I Was a Guard in the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2y5sbt/iwasa_guard_in_the_1971_stanford_prison/

by sergeant3 • 11 years ago

80 31 11 years ago

Oddly I was thinking about this experiment this morning. Perhaps I opened HN and forgot.

My thinking was along his lines. Now I think that I was in denial. In The Banality of Evil book, the main clerk of the genocide had "the personality of a mailman." He had "winged words." He fuggedaboudit. He forgot what his mind wanted to.

The Nazis were not sorry for their genocide victims. They were only sorry for themselves that they had to be the bad guys. De Nile runs deep.

Battle for the Mind: A Physiology of Conversion and Brain-Washing (Sargant, 1957) says that you need total neurological collapse to convert someone. I guess this is why the book of Nash the mentally ill math genius has better information than the misleading movie that people take seriously. He never got better until he was in a cheap state hospital and they broke out old fashioned insulin comas and such techniques on him. Total brain shock.

There is a debate now about whether torture works. It is all wishful thinking. People are innately convertable. There was a k5 essay about this. Slavery from raids used to be common. The adaptive behavior is Stockholm Syndrome -- you break down and reintegrate to the new tribe. Like Blue Jacket play (no longer being shown since it is ahistorical like the Simpsons play).

tormeh2• 11 years ago

People are convertible, but I don't think they are convertible under torture. I think the tribe you are supposed to convert to must seem like they would actually accept you somehow, not just dump you in a cell for the rest of your life and kill your former friends.

dhimes2• 11 years ago

Maybe not under torture alone, but my guess is that torture can be effectively used as a part of the equation. Otherwise Obama would have closed gitmo.

sheensleeves3• 11 years ago

Before the USA tortured directly, we had other countries torture terrorists for us. Some of these guys were released and then went on to do further terrorism. So that is in agreement w/ what you are saying.

stavrogin• 11 years ago

Hannah Arendt is widely praised and its Jerusalem book is often quoted all around the world, yet this portrayal of a "mailman" is more than dubious. The historian Hermann Langbein, who survived Auschwitz and later wrote the authoritative "Men and women at Auschwitz", showed that her ideas didn't match the facts. Recently, the first integral study of Eichmann's papers completely broke this "mailman" picture: he was a typical intellectual, who read philosophy books and even poetry, and liked writing. This "personality of a mailman" is a nonsense, unless writing long commentaries of Hegel's philosophy is "banal" for any "mailman".

Taking the Nazis as a whole is another big mistake. Some were sorry, some tried to mitigate the violence, at different levels. Primo Levi (also very critical of Arendt) remembered a young woman that became a guardian: at first she was horrified, she couldn't stand the violence and felt ill the first days, she tried to resign. A few weeks later, she was accustomed and hit prisoners. It's a pity his "grey zone" concept is despised by our Manichean world.

Apart from this, I totally agree with the denial aspect. The Standford experiment was very probably a trauma for this former guard, and his denegating discourse seems strongly biased by this. His main claims are:

- This experiment is a fraud, it claims to prove that we, the guards, became "evil" (his term), but that's wrong. - The experiment was biased because the main experimenter made some important decisions along the way. - We, the guards, did not loose our humanity, the material settings were inhumane and made us behave like this. For instance, we were sleep deprived. - If a guard became violent, it's not because he was violent, it's because he was an amateur actor that had endorsed a violent role just for fun. - The experiment author manipulated the students into saying things they didn't thought, and he kept their identities secret to give him "more control of the narrative".

Sure, this experiment is morally questionable and it's hard to build strong conclusions upon it, but if it was a fraud, why wasn't it debunked long ago? Why didn't most of the students protest they were wronged? Why caricature it with notions of good/evil? And would actors play a "violent cop" role for many days just on an impulse, with graduating violence? And, most of all: if an inhumane setting made them behave with less empathy, less humanity, isn't that a very interesting experimental result?

philwelch• 11 years ago

The Stanford Prison Experiment was debunked long ago. It's mostly taught today as a cautionary tale of how not to do psychological research, and as a case study in research ethics demonstrating why we have IBR's.

hurin2• 11 years ago

It's difficult to achieve some kind of objectivity. Of course no one wants to believe that they are innately bad or easily coerced into doing terrible things to other human beings, so it seems like it would be very natural to expect them to lash out at the methods of the experiment.

riffraff2• 11 years ago

Not to argue the basic concept, but in this specific case, AFAIK, it's very arguable whether "people are innately evil" might have been proven.

