The Stanford Prison Experiment had major ethical issues, but it did result in Zimbardo testifying to congress that what happened at Abu Ghraib prison was not a “bad apples” situation, but the inevitable result of putting a bunch of soldiers in charge of a prison with no real rules.
A quote from his book The Lucifer Effect (I haven’t read it, I got this from Wikipedia when I looked him up to see if I could get a quote from him talking to congress, which I couldn’t.):
“Good people can be induced, seduced, and initiated into behaving in evil ways. They can also be led to act in irrational, stupid, self-destructive, antisocial, and mindless ways when they are immersed in ‘total situations’ that impact human nature in ways that challenge our sense of the stability and consistency of individual personality, of character, and of morality.”
I often use his “experiment” as an example of bad science. He had plenty of good experiments, but that one ain’t one of them.
They knew it having problems by day 2, he didn’t call off the experiment until day 5. It didn’t follow a ton of best practices, even for the time. The only silver lining is the wealthy white college kids got to roleplay getting arrested in front of their families, which while not good science, is a pretty funny prank.
Please, look up the experiment. Also read Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy. If it doesn’t change your views on the U.S. prison system, then nothing will.
Was just reading about the failures of his “experiment” yesterday. Someone said he lied about the conditions, invalidating the results. I haven’t looked into that claim. What timing.
The book Humankind by Rutger Bregman goes into the details and is a fascinating read. Psychologists Haslam and Reicher did a follow-up “BBC Prison Study” in 2002 to test some of Zimbardo’s findings, and they didn’t find any of the really problematic behaviors that Zimbardo found (many of which were more or less coached or coerced). So it’s not necessarily that the results were invalidated, per se, and more that Zimbardo’s conclusions are not as ironclad as he made them out to be in his original paper. They simply weren’t repeatable once basic ethical safeguards were put into place for the safety of the participants. It kinda speaks to the wild west era of psychological research in the mid 20th century where there were no rules and people were free to do all manner of fucked up things that researchers could never get away with today. In some ways that period is useful because they allowed us to test some of our more fundamental understandings without the limitations placed on us by modern liability and psychiatric/psychological protection, but it can’t really be overstated how much damage was done to some of the subjects of those studies. Our modern system has matured in such a way that findings can more systematically and rigorously be tested because standardized practices are the norm and study subjects have basic safeguards across various disciplines.
For what it’s worth, Haslam, Reicher, and Zimbardo put out a joint statement that addressed some of the controversy surrounding their more or less conflicting results which essentially boiled down to the conclusion that both experiments are valid, though each has significant differences and limitations.
once basic ethical safeguards were put into place for the safety of the participants
That’s kind of the point, isn’t it?
If anyone wants a great video about the experiment, I recommend you watch this Vsauce video
