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Further, the parallels between the abuses at Abu Ghraib and the events in the SPE have given our Stanford prison experience added validity,
The prosecutor and judge refused to consider any idea that situational forces could influence individual behavior.
attempting to understand the situational and systemic contributions to any individual’s behavior does not excuse the person or absolve him or her from responsibility in engaging in immoral, illegal, or evil deeds.
it had to be terminated prematurely—do
One of the dominant conclusions of the Stanford Prison Experiment is that the pervasive yet subtle power of a host of situational variables can dominate an individual’s will to resist.
deindividuation, obedience to authority, passivity in the face of threats, self-justification, and rationalization.
In all the research cited and in our real-world examples, there were always some individuals who resisted, who did not yield to temptation.
Evil consists in intentionally behaving in ways that harm, abuse, demean, dehumanize, or destroy innocent others—or using one’s authority and systemic power to encourage or permit others to do so on your behalf.
“knowing better but doing worse.”4
My Lai massacre in Vietnam, the horrors of Nazi concentration camps,
With public fear notched up and the enemy threat imminent, reasonable people act irrationally, independent people act in mindless conformity, and peaceful people act as warriors.
Sam Keen
Iris Chang’s
this morality is like a gearshift that at times gets pushed into neutral.
Albert Bandura.
“banality of heroism.”
Prisoners must remain silent during rest periods, after lights out, during meals, and whenever they are outside the prison yard. Prisoners must eat at mealtimes and only at mealtimes. Prisoners must participate in all prison activities. Prisoners must keep their cell clean at all times. Beds must be made and personal effects must be neat and orderly. Floors must be spotless. Prisoners must not move, tamper with, deface, or damage walls, ceilings, windows, doors, or any prison property. Prisoners must never operate cell lighting. Prisoners must address each other by number only. Prisoners must
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10. Prisoners will be allowed 5 minutes in the lavatory. No prisoner will be allowed to return to the lavatory within 1 hour after a scheduled lavatory period. Lavatory visitations are controlled by the guards. 11. Smoking is a privilege. Smoking will be allowed after meals or at the discretion of the guard. Prisoners must never smoke in the cells. Abuse of the smoking privilege will result in permanent revocation of the smoking privilege. 12. Mail is a privilege. All mail flowing in and out of the prison will be inspected and censored. 13. Visitors are a privilege. Prisoners who are allowed a
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17. Failure to obey any of the above rules may result in punishment.
collective identity to prisoners as something more than a collection of individuals trying to survive on their own.
Hellmann thinks it is all “fun and games.” He has decided to act like “hot shit” from now on, “to play a more domineering role,” as in a fraternity hazing or in movies about prisons, like Cool Hand Luke.
Some prisoners report that they felt the first signs of time distortion, feeling surprised, exhausted, and angry.
Ceros, at first uncomfortable in his uniform, now likes the effect of wearing silver reflecting glasses. They make him feel “safely authoritative.”
He felt that the main task of the guards was to help create an environment in which the prisoners would lose their old identities and take on new ones.
Will the arbitrary cruelty of the guards continue to increase, or will it reach some equilibrium point? When they go home and reflect on what they did here, can we expect them to repent, feel somewhat ashamed of their excesses, and act more kindly? Is it possible that the verbal aggression will escalate and even turn to more physical force?
using the prisoners as playthings.
Guard Ceros later told us that it was difficult to maintain the guard persona when he was alone with a prisoner going to, in, or from the toilet, because there were not the external physical props of the prison setting on which to rely.
1037 goes over the top with his call to violent resistance: “Fight them! Resist violently! The time has come for violent revolution!”
Paul-5704 talks about the first effects of the time distortion that is beginning to alter everyone’s thinking. “After we had barricaded ourselves in this morning, I fell asleep for a while, still exhausted from lack of a full sleep last night. When I awoke I thought it was the next morning, but it wasn’t even lunch today yet!” He fell asleep again in the afternoon, thinking it was night when he awoke, but it was only 5 P.M. Time distortion also got to 3401, who felt starved and was angry that dinner had not been served, thinking it was 9 or 10 P.M. when it was not yet 5 P.M.
“Stanford County Jail Prisoners’ Grievance Committee,”
8612 was indeed confused, as he revealed to us later: “I couldn’t decide whether the prison experience had really freaked me out, or whether I had induced those reactions [purposefully].”
Although in retrospect it seems like an easy call, at the time it was a daunting one. I was a 2nd year graduate student, we had invested a great deal of time, effort, and money into this project, and I knew that the early release of a participant would compromise the experimental design we had carefully drawn up and implemented. As experimenters, none of us had predicted an event like this, and of course, we had devised no contingency plan to cover it. On the other hand, it was obvious that this young man was more disturbed by his brief experience in the Stanford Prison than any of us had
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I had to intentionally shut off all feelings I had towards any of the prisoners, to lose sympathy and any respect for them. I began to treat them as coldly and harshly as possible verbally. I would not let show any feelings they might like to see, like anger or despair.”
“They don’t see it as an experiment. It is real and they are fighting to keep their dignity. But we are always there to show them who is boss.”
“wanting to punish those who did not obey so that they would show the rest of the prisoners the right way to behave.”
didn’t even think about quitting.”
That grant was originally given to fund empirical and conceptual research on the effects of anonymity, of conditions of deindividuation, and on interpersonal aggression.
It was our previsit manipulation of the visitors’ expectations that worked to create confusion about what behaviors were appropriate
“I continued to become more involved than on the preceding day. I enjoyed harassing the prisoners at 2:30 A.M. It pleased my sadistic senses to cause bitterness between us.”
“The only time I felt I could not properly play my role was with 819 and 1037, when they were in such obvious difficulty on some occasions. At these times, I was not as tough as I should have been.”
I met this challenge by going on a hunger strike, to refuse to eat anything, to get sick and they would have to release 416.
The guard ordered me to call another prisoner a ‘bastard,’ and call myself the same. The former I would never do, the latter of which would produce a logical paradox denying the validity of the former. He began as he always does before “punishments,” alluding to the hint in his vocal intonation that the others would be punished for my actions. In order to avoid their punishment and avoid obeying that command, I produced a reaction that would solve both by saying, “I will not use the word bastard in any meaningful way”—giving both he and myself a way out.10
Jane Elliott,
The whole thing was authentic, not make-believe at all.
‘people become the role they enact’; that guards become symbols of authority and cannot be challenged; and that there are no rules or no rights they are obliged to grant prisoners.
The prisoner, on the other hand, who is left to consider his own situation in regard to how defiant he is, how effective he is in keeping the experience away from him, comes face-to-face daily with his own helplessness.
There were a few times when I had forgotten the prisoners were people, but I always caught myself, realized that they were people. I simply thought of them as ‘prisoners’ losing touch with their humanity. This happened for short periods of time, usually when I was giving orders to them. I am tired and disgusted at times, this is usually the state of my mind. Also I make an actual try of my will to dehumanize them in order to make it easy for me.
Some guards seemed to really enjoy our agony.”
“When 416 refused to eat I was once again angered specifically, since there was no way to force the food down his throat, even though we let some other prisoners try. Andre [Ceros] made the prisoner hug and kiss and caress a day-old sausage after being made to sleep with it. I thought this was uncalled for. I would never ever make the prisoner do this.”