I.e. the experiment was influenced by the author of the research by his own admission, and the results were never replicated.

hurin2• 11 years ago

Not to argue the basic concept, but in this specific case, AFAIK, it's very arguable whether "people are innately evil" might have been proven.

I definitely was not implying that a statement like that was (let alone ever could be) proven; only that for the subjects that participated in the experiment, who were exposed to that perhaps popular interpretation of the results - could be expected have a significantly different perception of the experiment on account of this.

thaumaturgy• 11 years ago

His comments are pretty interesting. He seems to lay the entire blame for the conditions of the experiment on Professor Zimbardo.

Looking at the prisoners, they were all just like me. Unlike in real prisoners, there wasn't social or racial disparity. There was no animosity. They looked just like me, or people I knew.

This is an odd comment to make; I'm not sure what he'd be trying to get at here. The most charitable interpretation I could give it is that abuse is more expected if there are racial or social differences between prisoners and guards.

I'm really disappointed that nobody thought to ask him directly why he didn't object to anything that he observed. He says a couple of times that there were parts of the experiment he didn't agree with, but that he didn't want to taint or harm the experiment. So, he seemed to be willing to at least passively accept the abuse of other people -- his own schoolmates -- for the sake of a purpose.

He wasn't apparently aware of how the experiment is taught in modern Psych classes, and it's funny, some of his comments reinforce what those classes teach:

We used the Stanford experiment to talk about prison mentalities actually and how prison effects people and changes them. How people become what the situation calls for. Like you said above that Lombardo set up that experiment and you did what you were told as a kid

and

While the popular idea from this may be the inherent evil, I hope you at least know that those who learn about this in college/university do not learn it that way, it's more along the topics of conformity, and diffusion of responsibility.

...in response to his saying,

In that prison experiment, leaving would have been an option, but I didn't for several reasons: first off, from my perspective, I didn't see that much happening that was bad. People looking back now ... can see it in black-and-white, two-dimensionally. At the time, it went on pretty much as advertised. ... Also, I felt a commitment when I agreed to participate in the experiment. For all I knew, if I left, the whole experiment could have unraveled. Also, I felt like this was a unique experience and I enjoyed getting paid for doing something unusual.

saraid2164• 11 years ago

It's a little disingenuous to use the word "schoolmates" to describe his fellow prisoners. This was at Berkeley; as far as I'm aware, none of the guards knew the prisoners before the experiment.

Honestly, if it weren't unethical, I'd be curious as to the results of a re-run of the SPE except that you spend the first day out-of-character doing icebreakers before role assignment. I suspect that it'd make things better on the whole, but you'd have the occasional case where a guard uses it as an occasion to fish for ways to get under a prisoner's skin much more quickly and effectively.

gojomo2• 11 years ago

Not "at Berkeley". I suspect even going back to 1971, this sort of 'experiment' wouldn't have flown at Berkeley.

riffraff2• 11 years ago

The most charitable interpretation I could give it is that abuse is more expected if there are racial or social differences between prisoners and guards.

I believe he meant that the feeling of "us vs them" on either side was not reinforced by this.

Also, isn't it a well know fact that empathy is weaker if one can identify the other as "different" ?

Other than common sense, I recall it has been put to test in some variations of the milgram experiment.

tunap• 11 years ago

Where's the IMDB link to the recent release of the Hollywood Docu-drama?

saraid2164• 11 years ago

Incidentally, Dr. Zimbardo has continued doing stuff in the last 40 years. He testified as an expert for Abu Ghraib, wrote a book [1], and has been promoting heroic imagination as an antidote. It's worth checking out his work since, if this is an area you're interested in.

