Sociology and the Prison System

[Jade Tigress]

My daughter is taking Sociology and Psychology this semester. She told me about an experiment done at Stanford in the '70s. I looked it up and was blown away by it. Read til the end, it's amazing what happened and how it escalated to include parents, and the professors conducting the study, getting caught up in the "reality" of it.

Total power vs. loss of identity. Nothing has changed over the years in our prison system, and how others contribute to the way you perceive yourself in everyday life, it just makes me think.

What are your thoughts?

 

[punisher73]

WOW is all I can say, that experiment was flawed from the get go. I have literally booked HUNDREDS of inmates into the county jail and they have never gone through anything like that. I have also taken HUNDREDS of inmates to Jackson Prison for processing and they don't go through most of that.

All they did was simulate a POW camp and not a prison. Any further results they found would be applicable to that and not a regular prison. Unfortunately, any results that would be somewhat comparable are tainted by such a faulty design.

 

[MBuzzy]

Though I didn't read this particular article, so I don't know how it is spun, I have studied the case in depth. To the best of my knowledge though, the experiment is not intended to be extended or generalized about the actual prison system. They used the prison construct to place the experimentees into the right situation.

As far as I know, the biggest result of this experiment deals with people's tendancy to fall into their roles and with the horrible things that people will do when they are protected by their role. The guards fell into their roles and felt that they could be cruel without guilt because it was "part of the experiment" and the other guards were behaving the same way....so it was somehow ok. The prisoners also fell into their roles, at first, feeling that the abuse was just part of the experiment. The truly frightening part of it is just how FAST these things happened. The experiment couldn't even be finished because of how fast things escalated and built on each other.

Now look at Guantanamo bay and the reports of abuse there. There is no experimenter to call things off when it goes too far. But what this experiment proves is that while the justice system and military holds the individuals responsible for their actions....is it really their fault? Or it is some psychological hard wiring?

Look at the Milgram experiment...It is more proof of the attrocities that people will do when they feel that they can justify it to themselves and pass the blame.

The typical question in a class that examines these things is: "Would you do it? Would you be one of the guards who was beating prisoners? Would you go all the way to the fatal electric shocks?" Everyone always says no.....but when placed in the situation....the vast majority of people will. The participants in those experiments were not bad people....they were just people like you and me with the same sense or morals and right or wrong. Many of them regret their actions to this day and feel great remorse. Many of them say that they didn't even realize what they were doing....kind of scary.

 

[MJS]

Well, I'm with Punisher on this. I'm but a few pages into the article and I'm already shaking my head, because as he said, the 'experiment' is flawed..big time!! IMHO, the people who're doing this experiment, are using the movie type prison settings that are aired on TV, but do not give a real dipiction of what a prison is like. From the get go, the 'scene' is painted where its basically a living hell, the guards and warden are nut jobs, and the prison is some torture chamber.

From the article:

It should be clear that we were trying to create a functional simulation of a prison -- not a literal prison. Real male prisoners don't wear dresses, but real male prisoners do feel humiliated and do feel emasculated. Our goal was to produce similar effects quickly by putting men in a dress without any underclothes. Indeed, as soon as some of our prisoners were put in these uniforms they began to walk and to sit differently, and to hold themselves differently -- more like a woman than like a man.

I'm confused. A functional prison, not a literal one. Umm...if you're not giving the right setting, how can you get the right response? Considering that they don't shave your head, blindfold you, and make you wear a dress, how can you get a feel? You can't. The feel that you're getting is one that I describe above...one of a living hell, not the reality.

IMHO, this did nothing more, than what certain martial arts flicks show...a false picture of what the arts, or in this case, prison is like. No wonder we have people telling MAists, that they're violent, just like we have people who think that prison isn't the country club that it really is.

 

[MBuzzy]

I see what the contention is about it not being an accurate representation of a prison, but honestly, within psychological circles, this and the milgram experiments are considered two of the most important experiments in their field. These are also one of the major reasons behind the IRB (institutional review board) and the fact that there is a very long and difficult system for doing human experimentation.

They were trying to test how people react in prison type situation. When they say that they were not trying to create a literal prison, they mean just that. We're not talking about a typical federal prison. The researchers were more interested in how people react when put into a prison like situation. Their overall research goal was to try to understand "abusive" prison situation. They therefore had to create a situation in which the guards and prisoners were set apart and provide the catalyst for their experimentation.

"Zimbardo set up a number of specific conditions on the participants which he hoped would promote disorientation, depersonalization and deindividuation."

