The Failings Of The Stanford Prison Experiment

The general public knows little about the history of psychology studies, but most people have heard of the Stanford Prison Experiment. The infamous 1971 project by Philip Zimbardo is so well-known precisely because of the horrific truths it surprisingly revealed: that, given even a modicum of power, any person has the potential to turn into a sadistic monster.

But new research into how the experiment was actually run suggests that the effects of the situation, in which subjects were randomly sorted into prisoners and guards and told to act accordingly, were imposed by Zimbardo and his colleagues rather than organically arisen. These problems are not just scientific (flaws in the method), but potentially ethical. Did Zimbardo in fact design a psychologically destructive scenario, with foregone conclusions?

The lessons that can be drawn from Zimbardo’s experiment are many: the dangers of too much power concentrated in too few hands; the horrors of the prison-industrial complex; the importance of teaching compassion. The risk in overturning his experiment is in losing sight of what it sought to demonstrate. But if those lessons are built on manipulation and false data, some scientists and authors say, they are inherently flawed; we must understand better how humans behave. That’s the job of psychology. It can’t be based on “a lie.”