Later in the experiment, as some guards became more aggressive, taking away prisoners' cots (so that they had to sleep on the floor), and forcing them to use buckets kept in their cells as toilets, and then refusing permission to empty the buckets, neither the other guards nor Zimbardo himself intervened. He instructed guards to find ways to dominate the prisoners, not with physical violence, but with other tactics, verging on torture, such as sleep deprivation and punishment with solitary confinement. Zimbardo himself took part in the study, playing the role of "prison superintendent" who could mediate disputes between guards and prisoners. "I had been conducting research for some years on deindividuation, vandalism and dehumanization that illustrated the ease with which ordinary people could be led to engage in anti-social acts by putting them in situations where they felt anonymous, or they could perceive of others in ways that made them less than human, as enemies or objects," Zimbardo told the Toronto symposium in the summer of 1996. Zimbardo's primary reason for conducting the experiment was to focus on the power of roles, rules, symbols, group identity and situational validation of behavior that generally would repulse ordinary individuals. Zimbardo's goal for the Stanford Prison study was to assess the psychological effect on a (randomly assigned) student of becoming a prisoner or prison guard.Ī 1997 article from the Stanford News Service described the experiment's goals in more detail: Solitary confinement was a small unlit closet. The only furniture in each cell was a cot. Prisoners were confined to a 6' x 9' cell with black steel-barred doors. Office of Naval Research, he conducted the Stanford prison study in which male college students were selected (from an applicant pool of 75).Īfter a mental health screening, the remaining men were randomly assigned to be "prisoners" or "guards" in a mock prison located in the basement of the psychology building at Stanford. In 1971, Zimbardo accepted a tenured position as professor of psychology at Stanford University. Main page: Stanford prison experiment Background
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