Philip Zimbardo, the psychologist who challenged human kindness

The motto of the Stanford prison experiment devised by psychologist Philip Zimbardo could be the following: Do you consider yourself a good person? It’s a simple question, but answering it requires some thought. If you think that you are a human being like many other people, you probably also think that you are not characterized by the fact that you are breaking rules 24 hours a day.

With our strengths and our weaknesses, most of us seem to retain a certain ethical balance when we come into contact with the rest of humanity. Partly because of this compliance with the rules of coexistence, we have managed to create relatively stable environments in which we can all live together relatively well.

Perhaps because our civilization offers a maco of stability, it is also easy to read the ethical behavior of others as if it were something very predictable: when we refer to people’s morality, it is difficult not to be very categorical. We believe in the existence of good people and bad people , and those who are neither very good nor very bad (here probably among the image we have of ourselves) are defined by an automatic tendency towards moderation, the point at which neither one is very bad nor the rest is seriously harmed. Labeling ourselves and others is comfortable, easy to understand and, furthermore, allows us to differentiate ourselves from the rest.

However, today we know that the context plays an important role when it comes to morally orienting our behavior towards others: to prove it, we only have to break the shell of “normality” in which we have built our habits and customs. One of the clearest examples of this principle can be found in this famous research, conducted by Philip Zimbardo in 1971 in the basement of his faculty. What happened there is known as the Stanford prison experiment, a controversial study whose fame is partly based on the disastrous results it had for all its participants.

Stanford Prison

Philip Zimbardo designed an experiment to see how people who had not had a relationship with the prison environment adapted to a situation of vulnerability to others. To this end, 24 healthy young middle-class men were recruited as participants in exchange for payment.

The experience would take place in one of the basements of Stanford University, which had been converted to resemble a prison. The volunteers were assigned to two groups by drawing lots: the guards, who would hold the power, and the prisoners, who would have to remain confined in the basement for the duration of the experimental period, that is, for several days.Since the aim was to simulate a prison as realistically as possible, the prisoners went through something like a process of arrest, identification and imprisonment, and the clothing of all the volunteers included elements of anonymity: uniforms and dark glasses in the case of the guards, and prisoner suits with embroidered numbers for the rest of the participants.

This introduced an element of depersonalization into the experiment: the volunteers were not specific people with a unique identity, but formally became simple jailers or prisoners.

The subjective

From a rational point of view, of course, all these aesthetic measures did not matter. It remained strictly true that there were no relevant differences in height and build between the guards and the prisoners, and they were all equally subject to the legal framework. Furthermore, the guards were prohibited from harming the inmates and their function was reduced to controlling their behaviour, making them feel uncomfortable, deprived of their privacy and subject to the erratic behaviour of their guards. In short, everything was based on the subjective, that which is difficult to describe with words but which equally affects our behaviour and our decision-making.

Would these changes be sufficient to significantly modify the moral behavior of the participants?

First day in prison: apparent calm

At the end of the first day, there was nothing to suggest that anything remarkable would happen. Both the inmates and the guards felt displaced from the role they were supposed to play, somehow they rejected the roles assigned to them. However, soon after, complications began. During the second day, the guards had already started to see the line that separated their own identity and the role they were supposed to fulfil blurred.

The prisoners, as disadvantaged people, took a little longer to accept their role, and on the second day a rebellion broke out: they placed their beds against the door to prevent the guards from coming in and taking away their mattresses. The guards, as forces of repression, used the gas from the fire extinguishers to end this small revolution. From that moment on, all the volunteers of the experiment stopped being simple students to become something else .

Day two: the guards become violent

What happened on the second day triggered all sorts of sadistic behaviour from the guards. The outbreak of the rebellion was the first symptom that the relationship between the guards and the prisoners had become totally asymmetrical : the guards knew they had the power to dominate the rest and acted accordingly, and the prisoners corresponded to their captors, even recognizing implicitly their inferiority situation just as a prisoner known to be locked up within four walls would. This generated a dynamic of domination and submission based solely on the fiction of the “Stanford prison”.