[1] http://lucifereffect.com/

moomin• 11 years ago

There's a well-known psychological result that people will do awful things if asked to do so in an authoritative context. What the guard is essentially saying is that the behaviour documented originated more from that existing result than any emergent behaviour.

chippy• 11 years ago

The well-known psychological theory was in part developed because of this experiment. This one, and Milgram's famous experiment.

gojomo2• 11 years ago

The real lesson of the Stanford Prison Experiment is that professors will do awful things to trusting undergraduates for academic fame.

sgnelson• 11 years ago

"It wasn't my fault, we were just following orders. It was sleep deprivation, the prisoners were dehumanized and we were told to play act as bad guys." seems to be his excuse (from reading his comments) which to me, seems to reinforce Zimbardo more than discredit him. But I might be missing something.

This is also just one person's opinion and memory from 40 years ago.

For better or worse, I think the Stanford Prison Experiment is a very interesting piece of research, and if it wasn't, we still wouldn't be discussing it and what it means.

saraid2164• 11 years ago

Well, it's worth noting that this has been John Mark's statement for some time. Here's the earliest instance I can find online: https://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?artic... (2011)

I'm also somewhat certain that his view was mentioned in Zimbardo's 2007 book; I loaned out my copy, so I can't check.

Htsthbjig3• 11 years ago

This man repeats over and over again that he believes humans are not inherently Evil, while he justifies the behavior of guards on the way the experiment was designed.

For me that proves that people could be inherently Evil while not realizing about what they are really doing(until they suffer from it).

For example, at the start of the WWII killing and abusing for the Germans and Japanese was so easy because there was such a power imbalance, like in the experiment with guards weapons,horses against tanks in Poland in WWII, that they actually abused and killed without actually thinking about it. They were Evil, but most of them did not really knew at the time, because all the propaganda they heard and so on(radio told them they were being heroes).

It was only when they started to loose that they understood what they had done to others, because they started being on the Evil receiving side.

Today you see this power imbalance in Iraq, any American soldier could kill 100-200 people from the other side before one American dies. So they don't really think about this until a terrorist attack kills 10-20 people in the West. Control on the media means the thousands of people dying in Iraq is not displayed on TV, so it does not exit.

neworder• 11 years ago

Just for the record, "horses against tanks" is well known to be propaganda bullshit.

CapitalistCartr• 11 years ago

They attacked armored cars and machine guns, though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charge_at_Krojanty

Htsthbjig3• 11 years ago

I am not referring to cavalry charge against tanks myth here, that actually happened at the end as an act of desperation, like Spanish wood ships sacrificing themselves against US iron ones.

I am talking about power imbalance that made Poland completely obliterated by Germany and URSS within four weeks.

That Poland was "eaten or breakfast" because it was not prepared was a fact. Poland had not the industry to face Germany in a different type of war.

Htsthbjig3• 11 years ago

We developed technology in order to help investigators access archives of documents of the time.

Once of the most interesting things you discover when you read the archives is that lost of things we consider obvious today, was not at the time.

One of those is the usefulness of airplanes at the start of WWI, proven at the end, and the usefulness of tanks at the start of WWII.

The fact tanks were bad weapons at fist, bulky, difficult to operate, slow,low range(compared with big cannons) easy targets, and no ability to cross difficult terrain.

This was improved in an incredible way, for example tank suspension improvements rendered the Maginot Line obsolete when finished.

Lots of people in the army were against change. Making tanks were very expensive, they needed fuel, and they genuinely considered money was better spent on other things.

aaron695• 11 years ago

It's kinda well known a lot of these old pop psychology experiments were not scientifically valid yet peoples keep taking them at face value even in this thread?

It's not to say the point was wrong, they were made fanciful to popularise a point the researchers believed in.

But if you want to believe they were right please at least quote valid research.

I Was a Guard in the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment

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