Zimbardo's prison experiment and the psychology of situational behavior

Zimbardo Experiment was a study performed in the early 1970s that intended to examine the effects of prison life on inmates and guards. What Zimbardo found in his prison simulation using college students as test subjects alarmed him so profoundly that he had to shut the experiment down after running it for only six days. This paper will discuss the implications of Zimbardo's findings and how they relate to today's world.

During the Zimbardo experiment, some of the "prisoners" became hysterical, submissive and dejected. None of them quit the experiment, though some of them did request "parole" and when their parole was denied they accepted the sentence as though they truly were stuck in the "system." Three "prisoners" had to be released because their depression was so severe and their thinking had become very confused (probably a reaction to the difficulty of being unable to tell what the "reality" of the situation was). The "inmates" chose to protect themselves over one another -- an example being that when one was put in solitary and the others told that they would have to give up their blankets in order to get him out, they chose to keep their blankets. Some of the "guards" became abusive, tyrannical, and cruel, while others befriended the "inmates" and did favors for them. But at no time did any of the "good" guards come to the researchers to complain about what the "bad" guards were doing. They countenanced it and "made up" for it by being nice to the "prisoners." Zimbardo notes that they did this only for the sake of their own egos, just as the "prisoners" thought of themselves first before their other fellow inmates. He explains that the illusion of self-control that we all have is based primarily on the fact that our environment is relatively free, but that when environments and social structures change, we quickly adapt to and accept the new parameters even if they are horrific.

Zimbardo's experiment helps to explain many situations in everyday life. For example, it explains the way normal citizens can become power-tripping police officers or the way persons from humble origins can grow up to be ruthless corporate oligarchs (like Oprah). It also explains the way militants like those led by Malcolm X will protest corrupt abusers of authority and it also explains the way people will "get back in line" like sheep when delivered a good swat by authorities. This theory, that we are all subject to social condition and situation, applies to family, work, government and so on. A paradigm of expectations is there either to be challenged or accepted, but usually what is needed is a new paradigm altogether. Zimbardo appears to call for a communal setting that is more humane, more considerate, more helpful, less condemning and less brutal. He appears to be calling for one that is, in a sense, more genuinely Christian or perhaps Utopian. The fact that most paradigms are constructs of bureaucratic, impersonal, inhumane dogmas, where everyone is expected to act like a cog in a machine, only serves to reinforce the awful principles which Zimbardo uncovers in his experiment -- namely, that such settings do nothing to encourage man's higher and nobler faculties.