They were specifically trying to test how the experimentees would adapt to their roles and how they would react in this situation. The consequences of this experiment go FAR FAR beyond simply talking about prisons. In the beginning, they set out to understand the psychology behind abusive prison guards, but instead found a much higher generalizability to the human psyche in general and how we all fit into our roles and feel secure there. Also, and more importantly, the idea of the "Lucifer effect" that people in groups or in certain situations will do things that they would never even consider doing normally. It also was one of the first real experiments to show that by "de-humanizing" your subject, torture, humiliation, and a long list of other horrible things are much easier to do.

In recent years, it has shed a lot of light into the abusive situations in the Abu Ghraid prison. There are huge similarities to this experiment and it sheds a light into the psychology behind abuses like this.

The article is exactly right...this was never intended to represent a literal prison. It was an experiment...it was intended to create a certain situation and figure out how people respond. If they wanted to recreate a real prison....well why?? They could just go to one!

 

[jks9199]

Zimbardo has been very forthright and open about the mistakes made in the Stanford Prison Experiment and the problems with it. Bluntly -- you couldn't do an experiment like that today, in part because of the results of the experiment.

Was it a real, professional prison? No. Are correctional officers and deputies today, as a general rule, more professional than they were in the 70s? Absolutely. Without a doubt. Are the factors and the results useful and illuminating? Absolutely. In fact, I suspect that lessons learned here are a part of why COs today are more professional.

It's an experiment that I personally feel every law enforcement officer and correctional officer should be aware of. It tells us a lot about both submission to authority and being in authority.

 

[MJS]

I see what the contention is about it not being an accurate representation of a prison, but honestly, within psychological circles, this and the milgram experiments are considered two of the most important experiments in their field. These are also one of the major reasons behind the IRB (institutional review board) and the fact that there is a very long and difficult system for doing human experimentation.

They were trying to test how people react in prison type situation. When they say that they were not trying to create a literal prison, they mean just that. We're not talking about a typical federal prison. The researchers were more interested in how people react when put into a prison like situation. Their overall research goal was to try to understand "abusive" prison situation. They therefore had to create a situation in which the guards and prisoners were set apart and provide the catalyst for their experimentation.



They were specifically trying to test how the experimentees would adapt to their roles and how they would react in this situation. The consequences of this experiment go FAR FAR beyond simply talking about prisons. In the beginning, they set out to understand the psychology behind abusive prison guards, but instead found a much higher generalizability to the human psyche in general and how we all fit into our roles and feel secure there. Also, and more importantly, the idea of the "Lucifer effect" that people in groups or in certain situations will do things that they would never even consider doing normally. It also was one of the first real experiments to show that by "de-humanizing" your subject, torture, humiliation, and a long list of other horrible things are much easier to do.

In recent years, it has shed a lot of light into the abusive situations in the Abu Ghraid prison. There are huge similarities to this experiment and it sheds a light into the psychology behind abuses like this.

The article is exactly right...this was never intended to represent a literal prison. It was an experiment...it was intended to create a certain situation and figure out how people respond. If they wanted to recreate a real prison....well why?? They could just go to one!

Maybe I'm just still missing something here, but even with this other experiment, it is still, IMHO, putting people in a different mindset, from what prison life is like, not some distorted view like we see on TV.

You said it yourself in the 2nd paragraph. They were trying to get a reaction from a prison setting, but this experiment was not a real prison setting. This experiment consisted of sadistic behavior from the acting guards, warden and anyone else that was part of the 'prison staff.'

 

[MBuzzy]

Maybe I'm just still missing something here, but even with this other experiment, it is still, IMHO, putting people in a different mindset, from what prison life is like, not some distorted view like we see on TV.

You said it yourself in the 2nd paragraph. They were trying to get a reaction from a prison setting, but this experiment was not a real prison setting. This experiment consisted of sadistic behavior from the acting guards, warden and anyone else that was part of the 'prison staff.'

They were trying to determine how people react in submissive and dominance type situations to gain further insight into ABUSIVE prison environments.

You are 100% correct, this is not a true prison environment. If that is what they wanted to model, they could have gone into a real prison. They used a prison setting yes, based loosely on a real prison, but they were attempting to get a different reaction than your standard prison.

The sadistic behavior was not actually part of the experiment. Well...in a way it was. There were certain cues used to try to evoke the type of response that they wanted, but up to this point, no one had any idea how the guards and prisoners would really react, nor how far it would really.

The guards were students and acting mainly of their own accord. The experiment construct was to choose 24 (I think) RANDOM students and RANDOMLY assign them to groups, either prisoner or guard. Then put them into the situation and just see what happened. There were very few instructions or inputs.

