Considering the recent Abu Ghraib scandal it might be a good time to revisit the classic prison experiment conducted by Philip Zimbardo in 1971. This site has a "slide show" which gives a fairly detailed narrative of the experiment.
About 25 college students who had passed a battery of psychological tests and a background check were randomly assigned to be either guards or prisoners in a simulated prison. The idea was to run the experiment for two weeks, but it was ended after six days because some of the guards had become extremely sadistic. Interestingly, the only correlation Zimbardo could find between the preliminary test results and the behavior of the subjects was that prisoners with more authoritarian personalities seemed less affected by the abuse. The guards, who were given no instructions on how to run the prison, managed to develop a lot of the same techniques used in real prisons in the course of only a few days.
Posted by Alan Hogue at May 8, 2004 12:46 PMDid you see Zimbardo himself interviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle about that today?
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at May 8, 2004 12:53 PMThe Zimbardo experiment is discussed in Christopher Browning's excellent but disturbing Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland; and it's the inspiration behind the schlockier but also interesting movie Das Experiment.
No, I hadn't seen that article.
The book looks very good. I'll have to add it to the pile. As for the movie, well, just how schlocky is schlocky? I don't know whether I have the stomach for something too silly right now, on this particular topic.
Posted by: Alan Hogue at May 8, 2004 01:12 PMIt starts well and the build-up of tension is nicely done, but IIRC the ending is a bit overwrought.
Posted by: Alan Allport at May 8, 2004 01:28 PMThe SF Chron has more on Zimbardo and Milgram both today.
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at May 9, 2004 01:13 PMVia Cursor, here's an article suggesting that comparisons to the Zimbardo experiment don't explain why the Abu Ghraib conduct worsened from abuse to atrocity, & adding that analyses of the two situations don't pay enough attention to the responsibility of supervisors in either.
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at May 13, 2004 06:58 PM