Stanford Prison Experiment: A Lesson

¶ … Stanford Prison Experiment: a Lesson in the Power of Situation, (Zimbardo, 2007), recounts his development of the Stanford Prison Experiment. Zimbardo recounts how at the time the direct confrontation of good vs. evil, of good people pitted against the forces inherent in bad situations, was missing from the body of social-science research. It was at this point that he decided that what he wanted to do was to create a situation in a controlled experimental setting in which we could array on one side a multitude of variables, such as role-playing, coercive rules, power differentials, anonymity, group dynamics, and dehumanization. And thus the Stanford Prison Experiment was born.

Analysis of Data

The outcome of this experiment was that the situational forces that were in play overwhelmed the goodness of most of those infected by their viral power. In the end the situation won; humanity lost. Out the window went the moral upbringings of the young men involved, as well as their middle-class civility. Power ruled, and uncontrolled power became out of control. Power without observation by higher authorities was a disillusioned prize that transformed character in random directions (Zimbardo, 2007).

The implications of this research for law are substantial, as legal scholars are beginning to distinguish. The criminal-justice system, for example, focuses mainly on individual defendants and their state of mind and mostly ignores situational forces. The Model Penal Code says that people are not guilty of an offense unless their liability is founded on conduct that comprises a voluntary act or the oversight to perform an act of which there are capable of. Humans tend to overstate the extent to which their actions are voluntary and reasonably chosen (Zimbardo, 2007).

Compare and Contrast

Today there appears to be many similarities between the Stanford Prison Experiment in regards to the experiment's abuses and the images of depravity in Iraq's Abu Ghraib, including a prison of nakedness, bagged heads, and sexual disgrace. Among the dozen investigations of the Abu Ghraib abuses, one found that the landmark Stanford study provided a cautionary tale for all military detention operations. In differentiating the comparatively benign environment of the Stanford prison experiment, this report makes obvious that in military detention operations, soldiers work under demanding combat conditions that are far from benign. The insinuation is that those combat conditions might be anticipated to produce even more severe abuses of power than were observed in the mock prison experiment (Zimbardo, 2007).

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