In various psychology classes (if you hadn't guessed, this is studied A LOT in everything from social psychology, to sociology, to Organizational behavior) I've seen a lot of the videos from the experiment and read some of the original documents and experiment set ups. It is really shocking what happened and how quickly it happened.

But the bottom line is that they were not trying to pass this off as a model for a real prison. It was an experiment and the goal was to create a very specific situation and evoke a very specific response. The experiment was simply done in a prison type setting.

It is like doing a physics experiment in a vacuum....you're not actually fooling anyone into thinking that you've re-created space....but you're modeling some aspects of it to determine how certain things will behave in that environment. It is the same idea. Again, if they wanted to do an experiment in a realistic prison....they would have gone to a prison....and if that was the case, why would they have chosen STUDENTS? and not real guards and criminals.

In a real prison, the guards are trained, the prisoners are real bad guys who belong there....there is no escape.

And one of the more insightful things about this experiment was that even though the students knew for a FACT that it was an experiment and that in reality they could get out when they wanted....within a matter of hours, they had fallen so deeply into their roles, that the prisoner students were behaving as if there was no escape and that the guards were somehow superior....and the guards were acting as if the other students were criminals and as if they were superior and had some right to treat them as they did.

 

[MBuzzy]

Zimbardo has been very forthright and open about the mistakes made in the Stanford Prison Experiment and the problems with it. Bluntly -- you couldn't do an experiment like that today, in part because of the results of the experiment.

Was it a real, professional prison? No. Are correctional officers and deputies today, as a general rule, more professional than they were in the 70s? Absolutely. Without a doubt. Are the factors and the results useful and illuminating? Absolutely. In fact, I suspect that lessons learned here are a part of why COs today are more professional.

It's an experiment that I personally feel every law enforcement officer and correctional officer should be aware of. It tells us a lot about both submission to authority and being in authority.

I fully agree, in fact, I would say that everyone should read about these experiments....particularly anyone in a position of authority. It is incredible to know the lengths to which people will go when they feel justified.

And you're right, you can't do these experiments anymore. As I said, there now exists something called the IRB, the institutional review board that very thoroughly reviews any experiment with human subjects to make sure that they aren't in any real psychological or physical danger.

 

[teekin]

They were trying to determine how people react in submissive and dominance type situations to gain further insight into ABUSIVE prison environments.

You are 100% correct, this is not a true prison environment. If that is what they wanted to model, they could have gone into a real prison. They used a prison setting yes, based loosely on a real prison, but they were attempting to get a different reaction than your standard prison.

The sadistic behavior was not actually part of the experiment. Well...in a way it was. There were certain cues used to try to evoke the type of response that they wanted, but up to this point, no one had any idea how the guards and prisoners would really react, nor how far it would really.

The guards were students and acting mainly of their own accord. The experiment construct was to choose 24 (I think) RANDOM students and RANDOMLY assign them to groups, either prisoner or guard. Then put them into the situation and just see what happened. There were very few instructions or inputs.

In various psychology classes (if you hadn't guessed, this is studied A LOT in everything from social psychology, to sociology, to Organizational behavior) I've seen a lot of the videos from the experiment and read some of the original documents and experiment set ups. It is really shocking what happened and how quickly it happened.

But the bottom line is that they were not trying to pass this off as a model for a real prison. It was an experiment and the goal was to create a very specific situation and evoke a very specific response. The experiment was simply done in a prison type setting.

It is like doing a physics experiment in a vacuum....you're not actually fooling anyone into thinking that you've re-created space....but you're modeling some aspects of it to determine how certain things will behave in that environment. It is the same idea. Again, if they wanted to do an experiment in a realistic prison....they would have gone to a prison....and if that was the case, why would they have chosen STUDENTS? and not real guards and criminals.

In a real prison, the guards are trained, the prisoners are real bad guys who belong there....there is no escape.

And one of the more insightful things about this experiment was that even though the students knew for a FACT that it was an experiment and that in reality they could get out when they wanted....within a matter of hours, they had fallen so deeply into their roles, that the prisoner students were behaving as if there was no escape and that the guards were somehow superior....and the guards were acting as if the other students were criminals and as if they were superior and had some right to treat them as they did.

The researcher in me wants this experiment recreated and let run. The implications for Social models of behavior to be overhauled and Id vs Ego behavior controls to be completely rehashed are mind boggling. Amazing how fast we turn back into reptiles isn't it? ( a useful skill however)
Lori