The Stanford Prison Experiment by Philip Zimbardo

When role-playing assaults reality.

The motto of the Stanford Prison Experiment devised by psychologist Philip Zimbardo might be: Do you consider yourself a good person? It's a simple question, but answering it requires some thought. If you think you are a human being like many other people, you probably also think that you are not characterized by breaking rules around the clock.

With our virtues and with our faults, most of us seem to retain a certain ethical balance when we come into contact with the rest of humanity. Partly because of this compliance with the rules of coexistence, we have managed to create relatively stable environments in which we can all live relatively well together.

Philip Zimbardo, the psychologist who challenged human kindness

Perhaps because our civilization offers a maco of stability, it is also easy to read the ethical behavior of others as if it were something very predictable: when we refer to people's morality, it is difficult not to be too categorical. We believe in the existence of good people and bad people, and those who are neither very good nor very bad.and those who are neither very good nor very bad (this is probably where our self-image comes in) are defined by automatically tending towards moderation, the point at which neither one is too badly harmed nor the rest are seriously harmed. Labeling ourselves and others is comfortable, easy to understand and, moreover, allows us to differentiate ourselves from the rest.

However, today we know that context plays an important role when it comes to morally orienting our behavior towards others: to prove it, we only have to break the shell of "normality" in which we have built our habits and customs. One of the clearest examples of this principle can be found in this famous investigation, conducted by Philip Zimbardo in 1971 in the basement of his faculty. What happened there is known as the Stanford Prison Experiment, a controversial study whose fame is partly based on the disastrous results it had for all its participants.

Stanford Prison

Philip Zimbardo designed an experiment to see how people who had never been in a prison environment would adapt to a situation of vulnerability. to a situation of vulnerability to a situation of vulnerability compared to others. To do this, 24 healthy, middle-class young men were recruited as participants in exchange for pay.

The experiment was to take place in one of Stanford University's basements, which had been set up to resemble a prison. Volunteers were assigned to two groups by lottery: the guards, who would hold power, and the prisoners, who would be confined to the basement for the duration of the experiment, i.e. for several days. Since the aim was to simulate a prison as realistically as possible, the inmates went through something akin to a process of arrest, identification and incarceration, and the costumes of all the volunteers included elements of anonymity: uniforms and dark glasses for the guards, and inmate suits with embroidered numbers for the other participants.

This introduced an element of depersonalization in the experiment: the volunteers were not specific persons with a unique identity, but formally became simple jailers or prisoners.

The subjective

From a rational point of view, of course, all these aesthetic measures did not matter. It remained strictly true that between guards and inmates there were no relevant differences in height and build, and they were all equally subject to the legal framework. Moreover, the guards were forbidden to harm the inmates and their function was reduced to controlling their behavior, making them feel uncomfortable, deprived of their privacy and subject to the erratic behavior of their guards. In short, everything was based on the subjective, that which is difficult to describe in words but which equally affects our behavior and our decision making.

Would these changes be sufficient to significantly modify the moral behavior of the participants?

First day in prison: apparent calm

At the end of the first day, there was no indication that anything remarkable was going to happen. Both the inmates and the guards felt displaced from the role they were supposed to fulfill, in a way they were rejecting the roles they had been assigned. Before long, however, complications began to arise. By the second day, the guards had already begun to see the line blurring between their own identity and the role they had been assigned. their own identity and the role they were they were supposed to fulfill.

The prisoners, as disadvantaged individuals, took a little longer to accept their role, and on the second day a rebellion broke out: they placed their beds against the door to prevent the guards from coming in and removing their mattresses. These, as forces of repression, used the gas from the fire extinguishers to put an end to this small revolution. From that moment on, all the volunteers of the experiment stopped being were no longer just students, but something else..

Day two: the guards turn violent

What happened during the second day triggered all kinds of sadistic behavior on the part of the guards. The outbreak of the rebellion was the first symptom that the relationship between guards and inmates the relationship between guards and inmates had become completely asymmetricalThe guards knew they had the power to dominate the rest and acted accordingly, and the inmates reciprocated their captors by implicitly acknowledging their inferiority, as would a prisoner who knows he is locked up within four walls. This generated a dynamic of domination and submission based solely on the fiction of the "Stanford prison".

