"The lie of the Stanford Prison Experiment"

This 2005 Stanford Daily article by Carlo Prescott (reposted below) on the famous Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) raises serious questions about both the reasons for the experiment, and the conclusions drawn by Dr. Philip Zimbardo and others regarding its controversial results. Mr. Prescott was one of the individuals involved in organizing the experiment, whose team was led by psychologist Phil Zimbardo. Dr. Zimbardo achieved a great deal of fame for this effort. In 2002 he served as President of the American Psychological Association.

Dr. Zimbardo has acknowledged the contributions of Mr. Prescott in previous writings. In a 40th anniversary retrospective on the SPE, Dr. Zimbardo called Prescott "our prison consultant," and described some of his activities in the running of the experiment. Most recently, he cited his help in a section of his book, The Lucifer Effect:

It all began with the planning, execution, and analysis of the experiment we did at Stanford University back in August 1971. The immediate impetus for this research came out of an undergraduate class project on the psychology of imprisonment, headed by David Jaffe, who later became the warden in our Stanford Prison Experiment. In preparation for conducting this experiment, and to better understand the mentality of prisoners and correctional staff, as well as to explore what were the critical features in the psychological nature of any prison experience, I taught a summer school course at Stanford University covering these topics. My co-instructor was Andrew Carlo Prescott, who had recently been paroled from a series of long confinements in California prisons. Carlo came to serve as an invaluable consultant and dynamic head of our “Adult Authority Parole Board.”

Oddly, Dr. Zimbardo fails to note in his acknowledgements that the study was funded by a grant from the US Office of Naval Research. (The fact is mentioned at the SPE FAQ webpage.) In fact, the research was written up in a paper for Naval Research Reviews, September 1973 (PDF).

Dr. Zimbardo's association with the Navy has continued for decades, and he is currently professor in the Department of Homeland Security Program at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey.

Mr. Prescott's paper asserts that the cruel actions by the student prisoner role-playing guards was not in fact an outcome of situational dynamics, as Zimbardo maintains, but that the "guards" were in fact instructed what to do. This would make the experiment more about how the student "prisoners" reacted under conditions of abuse than about penal behavior in general. It is possible that Zimbardo's accounts of the experiment are not totally truthful, and that the reasons the Office of Naval Research sponsored this project is because they were interested mainly in the actions of prisoners under abusive conditions in prisons run by the military, or possibly how prisoners in a POW camp might react to an abusive environment. This indeed was the program of the military's Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape or SERE programs that were being organized in the military at this time, with greater and greater organization regarding them over the decades.

In any case, the Naval Research Reviews editorial introduction to the paper, which was co-authored along with Zimbardo by Prison Experiment assistants Craig Haney and Curtis Banks, says the following:

The research reported in this article is part of a larger project sponsored by the Office of Naval Research which is designed to develop a better understanding of the basic psychological mechanisms underlying human aggression.... The 'prison' environment was further manipulated to promote anonymity, depersonalization and dehumanization among the subjects. The study demonstrates how these variables combine to increase the incidence of aggressive behavior on the part of the 'guards' and submissive and docile conformity on the part of the 'prisoners.'

What follows is Mr. Prescott's version of what occurred:

The lie of the Stanford Prison Experiment
By Carlo Prescott on April 28, 2005 in News

I read recently in the entertainment industry trade journal Variety of Maverick Entertainment, the principle of whom is Madonna, that intends to produce a film based on the “infamous” Stanford Prison Experiment. I read this with considerable consternation.

According to the article, the project’s principal investigator and the film’s driving force, Prof. Philip Zimbardo this “landmark” experiment is a classical treatise on the “power of the situation” and a full-blown explanation of the evils of every prison from Folsom to Abu Ghraib. I can assure you, it is neither. I say this not because I am an African American ex-con who served 17 years in San Quentin for attempted murder or one who spoke before Congress on the issue of prison reform. I say it because I was the Stanford Prison Experiment’s chief consultant. I armed the Zimbardo, Craig Haney and Curt Banks with the ideas that enabled them to infuse this study with the verisimilitude that it hangs its hat on to this day. And shouldn’t.

Regrettably, the gulf between verisimilitude and real prison life is a huge leap of faith that still raises serious issues of validity from the get-go.

Nevertheless, ideas such as bags being placed over the heads of prisoners, inmates being bound together with chains and buckets being used in place of toilets in their cells were all experiences of mine at the old “Spanish Jail” section of San Quentin and which I dutifully shared with the Stanford Prison Experiment braintrust months before the experiment started. To allege that all these carefully tested, psychologically solid, upper-middle-class Caucasian “guards” dreamed this up on their own is absurd.

How can Zimbardo and, by proxy, Maverick Entertainment express horror at the behavior of the “guards” when they were merely doing what Zimbardo and others, myself included, encouraged them to do at the outset or frankly established as ground rules? At the time, I had hoped that I would help create a valid, intellectually honest indictment of the prison system.

In hindsight, I blew it. I became an unwitting accomplice to a theatrical exercise that conveniently absolves all comers of personal responsibility for their abominable moral choices. It seems that Maverick Entertainment, riding shotgun with Zimbardo, is repeating historical folly (and dramatic contrivance) of the worst kind. And do you honestly believe Hollywood will come anywhere close to honoring or doing right by the field of psychology in this exercise?

Carlo Prescott lives in Oakland. E-mail him at carloprescott@yahoo.com.

Compare the article testimony above to what Dr. Zimbardo said in a 2004 essay, "A situationist perspective on the psychology of evil: Understanding how good people are transformed into perpetrators," in A. Miller (Ed.), The social psychology of good and evil (pp.21–50), Guilford Press (p. 39).

Participants [in the Stanford Prison Experiment] had no prior training in how to play the randomly assigned roles. Each subject’s prior societal learning of the meaning of prisons and the behavioural scripts associated with the oppositional roles of prisoner and guard was the sole source of guidance.

Or consider what Haney, Banks and Zimbardo stated in their Naval Research Reviews article: "Guard aggression... was emitted simply as a ‘natural’ consequence of being in the uniform of a ‘guard’ and asserting the power inherent in that role."

Certainly, a larger and more comprehensive, critical look is needed to determine what the facts are surrounding this "experiment," lauded in the press and social psychology literature as a landmark study on the nature of human beings under confinement. Its connection to US government studies on torture or imprisonment is another important aspect to any investigation.

Ending note for psychologists: the famous psychologist Erich Fromm critiqued the SPE and Zimbardo's conclusions, not knowing anything of Prescott's own criticisms, in his 1973 book The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. Excerpts of that critique can be read here.