Quiddity, I’d like to apologize for the hostile tone of my last post. I shouldn’t assume I know what your intent was. But I would like an explanation of what you think is “clear”.
Heffalump, I really really really don’t want to go back over the same ground as that other thread ended up in. I will say, once again, that I have never believed that all people in prison are soulless sociopaths. But a few of them genuinely are and the one I happened to see on that day gave every sign of being one of them. If I thought that he was a typical prisoner I wouldn’t have had any reason to post about the experience. As for the thread title, I’ve always regarded the OP as the substance of the thread and the title as a short line to mark it - by necessity a lot of meaning can’t fit in the ten or so words that the title holds. A title like “To those who don’t think, if one accepts as valid a conclusion based in some degree on emotional feelings although balanced on the whole by an objective assessment of the facts as an acceptable form of thinking, that some but not all people who happen to be incarcerated but are not typical of all incarcerated people and in some cases are not incarcerated at all are different, and by different I don’t mean to declare I am feeling a moral superiority over these people, than you, assuming you are not in fact one of these people, and I” is a little unwieldy. If I worked in a WalMart and titled a thread “Customers suck” and then wrote a thread about some particular annoying customers, nobody would accuse me of believing that every customer in every store was bad because of the thread title.
I’d like to believe that this is true. But I think it’s pretty clear that Professor Zimbardo does not believe this. From his statements, some of which I quoted above, I think it’s clear he does believe that his “prison” was actually similar to a real prison and the behavior he observed was typical of what occurs in a real prison. And he has officially stated, right up to the present day, that the experiment he conducted in 1971 is still relevant to what is happening in prisons today.
Notice, for example, how Zimbardo never refers to his students as “students” when they were participating in the experiment. He always calls them “guards” and “prisoners” when he talks about the things they did that week. And he always calls them “students” when he talks about them before and after that week. It’s like he feels they literally became different people for those six days and what happened was in no way related to their identity outside of the experiment.
Would you accept the idea that the SS Guards who were killing people in Auschwitz were only like that because they were in Auschwitz? And that once Auschwitz was closed down, they went back to being normal people? Obviously, you wouldn’t based on what you wrote, but by Zimbardo’s logic, that would be the case - he would believe that the camp itself was the culprit and the people who worked there were forced to kill by the environment they were in.
Here’s the briefing Professor Zimbardo gave his students as they were assuming the roles of 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” Then he handed everyone a baton. I think it’s pretty clear Zimbardo was influencing the direction of the experiment right from its beginning.
One of the “prisoners” went on a huger strike. the guards started punishing his cell mates . He claimed the pressure to be a “good” prisoner was real and effective . Much of what happens in prison happened in the experiment. I wonder what the students involved would say about it today.
And you base this opinion on what? Professor Zimbardo, by his own admission, based his knowledge of prisons on watching Cool Hand Luke. I base my knowledge of prisons on working in them for a couple of decades.
There’s a great big difference between the environment forcing someone to do something and the environment influencing their behavior. I’ll give a real-life example. Where I work there are a million policies, rules and procedures. Everything from a requirement that time be accurately reported on timesheets to the factors to be considered in making decisions. There was a time when literally no attention was paid to the accuracy of timesheets. People would report that they worked a full 7 1/2 hour day when in reality they worked 2 or 3 hours. Not just one or two people- definitely the majority of people. Suddenly, when new management came in and started firing and suspending people, supervisors starting checking on the timesheets they signed, and more people started working the hours they were paid for. You can’t deny that the environment has an effect. Zimbardo might believe the environment was the culprit, but he has no particular expertise is assigning responsibility- that’s not the job of a psychologist. It’s his job to determine what influences behavior.
Sure, he was influencing the direction of the experiment. But which question do you think Zimbardo was trying to answer? He wasn’t trying to determine how people would act if they are given rules and expect to be held accountable for following them. “The purpose was to understand the development of norms and the effects of roles, labels, and social expectations in a simulated prison environment.” He deliberately created a situation in which there were no norms - and some apparently normal people became abusive while others did not participate, but also did nothing to stop it.
And of course the research is relevant to prisons today- those running the prisons still need to be certain that an environment which tolerates abuse is not permitted to exist. I’m certain the problem does exist in some places today- perhaps not prisons, but I’m sure it exists in some [not most] local jails and lock-ups.