Objectively, there was only one room in the experiment, a number of volunteers and a team of observers, and none of the people involved were any more disadvantaged than the others in the eyes of the real judiciary and the trained and equipped police. However, the imaginary prison gradually made its way into the real world.

Vexations become daily bread

At some point, the harassment suffered by the inmates became totally real, as was also the feeling of superiority of the false guards and the role of jailer adopted by Philip Zimbardo, who had to shed the disguise of being an investigator and make the office assigned to his bedroom, to be near the source of problems he had to manage. Certain inmates were denied food, forced to stand naked or make fools of themselves, and were not allowed to sleep well. Similarly, shoving, tripping and shaking were frequent .

The Stanford prison fiction gained so much power that, for many days, neither the volunteers nor the researchers were able to recognize that the experiment should be stopped. Everyone assumed that what was happening was somehow natural. By the sixth day, the situation was so out of control that a remarkably shocked research team had to put an abrupt end to it.

Consequences

The psychological imprint left by this experience is very important. It was a traumatic experience for many of the volunteers, and many of them still find it difficult to explain their behaviour during those days: it is difficult to make the image of the guard or the inmate who left during the Stanford prison experiment compatible with a positive self-image.

For Philip Zimbardo it was also an emotional challenge. The spectator effect made external observers accept what was happening around them for many days and somehow consent to it. The transformation into torturers and delinquents by a group of “normal” young people had occurred so naturally that no one had noticed the moral aspect of the situation, despite the fact that the problems came almost at once.

The information regarding this case was also a shock to American society. First, because this kind of simulation directly alluded to the very architecture of the penal system , one of the foundations of life in society in that country. But even more important is what this experiment tells us about human nature. While it lasted, Stanford’s prison was a place where any representative of the Western middle class could enter and corrupt himself. Some superficial changes in the framework of relationships and certain doses of depersonalization and anonymity were able to demolish the model of coexistence that permeates all areas of our lives as civilized beings.

From the rubble of what had once been etiquette and custom, human beings did not emerge capable of generating by themselves an equally valid and healthy framework of relationships, but rather people who interpreted strange and ambiguous norms in a sadistic way.

The reasonable automaton as seen by Philip Zimbardo

It is comforting to think that lies, cruelty and theft exist only in “bad people”, people we label in this way to create a moral distinction between them and the rest of humanity. However, this belief has its weaknesses. No one is unfamiliar with stories about honest people who end up corrupting themselves soon after reaching a position of power. There are also many characterizations of “anti-heroes” in series, books and films, people with ambiguous morality who are realistic precisely because of their complexity and, why not say it, more interesting and closer to us: compare Walter White with Gandalf the White.

In addition, in the face of examples of malpractice or corruption, it is common to hear opinions such as “you would have done the same if you were in their shoes”. The latter is an unsubstantiated statement, but it reflects an interesting aspect of moral standards: its application depends on the context . Evil is not something that can be attributed exclusively to a series of people of a petty nature but is explained in large part by the context we perceive. Each person has the potential to be an angel or a devil.

“The dream of reason produces monsters”

The painter Francisco de Goya said that the dream of reason produces monsters. However, during the Stanford experiment monsters emerged by applying reasonable measures: the execution of an experiment using a series of volunteers.

Furthermore, the volunteers adhered so well to the instructions given that many of them still regret their participation in the study . The great flaw in Philip Zimbardo’s research was not due to technical errors, since all the depersonalization and staging measures in a prison proved to be effective and everyone seemed to follow the rules at first. His ruling was that was based on the overvaluation of human reason when deciding autonomously what is right and what is not in any context.

From this simple exploratory test, Zimbardo involuntarily showed that our relationship with morality includes certain uncertainty quotas , and this is not something we are able to manage well all the time. It is our most subjective and emotional side that falls into the traps of depersonalization and sadism, but it is also the only way to detect these traps and connect emotionally with others. As social and empathic beings, we must go beyond reason when deciding which rules are applicable to each situation and how they should be interpreted.

Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment teaches us that it is when we give up the possibility of questioning the dictates that we become dictators or willing slaves.

Bibliographic references:

  • Zimbardo, P. G. (2011). The Lucifer Effect: The Why of Evil . Barcelona: Espasa.