DANGEROUS MOBS VS. WISE CROWDSknee-length smocks with no underwear, their ankles chained together.
The experiment was due to last two weeks, but was abandoned after
just six days. Several of the prisoners had breakdowns and many of the
guards had become sadistic and cruel, even ordering the prisoners to
clean out the toilets with their bare hands.
Zimbardo’s interpretation of the experiment was that it shows how
evil resides in the situation, not in individuals. If you create the circum-
stances where there is an enormous power differential between groups,
he argued, and if you allocate people to roles that are traditionally seen
as dominant or submissive, then they are likely to lose their individu-
ality and become consumed by those roles. In a case of life apparently
imitating the science, Zimbardo’s explanation seemed to be borne out
by the horrors that took place at the Abu Ghraib prison camp in Iraq
in 2004, when American guards abused their prisoners in sickening
What kind of a person applies for a prison study?
Philip Zimbardo has argued that his Stanford Prison Experiment showed
“the evil that good people can be readily induced into doing to other
good people”, and in recent years he has explained the Iraqi prisoner
abuse at Abu Ghraib in similar terms. But what if the participants in his
experiment weren’t “good people”? Perhaps the idea of participating
in a prison experiment, or working at an interrogation facility, appeals
to a certain type of character. Thomas Carnahan and Sam McFarland
suggested this might be the case in a 2007 study in which they posted
recruitment adverts in several campus newspapers, just as Zimbardo
had done. One advert invited male participants for “a psychological
study of prison life”; the other invited participants for “a psychological
study”. Again, just as Zimbardo had done, Carnahan and McFarland
omitted all participants with mental health problems or a criminal or
anti-social background. Crucially, when the pair compared the remaining
30 applicants to the “study of prison life” with the 61 volunteers for the
“psychological study”, they found the former scored significantly higher
on measures of aggression, authoritarianism, Machiavellianism, social
dominance, and lower on measures of altruism and empathy.
Contrary to Zimbardo’s situationist perspective, the finding is
compatible with a more interactionist view of human behaviour – one
that acknowledges that people’s personalities affect the situations
they find themselves in. Moreover, like-minded individuals are likely to
seek out similar situations. Carnahan and McFarland concluded that,
whether in Zimbardo’s study or in Abu Ghraib, similar characters may
have “mutually weakened each other’s constraints against abuse and
reinforced in each other their willingness to engage in it”.