The experiment kinda reminds me of a reality show. When you watch a reality show, you frequently see people acting out in ways that are very rare in real life. Same thing with the Jerry Springer show.
Part of it is that these shows select people who are somewhat flamboyant. Part of it also is the editing.
But I think part of it is that the people on the show understand that that they are there to play a role. The producers know that outrageous behavior = ratings and they subtly (or not so subtly) urge the people to act out.
If somebody was making a “prison experiment” reality show, it would probably end up a lot like the Stanford prison experiment did.
I have seen both a documentary movie and a movie in the form of a fictional account based on this experiment. I will see if I can come up with anything at IMDB.
Little Nemo, I trust fully that you know more about prisons than I do. I didn’t get the impression that he was saying that all prisons are like this. I think his point had more to do with what human beings are capable of doing when reenforced with similar conduct by others.
Does anyone remember the day that a crowd of guys in Central Park started snatching at young women’s clothing and it got out of hand? Women begged the police to help them and the police did nothing. People watching from the sidelines did nothing. I don’t know what finally broke it up.
It’s more about mob mentality than about how rotten prisons are.
I highly recommend both of the films. Fascinating! And the psychologist did get way out of line.
If Zimbardo’s experiment were an isolated thing, it wouldn’t prove much. But as other people have pointed out in this thread, other experiments have come to similar conclusions. In Stanley Milgram’s experiment, people were induced to deliver what they believed to be a potentially fatal electrical charge to a stranger because some guy with a lab coat and switchboard was standing over them asking them to do it. The blue eye/brown eye experiment also shows it.
As I said in the “Are prisoners different from us?” thread, the idea that many perpetrators of great evil are perfectly normal people has one of its most lucid statements in Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: The Banality of Evil. Wiki sums up the thesis quite well:
One interesting treatment is Jonathan Bennett’s article “The Conscience of Huckelberry Finn,” wherein he is discussing the connection between morality and sympathy. He gives an interesting quote from a speech Himmler gave to a group of S.S. generals. In it, he is talking about the struggle between killing thousands of Jews and still being a decent man, going home to your wife and kids and being a good husband and father, etc. He says:
The idea that many (perhaps most) normal people have the capacity for great evil, if put in the right (wrong?) environment is very plausible given all of these cases. Of course there are people who are put in such environments and resist, and engage in genuine heroism. But I frankly think the idea that some people are good and others bad, and that ceteris paribus this goodness/badness will manifest in most environments in which the person is placed, is simply a myth.
It is starting to look to me that you have taken Zimbardo’s conclusions to mean ‘all prisons are evil and therefore everyone who works in a prison will turn evil’. In other words, personally. There’s no need.
In your post about prison, it seemed very much that you were indeed saying that criminals are a different breed. It seems like you’re trying to make that point here, too. I see your explanation to H&R that that was not your intent, but it still seems that you’re trying to make a case that Zimbardo is intrinsically evil and that that was what was wrong with his experiment.
My theory about people? I don’t really have a theory about people - it’s a pretty broad subject to have a theory about.
But on this issue, I stand by what I have (repeatedly) stated:
Philip Zimbardo is not evil. He’s not a bad person. But he is, like most people, capable of doing bad things. He created a situation in which a group of people, including himself, did some bad things. But he was intellectually dishonest because rather than admit that the capability of doing bad things existed within himself, he externalized it and placed all the blame for the things he (and everyone else) had done on the environment they were in.
I don’t see any way you can read his work, including the quotes of his I have posted in this thread, and interpret his views any differently.
As for taking it personally, of course I take it personally. Obviously Professor Zimbardo has never met me as an individual. But he has made it clear that he believes nobody can work in a prison without sucumbing to immoral behavior. I work in a prison - his implication about my morality is clear. If it were just the uninformed opinion of one person, I’d dismiss it. But a lot of other people who don’t know any better listen to his beliefs and are influenced by them.
Odd then that I have never encountered that particular experiment (or the Milgram experiment) other than in the context of teaching that virtually everyone is capable of doing what they know themselves are ‘bad things’ - its just that some need active encouragement whereas others only need an absence of social restraint. If his intent was to blame everything on the external environment, he’s pretty much failed since his experiment is now used to demonstrate the need to keep a vigilant eye on the behaviour of even ‘good’ people like him.