon the severity of the
outcomes of the mishap and the level of personal and situational similarity between the
individual and victim. More responsibility will be attributed to the harm-doer as the outcome
becomes more severe, and as personal or situational similarity decreases.[18]
An example of defensive attribution is the just-world hypothesis, which is where "good things
happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people". People believe in this in order to
avoid feeling vulnerable to situations that they have no control over. However, this also leads to
blaming the victim even in a tragic situation.[11] When people hear someone died from a car
accident, they decide that the driver was drunk at the time of the accident, and so they reassure
themselves that an accident will never happen to them. Despite the fact there was no other
information provided, people will automatically attribute that the accident was the driver's fault
due to an internal factor (in this case, deciding to drive while drunk), and thus they would not
allow it to happen to themselves.
Another example of defensive attribution is optimism bias, in which people believe positive
events happen to them more often than to others and that negative events happen to them less
often than to others. Too much optimism leads people to ignore some warnings and precautions
given to them. For example, smokers believe that they are less likely to get lung cancer than
other smokers.[19]

Application[edit]
Learned helplessness[edit]
Main article: Learned helplessness
The concept of learned helplessness emerged from animal research in which psychologists
Martin Seligman and Steven F. Maier discovered that dogs classically conditioned to an
electrical shock which they could not escape, subsequently failed to attempt to escape an

avoidable shock in a similar situation. [20] They argued that learned helplessness applied to human
psychopathology. In particular, individuals who attribute negative outcomes to internal, stable
and global factors reflect a view in which they have no control over their situation. It is
suggested that this aspect of not attempting to better a situation exacerbates negative mood, and
may lead to clinical depression and related mental illnesses.[21]

Perceptual salience[edit]
Main article: Perceptual salience
When people try to make attributions about another's behavior, their information focuses on the
individual. Their perception of that individual is lacking most of the external factors which might
affect the individual. The gaps tend to be skipped over and the attribution is made based on the
perception information most salient. The most salient perceptual information dominates a
person's perception of the situation.[22]
For individuals making behavioral attributions about themselves, the situation and external
environment are entirely salient, but their own body and behavior are less so. This leads to the
tendency to make an external attribution in regard to their own behavior.[23]

Home

Help

Log InLog In

Cart (0)

 About APA
Topics
Publications & Databases
Psychology Help Center
News & Events
Science
Education
Careers
Membership
Home // Psychological Science // Research in Action // Demonstrating the Power of
Social...

EMAIL

PRINT

true

Demonstrating the Power of Social Situations via a

Simulated Prison Experiment
In 1971, a team of psychologists designed and executed an unusual experiment
that used a mock prison setting, with college students role-playing prisoners and
guards to test the power of the social situation to determine behavior. The research,
known as the Stanford Prison Experiment, has become a classic demonstration of
situational power to influence individual attitudes, values and behavior. So extreme,
swift and unexpected were the transformations of character in many of the
participants that this study -- planned to last two-weeks -- had to be terminated by
the sixth day.
Findings

A person-centered analysis of human behavior attributes most behavior change, in positive or

negative directions, to internal, dispositional features of individuals. The factors commonly
believed to direct behavior are to be found in the operation of genes, temperament, personality
traits, personal pathologies and virtues. A situation-centered approach, in contrast, focuses on
factors external to the person, to the behavioral context in which individuals are functioning.
Although human behavior is almost always a function of the interaction of person and situation,
social psychologists have called attention to the attributional biases in much of psychology and
among the general public that overestimates the importance of dispositional factors while
underestimating situational factors. This "fundamental attribution error" they argue, leads to a
misrepresentation of both causal determinants and means for modifying undesirable behavior
patterns. Research by social psychologist Stanley Milgram, PhD, (1974; see also Blass, 1999)
was one of the earliest demonstrations of the extent to which a large sample of ordinary
American citizens could be led to blindly obey unjust authority in delivering extreme levels of
shock to an innocent "victim."
The Stanford Prison Experiment extended that analysis to demonstrate the surprisingly profound
impact of institutional forces on the behavior of normal, healthy participants. Philip Zimbardo,
PhD, and his research team of Craig Haney, Curtis Banks, David Jaffe, and ex convict
consultant, Carlo Prescott (Zimbardo, Haney, Banks, & Jaffe, 1973) designed a study that
separated the usual dispositional factors among correctional personnel and prisoners from the
situational factors that characterize many prisons. They wanted to determine what prison-like
settings bring out in people that are not confounded by what people bring into prisons. They
sought to discover to what extent the violence and anti-social behaviors often found in prisons
can be traced to the "bad apples" that go into prisons or to the "bad barrels" (the prisons
themselves) that can corrupt behavior of even ordinary, good people.
The study was conducted this way: College students from all over the United States who
answered a city newspaper ad for participants in a study of prison life were personally
interviewed, given a battery of personality tests, and completed background surveys that enabled

