The criticism that challenged Stanley Milgram for his obedience study transitioned in 1971 when Dr. Philip Zimbardo conducted an experiment that, to this day, hails as the gold standard of unethical research in social psychology.
Zimbardo, like Milgram, was fascinated by compliance. Wishing to dive even deeper than his colleague's research question of how far one would go when confronted with an authority figure, Zimbardo wanted to see how compliant individuals would become in a fabricated situation through which they were dehumanized.
In the basement of the psychology department at Stanford University, Zimbardo and his colleague Dr. Craig Haney created a mock prison environment for the infamous "Stanford Prison Experiment."
An advertisement yielded over 70 male volunteers from which Zimbardo completed a series of psychological tests and selected two dozen participants. The 24 names were randomized into two groups: "guards" and "prisoners." As the names might suggest, one group was to act as the guards of this mock prison, where the other group would take on the roles of prisoners. Unlike Milgram's experiment, there were no confederates recruited in this study.
Power was established early when guards were issued official uniforms and, as symbols of power, a club, handcuffs and a whistle. Mirrored sunglasses were also issued - a method through which guards could mask their identities.
Unsuspectingly, the local police department made mock arrests on the participants. And soon after they were booked and strip searched by the "prison" guards. They were issued clothing to mimic that of a prisoner and their names were replaced by identification numbers. A chain was also bound to their foot to remind them at all times of their loss of freedom.
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But it's all fake... Right?
It was fake. The problem is, it didn't feel fake. The first day things did not go as expected and activity in the prison was relatively light. The guards were awkward and clearly felt uncomfortable giving orders. With their persona being indifferent, the prisoners reacted in kind. But things changed when one guard decided to become more serious - more intimidating. The guard began issuing orders... and the prisoners complied. Surprised at the participants' obedience, the guard decided to see just how far he could take the act before someone would try to stop him.
It didn't take long. The prisoners started resisting. Not wanting to interfere (as this study was to go beyond Milgram's test of obedience), the experimenters did nothing to assist either group, leaving the guards to decide how to handle the situation. Seeing the prisoners as an affront to their authority, they began pushing back. But their response went beyond general requests for order. The guards began to harass the prisoners.
As part of a rebellion, the prisoners locked themselves in their rooms, tore off their numbers and began cursing at the guards. In response, the guards used fire extinguishers, took down the cell doors and forced the prisoners from their rooms before stripping them naked for search. The rebellion was broken.
The behavior of the guards became much more brutal. They would lock the prisoners in solitary confinement (a space that was dark and damp and too small for the prisoner to even sit down) for hours at a time. They taunted the prisoners, kept them from sleeping and when they did let them sleep would often take away elements of their bedding. Less than 36 hours after the experiment began, one prisoner (8612) had an emotional breakdown.
"I'm all fucked up inside. I want out! I want out now!" - Prisoner 8612
He screamed, begging them to let him leave. Convinced that he was truly suffering, Zimbardo permitted such. But this was just the beginning to several more days of increasingly severe mental and physical harassment.
"It was a real laboratory for Zimbardo and I to watch human nature transformed in a very rapid way in the face of a very powerful situation," said Hanley.
The guards control escalated. Soon even the decision to use the bathroom was at the guards' discretion and prisoners were often forced to urinate or defecate into a bucket left in their cell. To take things even further, prisoners were often asked to empty these buckets making the prisoners smell of urine and feces. They were made to do push-ups and jumping jacks. By the fourth day, things grew sexual with prisoners being asked to tell other prisoners that they loved them in an attempt to further cause them humiliation.
From that day forward, one prisoner broke down (having an extreme stress reaction) every single day. Zimbardo noted that these reactions were both genuine and unexpected.
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Why won't he end it?
On the fifth day, Zimbardo invited his girlfriend, Dr. Christina Maslach (a fellow psychologist), to visit the mock prison. Maslach couldn't stand the sight of it - the dehumanization of people who had done nothing but consent to a psychological experiment. Zimbardo recalls her saying, "It's terrible what you're doing." He was furious that she would make such a statement about an experiment of his that was shedding great light on the complexities of human obedience. He even went so far as to tell her that she was a poor psychologist. That's when she said the words that Zimbardo can still recall today: "I'm not sure I want to have anything to do with you, if this is the real you."
Zimbardo was struck. Until now he had seen himself simply as a scientist - someone observing human behavior as any psychologist would do in their laboratory. But now he saw the reality - that the power of the situation hadn't just changed his participants, it had changed him as well.
Originally intended to be two weeks in length, the Stanford Prison Experiment ended after just six days.
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What does it all mean?
We could discuss the ethical dilemmas of this study for an entire volume of textbooks, but that's irrelevant to a discussion on compliance. Despite Zimbardo's severe lack of moral character and the fact that his study lacked empirical value, it teaches us something important: That strict obedience is not always a good thing. Everyone in this study did exactly as they were told. They were compliant. The guards commanded the prison. The prisoners accepted the abuse. And the researchers allowed the experiment to continue uninterpreted despite the horrors their participants were facing.
The fact of the matter is that compliance isn't a good thing when it takes away a human beings right to think individually. Many of the participants in this study did horrific things. But Zimbardo noted the explanation for them doing so: "When we see somebody doing bad things, we assume they're bad people to begin with. But what we know from our study is there are a set of social psychological variables that can make ordinary people do things they never could imagine doing."
The Stanford Prison Experiment is a lesson in ethics, power roles and, most notably, the dangers of compliance.
I want to clarify: I'm not trying to say that obedience is a bad thing. It's not bad for children to obey their parents; it's not bad for employees to comply with their bosses instructions; it's not wrong for people to pull over when they see a cop car. What's bad is when a child does something illegal because an adult orders them to do so; when an employee goes against their moral compass to comply with the wishes of their superior; when someone is so blindly subjective that they are willing to strip search a fast-food worker because an officer tells them to over the telephone (yes, that has happened multiple times).
Our subjection to authority cannot overcome our ability to act as we believe we should - to reason and think based on our true character. Compliance can be positive, but the moment it imprisons our mind it ceases to be so.
Further Reading:
http://www.prisonexp.org/
