Summary

75 applicants who answered the ad were given diagnostic interviews and personality tests to
eliminate candidates with psychological problems, medical disabilities, or a history of crime or
drug abuse.
The experiment had to be terminated after only 6 days due to the extreme, pathological behavior
emerging in both groups. The situational forces overwhelmed the dispositions of the participants.
Pacifist young men assigned as guards began behaving sadistically, inflicting humiliation and
suffering on the prisoners. Prisoners became blindly obedient and allowed themselves to be
dehumanized.
The principal Investigator, Zimbardo, was also transformed into a rigid authority figure as the
Prison Superintendent.
The experiment demonstrated the power of situations to alter human behavior dramatically. Even
good, normal people can do evil things when situational forces push them in that direction.

Psychological harm
Within hours of beginning the experiment, some guards began to harass prisoners. At 2:30 A.M.
prisoners were awakened from sleep by blasting whistles for the first of many “counts.”

The counts served as a way to familiarize the prisoners with their numbers. More importantly,
they provided a regular occasion for the guards to exercise control over the prisoners.

PHYSICAL TASKS
The prisoners were taunted with insults and petty orders, they were given pointless and boring
tasks to accomplish, and they were generally dehumanized.
The guards retaliated by using a fire extinguisher which shot a stream of skin-chilling carbon
dioxide, and they forced the prisoners away from the doors. Next, the guards broke into each
cell, stripped the prisoners naked and took the beds out.

The ringleaders of the prisoner rebellion were placed into solitary confinement. After this, the
guards generally began to harass and intimidate the prisoners.
Eating, talking, resting, even taking the toilet became a privelge.

Deindividuation may explain the behavior of the participants; especially the guards. This is a
state when you become so immersed in the norms of the group that you lose your sense of
identity and personal responsibility.
Learned helplessness could explain the prisoner’s submission to the guards. The prisoners
learned that whatever they did had little effect on what happened to them. In the mock prison the
unpredictable decisions of the guards led the prisoners to give up responding.

Lack of realism
Ecological validity refers to the degree of realism with which a simulated experimental setup
matches the real-world situation it seeks to emulate.8

The Stanford Prison Experiment is criticized for lacking ecological validity in its attempt to
simulate a real prison environment. Specifically, the “prison” was merely a setup in the basement
of Stanford University’s psychology department
The student “guards” lacked professional training, and the experiment’s duration was much
shorter than real prison sentences. Furthermore, the participants, who were college students,
didn’t reflect the diverse backgrounds typically found in actual prisons in terms of ethnicity,
education, and socioeconomic status.

None had prior prison experience, and they were chosen due to their mental stability and low
antisocial tendencies. Additionally, the mock prison lacked spaces for exercise or rehabilitative
activities.

Most of the guards later claimed they were simply acting.

Revelations by Zimbardo (2007) indicate he actively encouraged the guards to be cruel and
oppressive in his orientation instructions prior to the start of the study. For example, telling them
“they [the prisoners] will be able to do nothing and say nothing that we don’t permit.”
He also tacitly approved of abusive behaviors as the study progressed. This deliberate cueing of
how participants should act, rather than allowing behavior to unfold naturally, indicates the study
findings were likely a result of strong demand characteristics rather than insightful revelations
about human behavior.

Lack of validity
Unreliable proceudres and methodology
Acting participants some afraid to fail school or in a way that would help research
Fame breakdowns as they werent allowed to leave

Lack population validity /

Generalizabilty / sample bias

Lack of fully informed consent by participants as Zimbardo himself did not know what would
happen in the experiment (it was unpredictable).

Also, the prisoners did not consent to being “arrested” at home. The prisoners were not told
partly because final approval from the police wasn’t given until minutes before the participants
decided to participate, and partly because the researchers wanted the arrests to come as a
surprise.

However, this was a breach of the ethics of Zimbardo’s own contract that all of the participants
had signed.

Protection of Participants
Participants playing the role of prisoners were not protected from psychological harm,
experiencing incidents of humiliation and distress. For example, one prisoner had to be released
after 36 hours because of uncontrollable bursts of screaming, crying, and anger.
Withdrawal
Prisoners genuinely believed and even reinforced among each other, that they couldn’t leave the
experiment until their “sentence” was completed, mirroring the inescapability of a real prison

In the Stanford Prison Experiment, the guards exhibited abusive and authoritarian behavior,
using psychological manipulation, humiliation, and control tactics to assert dominance over the
prisoners. This ultimately led to the study’s early termination due to ethical concerns.

Participants were not fully aware of the nature of the experiment or the potential harm they may
experience. The participants were also not protected from harm, as the experiment caused
psychological distress and even trauma.

Furthermore, the experiment lacked scientific validity as it was not conducted in a controlled
environment. The researchers had a vested interest in the outcome of the experiment and may
have influenced the behaviour of the participants. The sample size was also too small to draw
generalisations about human behaviour.

Blurred boundaries between researcher and subject were one of the ethical issues raised by the
Stanford prison experiment.

Prisoners were kept in unsafe, unsanitary, and dehumanizing facilities. Several of them told
guards they wanted to leave, but they were refused. The three men who were removed from the
study were only allowed to when researchers thought they were too traumatized to safely
continue. One prisoner later lamented that he never sued the researchers over their ill treatment.
Zimbardo’s study wasn’t just unethical – it was illegal.

In recent years, the legitimacy of Zimbardo’s work has come under attack. Guards were briefed
beforehand and told that their role was to instill a feeling of fear and helplessness in prisoners.
They didn’t “naturally” come up with their acts of cruelty on their “own” – many were suggested
ideas by Zimbardo and his undergraduate student David Jaffe. In fact, Zimbardo and Jaffe even
served as superintendent and ward of the makeshift prison. It begs the question of whether
participants were merely acting how they thought experimenters wanted them to.
Considering the testimonies of the star guard and prisoner, the answer is most likely a firm yes.
Both stated that they treated it as an improv experiment.

Why care?
Reminder that we need to be more rigorous and responsible when conducting an experiment.
Participants place a lot of trust in researchers – thus, researchers must strive to be worthy of that
trust. Also, when we meddle to get particular results, we’ll miss equally interesting findings. The
Stanford Prison Study certainly doesn’t prove that any individual, if assigned a role, will
independently conform to it. It does however show that certain institutions and environments
demand sadism and tyranny, and some individuals are willing to work for them. Also, people are
far too willing to commit cruelty in the name of “greater good.”