Why Zimbardo’s Prison Experiment Isn’t in Peter Gray’s Textbook

Wednesday, September 16th, 2015

Peter Gray explains why Zimbardo’s prison experiment isn’t in his textbook:

Twenty-one boys (OK, young men) are asked to play a game of prisoners and guards. It’s 1971. There have recently been many news reports about prison riots and the brutality of guards. So, in this game, what are these young men supposed to do? Are they supposed to sit around talking pleasantly with one another about sports, girlfriends, movies, and such? No, of course not. This is a study of prisoners and guards, so their job clearly is to act like prisoners and guards—or, more accurately, to act out their stereotyped views of what prisoners and guards do. Surely, Professor Zimbardo, who is right there watching them (as the Prison Superintendent) would be disappointed if, instead, they had just sat around chatting pleasantly and having tea. Much research has shown that participants in psychological experiments are highly motivated to do what they believe the researchers want them to do. Any characteristics of an experiment that let research participants guess how the experimenters expect or want them to behave are referred to as demand characteristics. In any valid experiment it is essential to eliminate or at least minimize demand characteristics. In this experiment, the demands were everywhere.

In order to assess the degree to which participants in the experiment could guess what Zimbardo expected to happen, Banuazizi and Mohavedi presented some of the details of the experimental procedure to a large sample of college students who had not heard of the experiment and asked them to write down what they thought the researchers wanted to prove and to describe how the guards and prisoners were likely to behave. The great majority guessed the results. In various words, they said that the purpose of the experiment was to prove that normal people placed into the position of prisoner or guard would act like real prisoners and guards, and they predicted that the guards would act in hostile, domineering ways and the prisoners would react in either passive or defiant ways or both.

Subsequent revelations about the experiment—published since the first edition of my textbook—reveal that the guards didn’t even have to guess how they were supposed to behave; they were largely told how by Zimbardo and his associates.

Comments

  1. Grasspunk says:

    Sounds like Sailer’s “social science as market research” thesis.

  2. Adam says:

    These results confirm Steven Levitt’s (Freakonomics) doubts about the validity of the Stanford Prison Experiment:

    Levitt: You know, I actually never…That’s one result I don’t believe. I just fundamentally don’t believe that if you take undergrads and if you put them in the role of the prisoner versus the prison guard. It’s just, you know, I’ve never tried it but I just don’t believe that it’s real. And I think to get it you have to manipulate other things. It just doesn’t seem right to me that people are like that. And maybe that’s what’s so amazing about it, is that it really happens. And it was, I don’t know if you were with me by the time I was talking to it, a movie director from the BBC and he said he had tried to recreate that for the BBC and it got so ugly so quickly that he had to cancel the whole thing and they didn’t even do the show. But I don’t know…

    Dubner: But wait, “got so ugly so quickly” connoting that it did happen, yes?

    Levitt: Yeah, he said it was real, too. But a lot of times what I’ve found is that that when I try to do experiments as an economist that work great for psychologists, I cannot get them to work. And I really have come to believe that it’s because the people in the study are so keen on doing what the researcher wants them to do, and they think that the psychologist wants them to behave in one way, and they think the economist wants them to behave in a different way, and so it’s hard to reproduce some of those psychological findings. I’d love to do the prison study, and I’d love to do it in a way that was unbiased. And I just, it’s one thing, I would bet a lot of money that things wouldn’t turn out the way that they did in that old Zimbardo study.

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