Philip Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment

The motto of Stanford jail experiment devised by the psychologist Philip Zimbardo It could be the following: Do you consider yourself a good person? It's a simple question, but answering it requires some thought. If you think that you are a human being like many other people, you probably also think that you are not characterized by breaking rules 24 hours a day.

With our strengths and weaknesses, most of us seem to keep certain ethical balance by coming into contact with the rest of humanity. Partly thanks to this compliance with the rules of coexistence, we have managed to create relatively stable environments in which we can all live together relatively well.

Philip Zimbardo, the psychologist who challenged human goodness

Perhaps because our civilization offers a framework of stability, it is also easy to read the ethical behavior of others as if it were something very predictable: when we refer to the morality of people, it is difficult not to be very categorical. We believe in the existence of good people and bad people

, and those that are neither very good nor very bad (here probably between the image we have of ourselves) are defined automatically tending toward moderation, the point at which neither one is greatly harmed nor is seriously harmed by rest. Labeling ourselves and others is comfortable, easy to understand, and also allows us to differentiate ourselves from the rest.

However, today we know that context plays an important role when it comes to morally orienting our behavior towards others: to verify this, we only have to break the shell of "normality" on which we have built our customs and practices. One of the clearest examples of this principle is found in this famous investigation, conducted by Philip Zimbardo in 1971 inside the basement of his faculty. What happened there is known as the Stanford jail experiment, a controversial study whose fame is partially based on the disastrous results it had for all its participants.

Stanford jail

Philip Zimbardo designed an experiment to see how people who had not had a relationship with the prison environment adapted to a situation of vulnerability in front of others. To do this, 24 healthy, middle-class young men were recruited as participants in exchange for pay.

The experience would take place in one of the basements of Stanford University, which had been fitted out to resemble a jail. The volunteers were assigned to two groups by lot: the guards, who would hold power, and the prisoners, who they would have to be confined in the basement for the duration of the experimentation period, that is, for several days. As he wanted to simulate a prison as realistically as possible, the inmates went through something of a process of arrest, identification and incarceration, All the volunteers' wardrobe included elements of anonymity: uniforms and dark glasses for the guards, and inmate suits with embroidered numbers for the rest of the volunteers. participants.

In this way an element of depersonalization in the experiment: the volunteers were not specific people with a unique identity, but formally became simple jailers or prisoners.

Subjective

From a rational point of view, of course, all these aesthetic measures did not matter. It remained strictly true that there were no relevant differences in stature and constitution between guards and inmates, and all of them were equally subject to the legal framework. What's more, the guards were forbidden to do harm to inmates and their role was reduced to controlling their behavior, making them feel uncomfortable, deprived of their privacy and subject to the erratic behavior of their guards. Ultimately, everything was based on the subjective, something that is difficult to be described in words but that equally affects our behavior and our decision-making.

Would these changes be enough to significantly modify the moral behavior of the participants?

First day in jail: apparent calm

At the end of the first day, nothing suggested that anything remarkable was going to happen. Both inmates and guards felt displaced from the role they were supposed to fulfill, in some way they rejected the roles assigned to them. However, soon after the complications began. During the second day, the guards had already begun to see the line blurring separated his own identity and role that they had to fulfill.

The prisoners, as disadvantaged people, took a little longer to accept their role, and on the second day A rebellion broke out: they placed their beds against the door to prevent the guards from entering to remove their mattresses. These, as forces of repression, used the gas from the fire extinguishers to end this small revolution. From that moment on, all the volunteers in the experiment they stopped being simple students to become something else.

Second day: the guards turn violent

What happened on the second day triggered all kinds of sadistic behavior on the part of the guards. The outbreak of the rebellion was the first sign that the relationship between guards and inmates had become totally asymmetrical: the guards knew each other with the power to dominate the rest and acted accordingly, and the inmates corresponded to their captors coming to implicitly recognize his situation of inferiority just as a prisoner who knows himself locked up between four would walls. This generated a dynamic of domination and submission based solely on the fiction of the "Stanford jail."

Objectively, in the experiment there was only one room, a number of volunteers and a team of observers and none of the people involved was in a more disadvantageous situation than the others before the real judiciary and before the police officers trained and equipped to be. However, the imaginary prison gradually made its way until it emerged in the world of reality.

