The Real Lesson of the Stanford Prison Experiment
They recreated the original ad, and then ran a separate ad omitting the phrase “prison life.” They found that the people who responded to the two ads scored differently on a set of psychological tests. Those who thought that they would be participating in a prison study had significantly higher levels of aggressiveness, authoritarianism, Machiavellianism, narcissism, and social dominance, and they scored lower on measures of empathy and altruism.
.. While it’s true that some guards and prisoners behaved in alarming ways, it’s also the case that their environment was designed to encourage—and, in some cases, to require—those behaviors. Zimbardo himself has always been forthcoming about the details and the nature of his prison experiment: he thoroughly explained the setup in his original study and, in an early write-up, in which the experiment was described in broad strokes only, he pointed out that only “about a third of the guards became tyrannical in their arbitrary use of power.” (That’s about four people in total.)
.. By the time Zimbardo published a formal paper about the study, in a 1973 issue of the International Journal of Criminology and Penology, a streamlined and unequivocal version of events had become entrenched in the national consciousness—so much so that a 1975 methodological critique fell largely on deaf ears.
.. The lesson of Stanford isn’t that any random human being is capable of descending into sadism and tyranny. It’s that certain institutions and environments demand those behaviors—and, perhaps, can change them.