the researchers to pre-select only those who were mentally and physically healthy, normal and
well adjusted. They were randomly assigned to role-play either prisoners or guards in the
simulated prison setting constructed in the basement of Stanford University's Psychology
Department. The prison setting was designed as functional simulation of the central features
present in the psychology of imprisonment (Zimbardo, Maslach, & Haney, 1999). Read a full
description of the methodology, chronology of daily events and transformations of human
character that were revealed.
The major results of the study can be summarized as: many of the normal, healthy mock
prisoners suffered such intense emotional stress reactions that they had to be released in a matter
of days; most of the other prisoners acted like zombies totally obeying the demeaning orders of
the guards; the distress of the prisoners was caused by their sense of powerlessness induced by
the guards who began acting in cruel, dehumanizing and even sadistic ways. The study was
terminated prematurely because it was getting out of control in the extent of degrading actions
being perpetrated by the guards against the prisoners - all of whom had been normal, healthy,
ordinary young college students less than a week before.
Significance
The Stanford Prison Experiment has become one of psychology's most dramatic
illustrations of how good people can be transformed into perpetrators of evil, and
healthy people can begin to experience pathological reactions - traceable to
situational forces. Its messages have been carried in many textbooks in the social
sciences, in classroom lectures across many nations, and in popular media
renditions. Its web site has gotten over 15 million unique page views in the past four
years, and more than a million a week in the weeks following the expose of the
abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American Military Police army reservists in Abu Ghraib
Prison.
Practical Application

The lessons of the Stanford Prison Experiment have gone well beyond the classroom (Haney &
Zimbardo, 1998). Zimbardo was invited to give testimony to a Congressional Committee
investigating the causes of prison riots (Zimbardo, 1971), and to a Senate Judiciary Committee
on crime and prisons focused on detention of juveniles (Zimbardo, 1974). Its chair, Senator Birch
Bayh, prepared a new law for federal prisons requiring juveniles in pre-trial detention to be
housed separately from adult inmates (to prevent their being abused), based on the abuse
reported in the Stanford Prison Experiment of its juveniles in the pre-trial detention facility of the
Stanford jail.
A video documentary of the study, "Quiet Rage: the Stanford Prison Experiment," has been used
extensively by many agencies within the civilian and military criminal justice system, as well as
in shelters for abused women. It is also used to educate role-playing military interrogators in the

Navy SEAR program (SURVIVAL, EVASION, and RESISTANCE) on the potential dangers of
abusing their power against others who role-playing pretend spies and terrorists (Zimbardo,
Personal communication, fall, 2003, Annapolis Naval College psychology staff).
The eerily direct parallels between the sadistic acts perpetrator by the Stanford Prison
Experiment guard and the Abu Ghraib Prison guards, as well as the conclusions about situational
forces dominating dispositional aspects of the guards' abusive behavior have propelled this
research into the national dialogue. It is seen as a relevant contribution to understanding the
multiple situational causes of such aberrant behavior. The situational analysis of the Stanford
Prison Experiment redirects the search for blame from an exclusive focus on the character of an
alleged "few bad apples" to systemic abuses that were inherent in the "bad barrel" of that
corrupting prison environment.
search

