Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment:

Recap and Discussion Questions

Here are some questions related to the Stanford Prison Experiment (“SPE”). Some questions
recap what happened in the study itself, while other questions are really discussion questions.
Several of these discussion questions come from Philip Zimbardo’s research team
( www.prisonexp.org/discuss.htm ).

Read all the questions now. After the video, be ready to share your thoughts in discussion.1

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Before you plunge into the discussion . . .

• Identify one person to keep you on time.
• Identify a second person to report on a theme from your discussion to the class as a
whole. This is not a recap of everything said, but rather, a description of key areas of
agreement and disagreement. It’s work to think about this while a discussion happens, so
don’t expect this person to say as much as others during the discussion.
• Identify a third person to keep you on topic, to make sure everybody’s participating, and
to facilitate the group’s decision about which questions to discuss.
Now you can plunge in!

1. Link what you see in this video to some key concepts we have covered so far in this
social psychology class. (Note: I suggest at least 10 minutes for this item so you can
peruse your notes, come up with thoughts, share ideas, evaluate the ideas)

2. What police procedures were used during SPE arrests? How did the procedures lead
people to feel confused, fearful, and dehumanized?

3. If you were an SPE guard, what type of guard would you have become? How sure are
you?

4. In the SPE, what prevented “good” guards from objecting to, or countermanding, the
orders from tough or “bad” guards?

5. If you were a prisoner, would you have been able to endure the experience? What would
you have done differently than those subjects did? If you were imprisoned in a "real"
prison for five years or more, could you take it?

1
If you happen to miss the Zimbardo video, you may want to visit the website which
describes the study (www.prisonexp.org ) .
6. Why did the prisoners try to work within the arbitrary prison system to effect a change in
it (e.g., setting up a Grievance Committee), rather than trying to dismantle or change the
system through outside help?

7. What factors would lead prisoners to attribute guard brutality to the guards' dispositions,
rather than to the situation?

8. At various points in the video, we see evidence that prisoners identify with their prisoner
numbers. This raises questions about identity. What is identity? Is there a core to your
self-identity independent of how others define you? How difficult would it be to remake
any given person into someone with a new identity?

9. How would young, middle-class, for the most part European-American women have
responded to a prison simulation like the SPE?

10. The video is entitled “Quiet Rage.” Why? Do you agree with this notion?

11. After the study, how do you think the prisoners and guards felt when they saw each other
in the same civilian clothes again and saw their prison reconverted to a basement
laboratory hallway?
Related question: In real life, is there such a thing as a role of “former prisoner”? How
does someone’s participation in society change if he or she has a record as an offender?

12. In what ways was it ethical to conduct this study? In what ways was it unethical? Was it
right to trade the suffering experienced by participants for the knowledge gained by the
research? (The experimenters did not take this issue lightly, although the video may
sound somewhat matter-of-fact about the events and experiences that occurred).

13. How do the ethical dilemmas is this research compare with the ethical issues raised by
Stanley Milgram's obedience experiments? Would it be better if these studies had never
been done?

14. If you were the experimenter in charge, would you have conducted this study? Would you
have terminated it earlier? Would you have conducted a follow-up study?

15. Knowing what this research says about the power of prison situations to have a corrosive
effect on human nature, what recommendations would you make about changing the
correctional system in your county, state or country?