The Stanford Prison Experiment

LouieW

So I guess some people have described the Stanford Prison Experiment as a psychological experiment about what happens to people when they are exposed to an awful situation. It is also supposed to show how normal "good" people can and often do go bad when placed in the right context. Based on that idea, some have made comparisons between it and stuff like the abuse at Abu Ghraib.

I think that approach to the experiment is pretty messed up though. First off, I am not really a fan of generalizing about how normal people would do terrible things based on the Stanford Prison Experiment. While it is true that they weeded out people with medical or mental issues, all of the students who participated volunteered for an experiment on prison life. This might just be conjecture, but I figure that the students who would be willing to sign up for something like that might not be the most atypical ones around. Plus, going into the experiment, it seems like they would all have certain ideas of how prison life was supposed to be, so I would call it a stretch to say that they were blank slated normal people anyway.

To make matters worse, the researchers organizing the experiment seemed to want to make the prison experience as miserable as possible. Maybe stuff like forcing all of the prisoners to be blindfolded when they went to the bathroom, humiliating them, forcing them to wear only a smock, and putting them all in tiny cramped cells might affect how they and the guards behaved. It might not have, but I have a hard time buying the argument that the guards started abusing prisoners completely on their own. I think the reality is a lot more like the researchers knowingly or unknowingly encouraged the guards to start doing awful stuff and then blamed their actions on human nature rather then that encouragement.

Honestly, the thing that bugs me the most about the experiment is how it has been used to support the idea that personal responsibility is basically a joke since even good people will do bad things if they are put in the wrong situation. The Stanford Prison Experiment was a lot different from incidents like Abu Ghraib though. For example, in the Abu Ghraib case, the abuse took place in wartime and the guards' were a bit more unhinged from the get-go than the students were. Even if the two incidents were exactly the same, situations like them do not materialize out of thin air. Since people have to make them happen, it seems reasonable to me that at least some of those people can be held responsible for those events.

Moreover, I feel like blaming the abuse in Abu Ghraib or elsewhere on the situation itself ends up shifting that blame in a really wrongheaded way. Sure, it probably is fair to blame the supervisors of the prison for neglecting their duty, but that does not mean the guards themselves should be off the hook either, especially when that means making human nature into a scapegoat.

I am not sure if any of that made much sense. I guess it just bothers me when people act like good people are so easily corrupted and then provide some rather questionable evidence for it.

glennmagusharvey

I'm not sure how scientific that "experiment" was, but at the very least it does go to show that the human mind and human social interactions are really, really intruiguing and weird.