blogpost

Beautiful Minds

Insights into intelligence, creativity, and the mind

About

Contact

An Important but Rarely Discussed Lesson of the Stanford

Prison Experiment
By Scott Barry Kaufman | August 27, 2015
|

Any man can withstand adversity; if you want to test his character, give him power.
Abraham Lincoln
I recently watched the movie adaptation of the Stanford Prison Experiment. Like most reviewers,
I found it harrowing. But as a psychologist, I also found it revealing. With my eyes glued to the
screen in rapt attention, heart racing, I became obsessed with understanding what really was
going on, and the lessons we can glean from such an experiment gone so horribly wrong.
The standard story, given by the experimenter Philip Zimbardo, is that the experiment is a lesson
about how everyday people (and groups consisting of everyday people), when given too much
power, can become sadistic tyrants. In a recent article for The New Yorker, Maria Konnikova
casts some doubt on that conclusion, arguing that the real lesson is the power of institutions to
shape behavior, and how people are shaped by those preexisting expectations.
While this is certainly a valuable lesson, I believe another crucial variable at play that is rarely
mentioned by commentators of the prison experiment or even in psychology textbooks is the
person. Yes, power corrupts. But power does not corrupt everyone equally.
There's no way the small group of participants in the Stanford Prison Experiment represented the
full range of human personality variation. For one, these were young males. Already, there is
going to be higher levels of testosterone, on average, than most other populations. But there's
also the issue that these participants actively sought out participation in a study having to do with
prison. Research published in 2007 found that people who responded to an ad to be part of a
study on "prison life" scored higher on tests of aggressiveness, authoritarianism,
machiavellianism, narcissism, and social dominance, and lower on measures of empathy and
altruism.
But even among the small sample of young male participants in the Stanford Prison
Experiment, there was great variability in how people responded to power. Some guards were
particularly cruel, whereas others could barely take the cruelty and offered to go on errands,

while still others were actively kind to the prisoners, fulfilling their requests. Let's also not forget
the hero of the film, Zimbardo's graduate student Christina Maslach, who recoiled in horror at
the sight of how the participants were treated in the experiment.
I fear it's all too easy for us to focus our attention on that one loud, brash person who abuses
power while ignoring the majority who were not nearly as cruel. Zimbardo has remarked that he
was afraid he would be in for a very long and boring experiment. I suspect that if "Cool Hand
Luke" didn't sign up for the experiment, the experiment would indeed have lasted the full two
weeks. People would have generally followed the rules, and we probably wouldn't have had a
movie made after it.

***
Since the Stanford Prison Experiment, we've learned a lot more about the psychology of
power. Here's something we've found: power isn't inherently good or evil.
Yes, it's true that power fundamentally alters perception. As Adam Galinsky and colleagues put
it, powerful people roam in a very different psychological space than those without power.
Power increases confidence, optimism, risk-taking, sensitivity to internal thoughts and
feelings, goal-directed behavior and cognition, and creativity.
But these are not necessarily bad outcomes. Put to good use, power can have an incredibly
positive effect on people. There are so many compassionate teachers, bosses, politicians,
humanitarians, and others who wield power, who genuinely want to make the world a better
place.
I think a really important point here is that power amplifies the person. It gives already existing
personality dispositions and tendencies a louder voice, and increases the chances that these
tendencies will be given fuller expression. Thus, we must consider interactions between the
person and the situation. As Galinsky and colleagues point out, "the situation loses its suffocating