Objectively, in the experiment there was only one room, a number of volunteers and a team of observers, and none of the people involved were more disadvantaged than the others in the eyes of the real judiciary and the police officers trained and equipped to be so. Nevertheless, the imaginary prison gradually made its way into the world of the real.

Abuse becomes the daily bread.

At a certain point, the humiliations suffered by the inmates became totally real, as did the sense of superiority of the fake guards and the role of jailer adopted by Philip Zimbardo, who had to shed his investigator's disguise and make his assigned office his bedroom, in order to be close to the source of the problems he had to manage. Certain inmates were denied food, forced to remain naked or to make fools of themselves, and were not allowed to sleep well. In the same way, pushing, shoving, tripping and shaking were frequent..

The fiction of Stanford Prison gained so much power that, for many days, neither the volunteers nor the researchers were able to recognize that the experiment had to stop. Everyone assumed that what was happening was, in a sense, natural. By the sixth day, the situation was so out of control that a remarkably shocked research team had to bring it to an abrupt end.

Consequences of role-playing

The psychological imprint left by this experience is very important. It was a traumatic experience for many of the volunteers, and many of them still find it difficult to explain their behavior during those days: it is difficult to reconcile the image of the guard or inmate who left during the Stanford prison experiment with a positive self-image.

For Philip Zimbardo it was also an emotional challenge. The bystander effect meant that for many days outside observers accepted what was going on around them and, in a way, acquiesced to it. The transformation into torturers and criminals by a group of "normal" young people had occurred so naturally that no one had noticed the moral aspect of the situation, even though the problems came practically all at once.

The information concerning this case also came as a shock to American society. First, because this kind of simulacrum directly alluded to the very architecture of the criminal justice system. the very architecture of the penal systemone of the foundations of life in society in that country. But even more important is what this experiment tells us about human nature. For as long as it lasted, Stanford Prison was a place where any representative of the Western middle class could enter and become corrupt. A few superficial changes in the framework of relationships and certain doses of depersonalization and anonymity were capable of overthrowing the model of coexistence that permeates all areas of our lives as civilized beings.

Out of the rubble of what had previously been etiquette and custom did not emerge human beings capable of generating for themselves an equally valid and healthy framework of relationships, but people who interpreted strange and ambiguous norms in a sadistic manner.

The reasonable automaton as seen by Philip Zimbardo

It is comforting to think that lying, cruelty and theft exist only in "bad people," people whom we label in this way to create a moral distinction. moral distinction between them and the rest of humanity. However, this belief has its weaknesses. No one is unfamiliar with stories about honest people who end up corrupting themselves soon after rising to a position of power. There are also many characterizations of "anti-heroes" in series, books and movies, people of ambiguous morality who, precisely because of their complexity, are realistic and, why not say it, more interesting and closer to us: compare Walter White with Gandalf the White.

Moreover, when faced with examples of malpractice or corruption, it is common to hear opinions along the lines of "you would have done the same thing if you were in his place". The latter is an unsubstantiated statement, but it reflects an interesting aspect of moral standards: its application depends on the context. Evil is not something attributable exclusively to a series of people of a petty nature but is largely explained by the context we perceive. Every person has the potential to be an angel or a demon.

"The dream of reason produces monsters."

The painter Francisco de Goya said that the dream of reason produces monsters. However, during the Stanford experiment, monsters emerged through the application of reasonable measures: the execution of an experiment using a series of volunteers.

Moreover, the volunteers adhered so well to the instructions given that many of them still regret it today. many of them still regret today their participation in the study.. The major flaw in Philip Zimbardo's research was not due to technical errors, as all the depersonalization and staging measures of a prison proved effective and everyone seemed to follow the rules at first. His fault was that it was based on the overestimation of human reason in deciding autonomously in autonomously deciding what is right and what is wrong in any context.

From this simple exploratory test, Zimbardo inadvertently showed that our relationship to morality includes certain uncertaintyand this is not something we are always able to manage well. It is our more subjective and emotional side that falls into the traps of depersonalization and sadism, but it is also the only way to detect these traps and connect emotionally with others. As social and empathic beings, we must go beyond reason when deciding which rules apply to each situation and how they should be interpreted.

Philip Zimbardo's Stanford prison experiment teaches us that it is when we give up the possibility of questioning mandates that we become dictators or voluntary slaves.

Bibliographical references:

• Zimbardo, P. G. (2011). The Lucifer Effect: the why of evil.. Barcelona: Espasa.