Sunday, November 18, 2007

Article #5 - Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment

Haney, C., & Zimbardo, P. (1998). The Past and Future of U.S. Prison Policy: Twenty-Five Years After the Stanford Prison Experiment American Psychologist, 53 (7), 709-727

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research As Neal Osherow mentioned in class, all the really groundbreaking research in social psychology was done 30-40 years ago, before people started realizing all the ethical implications of what they were doing. Thus, we ended up with things like the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE). If you're not familiar with it, then please check out Philip Zimbardo's slide show and website devoted to it. By setting up what at first glance would appear to be a simple study where undergrads were randomly assigned to be either "prisoners" or "guards," everyone involved, including the experimenters, ultimately got sucked into the situation and modified their behavior to fit stereotyped roles and beliefs of who deserved punishment and who was worthy to deliver it. The SPE has been criticized on many grounds (the Wikipedia page does a good job of summing up most of them) but it's still a clear example of just how situations can determine the boundaries and appropriateness of human behavior.

In their 1998 look back on the SPE, Haney and Zimbardo describe how information about imprisonment learned from psychology and the practice of institutionalization in the United States have diverged sharply since the 1970's. Many of these statistics and graphs should be familiar, as Dr. Geiselman has used them in his lectures, so you should know the basic story already: in the late 1970's the positivist school of criminology held sway and there was a push for rehabilitation and treatment of prisoners; however with the 80's came a shift to more conservative policies and a crime control emphasis - gang activity and crack grabbed media headlines and threw society into a panic. From then to our current situation the focus has been on locking more and more people up, to the point where now the majority of inmates in federal prisons are there on drug offenses for which they'll never receive treatment adequate to prevent recidivism.

Zimbardo and Haney point out that the setup of modern prisons is everything it shouldn't be: antagonistic guards lump all prisoners together, regardless of psychological, social, or cultural differences; judges, society, and prison administrators are intent on imposing "prison pain;" when/if a prisoner is released, they have little to no preparation for re-integration into society, and the longer they've been incarcerated the less successful they're likely to be on the outside. They relate these factors back to similar situations that developed in the brief days of the SPE, arguing that, even though inmate advocates have made some slight progress towards more humane treatment (with some disastrous setbacks), ultimately any change will have to come from the top down. Unfortunately, it seems that finding a person who is both far enough removed from actual prison environments to be able to avoid falling into a stereotyped role and in a position to effect actual change requires going all the way to the Supreme Court. The Reagan-era crime-&-punishment conservatism is currently still in ascendance, however, so no progress on prison reform is likely until the makeup of the court shifts to be more sympathetic.

Stepping away from prisons, it can be seen how the implications of the SPE would carry over to other situations. In an interrogation a person is detained by authority figures, often left in a state of uncertainty as to his fate or even why he's there, and may be treated alternately with sympathy or scorn. Interrogations are much, much shorter than the six days of the SPE, and the methods derived by some of the SPE guards would never be allowed in most precincts, but with a heavy confluence of stress factors similar results of compliance will be likely.

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