hold over the thoughts and behavior of the powerful... and they are left with their own opinions,
beliefs, attitudes, and personalities to drive their behavior."
Research shows that activating the concept of power in men with an already-existing disposition
toward sexual harassment or aggression increases objectification of women. There's also an
emerging line of research on the "Dark Tetrad"-- which consists of the darker personality
dispositions of narcissism, psychopathy, machiavellianism, and everyday sadism. One study
found that when given the opportunity, everyday sadists (those with a higher appetite for cruelty)
killed bugs at greater rates than nonsadists, and were more willing to work for the opportunity to
hurt an innocent person. Similarly, when narcissists have their ego threatened (e.g., are insulted),
they are much more likely to increase aggression, even increasing aggression on innocent
bystanders.
Not just anyone put in a position of power will hurt others, however. Serena Chen and
colleagues found that those with an exchange relationship orientation (who focus on tit for tat)
engaged in more self-serving behaviors when given power, whereas those with a communal
relationship orientation (who take into account other people's needs and feelings when making a
decision) demonstrated greater generosity when given power.
***
So what, if anything, can we do to decrease the likelihood of power leading to bad behavior?
One interesting reversal to the finding that power amplifies the person is that when people in
positions of power are given explicit and salient goals, the situation becomes much more
important, and can override people's innate dispositions.* Perhaps we can refocus people's
tendencies in a positive direction by providing them with clear prosocial goals.
This suggestion acknowledges the fact that no one is all good or all bad; all of us have many
sides. Even people who abuse power most certainly have other, more prosocial sides that may be
unexplored. We must ask ourselves which side we most want to bring out of a
person. Zimbardo's experiment shines a light on the bad, but I could imagine an equally
persuasive study designed in such a way to show the incredible potential for good in just about
anyone when given power with prosocial goals.
Another way to bring out more positive outcomes is to simply put more people with prosocial
dispositions (e.g., high empathy and compassion) in positions of power and let them carry out
their already existing prosocial goals (e.g., desire to reduce violence, feed the hungry, etc.).
There are so many humane people in this world. In fact, most people are humane. Let's not let the
minority who abuse power make us forget this fact. I think the media as well as psychologists

could do a lot more to highlight the more uplifting and hopeful segments of humanity. As Jimmy
Carter once said, "What are the things that you can't see that are important? I would say justice,
truth, humility, service, compassion, love. You can't see any of those, but they're the guiding
lights of a life."
Recognizing that power is not inherently good or bad, we can try to stack the deck as much as
possible to harness the incredible power of power. As Galinsky and colleagues so eloquently put
it,
"Perhaps human accomplishment is as much about the cans and cannots as it is the haves and the
have-nots. Although power is often thought of as a pernicious force that corrupts those who
possess it, it is the protection from the situational influence demonstrated here that helps
powerful individuals surmount social obstacles and reach greater heights of creativity to express
the unpopular ideals of today that can lead others to the horizons of tomorrow."
(C) 2015 Scott Barry Kaufman, All Rights Reserved
* This is another valuable lesson of the Stanford Prison Experiment: the power of goals from
authority figures. Experimenters like Zimbardo are in a position of power themselves, and are
responsible for not abusing that power. This was also a lesson of the famous Milgram
experiment. In the Stanford Prison Experiment, there was no ethical oversight. Zimbardo took on
the role of the prisoner superintendent, and explicitly told the guards to gain control over the
prisoners. In some cases, he encouraged the priosoners to abuse the guards. In a telling attempt to
replicate the Stanford Prison Experiment, the BBC found that the prisoners worked together
to overthrow the guards, who were ambivalent about their roles in the first place. The difference
between the experiments? The experimenters were held accountable, as the BBC study had an
ethical committee that continually monitored the study to make sure it didn't get out of hand.
Also, there was even some uncertainty about roles. At least in the beginning, prisoners were told
that they might be able to become guards. Research shows that in environments in which
authority is unstable, or at least perceived as unstable, being in a position of low power can
actually be empowering. As one group of researchers put it, "For low power individuals, power
instability is empowering, leading them to act and behave as high power individuals... Having
unstable low power leads to feelings of confidence and self-efficacy, especially when low power
individuals can gain power by being creative. They may be more confident about their abilities
and also perceive that they have the 'power to change their situation." I agree with other
psychologists that the original message of the Stanford Prison Experiment-- that groups are bad,
and that people in power automatically abuse power-- is far too simplistic.

STANFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT

The Menace Within ,

What happened in the basement of the psych building 40 years ago shocked the world.
How do the guards, prisoners and researchers in the Stanford Prison Experiment feel
about it now?
It began with an ad in the classifieds.
Male college students needed for psychological study of prison life. $15 per day for 1-2 weeks.
More than 70 people volunteered to take part in the study, to be conducted in a fake prison
housed inside Jordan Hall, on Stanford's Main Quad. The leader of the study was 38-year-old
psychology professor Philip Zimbardo. He and his fellow researchers selected 24 applicants and
randomly assigned each to be a prisoner or a guard.
Zimbardo encouraged the guards to think of themselves as actual guards in a real prison. He
made clear that prisoners could not be physically harmed, but said the guards should try to create
an atmosphere in which the prisoners felt "powerless."
The study began on Sunday, August 17, 1971. But no one knew what, exactly, they were getting
into.
Forty years later, the Stanford Prison Experiment remains among the most notableand
notoriousresearch projects ever carried out at the University. For six days, half the study's
participants endured cruel and dehumanizing abuse at the hands of their peers. At various times,
they were taunted, stripped naked, deprived of sleep and forced to use plastic buckets as toilets.
Some of them rebelled violently; others became hysterical or withdrew into despair. As the
situation descended into chaos, the researchers stood by and watcheduntil one of their
colleagues finally spoke out.
The experiment is still a source of controversy and contentioneven among those who took part
in it. Here, in their own words, some of the key players in the drama reflect on their roles and
how those six days in August changed their lives.
THE SUPERINTENDENT

Phil Zimbardo

After the end of the first day, I said, "There's nothing here. Nothing's
happening." The guards had this antiauthority mentality. They felt awkward in their uniforms.
They didn't get into the guard mentality until the prisoners started to revolt. Throughout the
experiment, there was this conspiracy of denialeveryone involved was in effect denying that
this was an experiment and agreeing that this is a prison run by psychologists. Christina Maslach,
who had just finished her PhD, came down the night before
. The prisoners come out, and the guards put bags over their heads, chain their feet together and
make them put their hands on each other's shoulders, like a chain gang. They're yelling and
cursing at them. Christina starts tearing up. She said, "I can't look at this." I ran after her and we
had this argument outside Jordan Hall. She said, "It's terrible what you're doing to these boys.
How can you see what I saw and not care about the suffering?" But I didn't see what she saw.
And I suddenly began to feel ashamed. This is when I realized I had been transformed by the
prison study to become the prison administrator. At that point I said, "You're right. We've got to
end the study."

THE WHISTLE BLOWER

Christina Maslach

until I actually went down to the basement and saw the prison. I met one
guard who seemed nice and sweet and charming, and then I saw him in the yard later and I
thought, "Oh my God, what happened here?" I saw the prisoners being marched to go down to
the men's room. I was getting sick to my stomach, physically ill. I said, "I can't watch this." But
no one else was having the same problem.
Phil came after me and said, "What's the matter with you?" That's when I had this feeling like, "I
don't know you. How can you not see this?" It felt like we were standing on two different cliffs
across a chasm. If we had not been dating before then, if he were just another faculty member
and this happened, I might have said, "I'm sorry, I'm out of here" and just left. But because this
was someone I was growing to like a lot, I thought that I had to figure this out. So I kept at it. I
fought back, and ended up having a huge argument with him. I don't think we've ever had an
argument quite like that since then.
THE GUARDS
Dave Eshelman
Our social relationships are also very dependent on our ability to make accurate attributions. If a
new friend is acting in a negative way, is this a temporary problem due to her current challenges
or is this a consistent pattern of behavior for her? Your conclusions in this case are likely to
determine whether you continue to interact with this friend.

The fact that I ramped up the intimidation and the mental abuse without any real sense as to
whether I was hurting anybody? I definitely regret that. But in the long run, no one suffered any
lasting damage.

THE RESEARCHERS
Craig Haney
It really was a unique experience to watch human behavior transform in front of your
eyes. And I can honestly say that I try never to forget it. I spend a lot of time with real
prisoners and real guards, and having seen what I saw then, while a graduate student,
gave me respect for the power of institutional environments to transform good people
into something else.