Although critics accused Dr. Zimbardo of leading students playing the role of prison guards to engage in abusive behavior, he defended his study by claiming that he only told the prison guards to create feelings of boredom, discouragement, fear, and helplessness in the prisoners, and nothing else. They were not given formal or detailed instructions on how to behave as prison guards.
Within a day, the guards were abusive and engaging in psychological torture: they forced the inmates to defecate in a bucket, kept them awake repeatedly during the night, and forced them to perform homosexual acts.
On the sixth day of the experiment, Dr. Zimbardo told Christina Meslech, a graduate student he married that year, that he was struck by the interesting behaviors the study had revealed in less than a week. In an interview with Dr. Zimbardo for a documentary about the Stanford Prison Experiment, Christina said, “I think what you’re doing to those boys is horrible.” “He was right,” said Dr. Zimbardo. I had to end that experiment because it was an experiment and not a real prison. “There were real people who were suffering and I had forgotten that fact.”
In an interview for the same documentary, one mock guard said, “What made the experience even more disturbing for me was that we were constantly being asked to act in a way that was contrary to what I felt inside.” Another mock guard said, “I thought I couldn’t act like that; But during the test, I didn’t feel any regrets.”
The Stanford Prison Experiment has been a staple of psychology textbooks for decades. One of the main reasons for this is the ethical questions that this experiment raises regarding human studies.
The debate about the Stanford prison experiment resurfaced in 2004 after American soldiers were accused of torture and humiliation at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Images of the ill-treatment of those soldiers were published by news organizations including the New York Times. Dr. Zimbardo was an expert witness in the defense of Ivan Frederick II (war criminal and former staff sergeant in the US Army), who pleaded guilty to eight counts of prisoner abuse in a court-martial. The professor considered the soldier a victim of circumstance and argued that psychiatric evaluations did not show that he had sadistic tendencies.
In his 2007 book, The Lucifer Effect: How Good People Turn Bad, Dr. Zimbardo wrote, “Prosecutors and judges refuse to accept that circumstances can influence a person’s behavior. They had in mind the standard concept of individualism that most people in our culture believe in; That is, the idea that the error was entirely voluntary and the result of Ivan Frederik’s free choice to engage in evil deeds.
