If you've heard of the Stanford Prison Experiment, you already know the answer and you can go read an article on Cracked.com or something else if you want. Try this one about animal intelligence, it's pretty fascinating.
For the rest of you, let me lay down the basics: In 1971 Stanford University's psychology department decided to run an experiment studying the effects of roles in society, and how social expectations affect behaviour. They recruited 24 young, psychologically balanced men with no criminal records or health problems. They split them, via coin tosses, into two groups: Guards and prisoners. They started using only nine of each, with three of each held in reserve in case someone had to be replaced (which turned out to be a good idea).
The study was to run for two weeks, during which the prisoners would be forced into tiny cells and made to eat bad food, while the guards were to make sure that they didn't cause trouble and that they ate all their food. The guards were, for the record, not allowed to use physical force or injure the prisoners at any point. The guards weren't given much in the way of instruction beyond that. Both prisoners and guards knew that they'd be monitored the entire time.
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| What a fake prison guard looked like in 1971. |
- push-ups
- solitary confinement (a closet with no light)
- cleaning the toilets bare-handed
- having their beds removed
- loss of bathroom privileges
- being forced to go nude
On day four, prisoner #819 wasn't feeling well and refused to speak to a priest who had been brought in to talk to the prisoners as though he were actually visiting a real prison. The experimenter told 819 that he could go, at which point the other prisoners started to protest his being freed, chanting, "Prisoner 819 did a bad thing."
After the other prisoners started chanting, he refused to leave. He said he wanted to go back and prove to the others that he wasn't a bad prisoner. It was only when he was reminded that this was an experiment, not an actual prison, that he realized that he wasn't a bad prisoner. Hell, that he wasn't a prisoner at all. After that epiphany, 819 left happily.
On day four there were also rumours that prisoner 8612 was going to come back and break the prisoners out. The researcher, totally forgetting that he was a psychologist running an experiment and not a warden running a prison, went to the local police for assistance to stop the breakout. The police told him that their insurance wouldn't let them move the 'prisoners' to their jail. He "left angry and disgusted at this lack of cooperation between [their] correctional facilities".
Then came prisoner 416 to replace 819. He hadn't been through the gradual (but still remarkably quick) escalation of abuse that the guards were now subjecting the prisoners to. He was still just a regular guy taking part in an experiment. Basically, he caused trouble, and instead of seeing him as a reminder of the reality of the situation, he was branded (like 819 before him) a bad prisoner. He went on a hunger strike to protest the shabby treatment the guards were giving the prisoners, and got thrown in solitary confinement (a lightless closet) and was yelled at. He was only let out when the experimenter intervened.
So, after being in the experiment for about two days (and the closet for around 6x as long as the guards were allowed to keep someone in it), how did 416 feel? Did he feel angry? Did he want to quit the experiment? In his own words:
I began to feel that I was losing my identity, that the person that I called Clay, the person who put me in this place, the person who volunteered to go into this prison -- because it was a prison to me; it still is a prison to me. I don't regard it as an experiment or a simulation because it was a prison run by psychologists instead of run by the state. I began to feel that that identity, the person that I was that had decided to go to prison was distant from me -- was remote until finally I wasn't that, I was 416. I was really my number.So, no. He didn't want to quit, he became the prisoner they told him he was. In less than two days. After several hours locked in a dark closet with people yelling at him, his entire sense of self was disappearing. Like the rest of the prisoners, all he wanted to do was not get in trouble with the guards. The guards who, less than a week ago, had been guys willing to sign up for a psych experiment for $15/day.
I should, for the record, point out that anyone was allowed to leave the experiment whenever they wanted. All anyone had to do was ask to leave the study, and they would have been let go. But nobody did, because they had been told that they couldn't quit. Who told them that? Prisoner 8612.
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| I'd trust him after he had a breakdown, how about you? |
So, now that you've learned that you'll probably do whatever someone in authority tells you, and that you can go from a normal person to a totally obedient prisoner or a sadistic guard in less time than it takes to watch John Henry Timmis IV's movie The Cure For Insomnia, just because people tell you that you're one or the other... It makes you wonder what we can do to keep people from exploiting our natural tendency to do what we're told.
People: Scarily easy to manipulate as a whole in the correct circumstances.
Sources:
Official website of the Stanford Prison Experiment - all images taken from this source
Wikipedia
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