I first learned of the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment when I took AP Psychology during my senior year of high school when we were learning about the ethics of experiments. For my Research Methods and Analyses psychology class last year at UR, I watched The Stanford Prison Experiment film, which gave an excellent rundown of the entire experiment. Although I had a prior understanding of the experiment, “The Story: An Overview of the Experiment,” on the official website gave profound ethical insight on the Stanford Prison Experiment. The first video, “A Student is Arrested,” indicates that the surrounding neighbors and bystanders were completely unaware that the student was participating in an experiment, which poses questions to how the public might have viewed arrestees. Once the participants entered “prison” (the basement of the Stanford psychology department) they were designated to “cells” and were even sometimes sent to the “hole” (simulating solitary confinement) if they misbehaved or if a guard sent them there. As delineated in the film and through this website, the results of this experiment were beyond anyone’s expectations, including Philip Zimbardo’s. It fascinates and disturbs me to this day that human nature pushed both the guards and the prisoners to act in the ways they did. 

I am currently taking a class about prisons with Dr. Andrea Simpson called Gender, Politics, and Prisons where we have learned extensively about the degrading conditions of prisons. What fascinates me most about the Stanford Prison Experiment is that it utilized similar degradation techniques to mock a real prison, and we were able to see the psychological impacts this had on the prisoners. Yet, the prison industrial complex remains degrading and with an extreme power imbalance between correctional officers and inmates. The “prisoners” in the experiment endured oppression and maltreatment from the “guards”– through forced push-ups, only being called by their ID numbers, forced “counts” at 2:30 AM, and more– yet this is not far off from the treatment of prisoners today in some institutions. Many female-identifying and trans prisoners face extreme physical, sexual, and verbal abuse from correctional officers; while the Stanford Prison Experiment worked with strictly male prisoners, the abuse is prevalent throughout the clips provided on the website. While I do respect the perseverance of Zimbardo to conduct this groundbreaking study, I wish our society would have taken away from it more policy implications. We could have used the psychological findings to improve and reform the brutal conditions of some prisons, yet the carceral system remains coercive and abusive.

https://www.prisonexp.org/the-story

Anna Marston