Vexations become the daily bread

At one point, the vexations suffered by the inmates became totally real, as was the sense of superiority of the false guards and the role of jailer adopted by Philip Zimbardo, who had to shed the investigator's disguise and make the office assigned to him his bedroom, to be close to the source of problems he had to deal with. manage. Certain inmates were denied food, forced to remain naked or to make a fool of themselves, and not allowed to sleep well. In the same way, shoving, tripping, and shaking were frequent.

Stanford jail fiction it gained so much power that, for many days, neither the volunteers nor the researchers were able to recognize that the experiment should stop. Everyone assumed that what was happening was, in a way, natural. By the sixth day, the situation was so out of control that a notably shocked investigation team had to put an abrupt end to it.

Consequences of role play

The psychological imprint left by this experience is very important. It was a traumatic experience for many of the volunteers, and many of them still find it difficult to explain their behavior during those days: it's hard to match the image of the guard or inmate who left during the Stanford jail experiment and a self-image positive.

For Philip Zimbardo it was also an emotional challenge. The bystander effect it caused outside observers to accept what was happening around them for many days and to somehow consent to it. The transformation into torturers and criminals by a group of "normal" young people had occurred in such a natural that no one had noticed the moral aspect of the situation, despite the fact that the problems arose practically blow.

The information regarding this case was also a shock to American society. First, because this kind of simulacrum directly alluded to the very architecture of the penal system, one of the foundations of life in society in that country. But even more important is what this experiment tells us about human nature. While it lasted, Stanford Jail was a place where any representative of the Western middle class could enter and become corrupted. Some superficial changes in the framework of relationships and certain doses of depersonalization and anonymity were capable of demolishing the model of coexistence that permeates all areas of our life as beings civilized.

From the rubble of what had previously been etiquette and custom, no human beings capable of generating by themselves an equally valid and healthy framework of relationships, but people who interpreted strange and ambiguous norms of way sadistic.

The reasonable automaton seen by Philip Zimbardo

It is comforting to think that lie, cruelty and theft exist only in "bad people", people we label in this way to create a moral distinction between them and the rest of humanity. However, this belief has its weaknesses. Nobody is unfamiliar with stories about honest people who end up corrupting shortly after reaching a position of power. There are also many characterizations of "antiheroes" in series, books and movies, people of ambiguous morality who Precisely because of their complexity, they are realistic and, why not say it, more interesting and closer to us: compare Walter White with Gandalf the White.

Furthermore, when faced with examples of malpractice or corruption, it is common to hear opinions such as "you would have done the same if you were in their place. The latter is an unsubstantiated claim, but it reflects an interesting aspect of moral standards: its application depends on the context. Evil is not something attributable exclusively to a series of people with a mean nature but is explained largely by the context we perceive. Each person has the potential to be an angel or a demon.

"The dream of the reason produces monsters"

The painter Francisco de Goya said that The dream of the reason produces monsters. However, during the Stanford experiment monsters arose through the application of reasonable measures: the execution of an experiment using a series of volunteers.

In addition, the volunteers adhered so well to the instructions given that many of them still regret their participation in the study today. The great flaw in Philip Zimbardo's research was not due to technical errors, since all the measures of depersonalization and staging of a jail proved effective and everyone seemed to follow the rules in a beginning. His fault was that It started from the overvaluation of human reason when deciding autonomously what is correct and what is not in any context.

From this simple exploratory test, Zimbardo unwittingly showed that our relationship with the morality includes certain uncertainty quotas, and this is not something that we are always able to manage well. It is our most subjective and emotional aspect that falls into the traps of depersonalization and sadism, but it is also the only way to detect these traps and connect emotionally with the neighbor. As social and empathic beings, we must go beyond reason when deciding which rules are applicable to each situation and how they have to be interpreted.

Philip Zimbardo's Stanford prison experiment teaches us that it is when we give up the possibility of questioning mandates that we become dictators or voluntary slaves.

Bibliographic references:

• Zimbardo, P. G. (2011). The Lucifer Effect: the reason for the evil. Barcelona: Espasa.