1C Lesson for “The Stanford Prison Experiment” by Philip G. Zimbardo

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Part One. Lexicon

 

1. symbiosis, an unhealthy interdependence between two groups or two people; we claim to hate Octo-Mom but we're addicted to the obsessive coverage of every minutia of her life. And in turn Octo-Mom is addicted to the attention we give her. We live in a shared hell of reciprocity. 
2. latent sadism, sleeping or dormant cruelty that awakens under the right conditions. A child has a toy doll (a GI-Joe) that he prizes. Then the hand breaks off. This one "injury" opens the flood gates so that he pulls the head off, puts ketchup inside the torso and stuffs a fire cracker inside and blows up the doll. His sadism has been unleashed. Or the subjects in the Milgram study become sadistic when granted the power. Or a teacher or a cop abuses their power. 
3. bovine, cow-like, passive, lacking critical thinking skills to make a self-appraisal. 
4. malleable, easily shaped or conformed to the desired role
5. miscreant, a person without morals
6. learned helplessness, a self-fulfilling prophecy in which the person deludes himself into believing he is helpless or powerless when objective reality shows that he is actually capable. Sadly, the power of his mind debilitates him so that his delusion becomes true.

 

 

Part Two. What is the dehumanization process that encourages the “guards” to become more cruel and ruthless in their imposition of power against the “prisoners”?

 

One. Strip a man of all his belongings, including clothes is powerful symbolically because his complete nakedness represents complete helplessness and powerlessness to both himself and the guards. There are robberies in Los Angeles where not just money is stolen, but the person's clothes, so the victim is forced to run naked for cover. This humiliation is part of the crime. 

 

Two. Establish the prisoners’ as reprobates and miscreants, rejects of society who are incapable of obeying the social contract without the intervention of the prison system. Once you do that, they have no humanity and you lose sympathy for them. See paragraph 4.

 

Three. Impose strict rules, which must be rigidly enforced to keep a sharp dividing line between the powerful and the powerless: See paragraph 5. Often a teacher imposes rules to establish control but these rules have no other function. 

 

Four. The dehumanization can only occur in mutual interdependence: a cruel symbiosis between guards and prisoners. In other words, the prisoners accept their dehumanization just as the prisoners encourage it. See paragraph 7. Also see paragraph 19.

 

Five. Establish anonymity to “minimize each prisoner’s sense of uniqueness and prior identity.” See paragraph 14. They are reduced to ID numbers.

 

Six. Strip the men of their masculinity by restraining their movement through modified clothing that makes them move in a “feminine” manner. They’re wearing smocks that look like dresses. See paragraph 14.

 

Seven. Reinforce the prisoners’ sense of infantile helplessness by making them ask permission for the most rudimentary activities. See paragraph 15.

 

Eight. Treat the prisoners more like animals than humans. Throw them a bucket of slop for their meals. See paragraph 15.

 

Nine. Reinforce the prisoners’ helplessness by taking away their sense of time. See paragraph 16.

 

Ten. Create enmity (mutual dislike) between the guards and prisoners that encourages flare ups, which serve as reminders as to who is in power. In real prisons, guards bet on underground fights between prisoners. See paragraphs 20-22.

 

Eleven. Impose control by imposing a “carrot and stick” mechanism.If you go to bed at "lights out," we'll give you an extra hour of TV. See paragraph 25.

 

Twelve. Reinforce power by assigning arbitrary, meaningless tasks and gratuitous acts of humiliation. See paragraph 27.

 

Thirteen. Establish the Principle of Learned Helplessness. Here we arrive at a terrifying insight of human psychology: The more helpless people become, the less sympathetic they become. To the contrary, they become more and more contemptible.

 

Fourteen. Make imprisonment and the loss of freedom so acute that the prisoners lose their identity and can only live through their narrowly defined role as prisoners. See paragraphs 32 and 33.

 

Fifteen. Awaken Your Inner Sadist: The guards are sorry to give up their power at the end of the experiment. See paragraph 36

 

Sixteen. Create an environment of hopelessness that results in prisoners’ apathy. See paragraph 40.

 

Seventeen. Create a label, such as “criminal” or “insane,” and that label becomes the person’s dominant reality. See paragraph 58.

 

 

Part Three. What lessons were learned from the experiment?

 

One. Normal people can be radically transformed into instruments of evil under specific “institutional pressures” which pit an authority figure against a subservient. See paragraph 56.

 

Two. An abusive environment can create psychotic and sadistic behavior associated with PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. See paragraphs 57 and 59.

 

Three. The mock prison environment is a metaphor for the abuse of power that can take place in a marriage, school, a job, and so on. An abusive spouse, teacher, administration, boss, co-workers, and so on can all create conditions analogous, perhaps to a lesser degree, to the Stanford Prison Experiment.

 

 

Part Four. Related Writing Assignments for Essay #2

 

One. Compare the Stanford Research Experiment, and other selections from Chapter 6, to one of the following films: The Chocolate War, If, or One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Next.

 

Sample thesis might look like this: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest parallels the dehumanization chronicled in the Stanford Research Experiment evidenced by ___________________, ____________________, _____________________, and __________________________.

 

 

Two. The American soldiers in Abu Ghraib demonstrate the same process of dehumanization chronicled in the Stanford Research Experiment evidenced by ______________________, ___________________, __________________________, and _______________________________.

 

 

Three. Refute or defend the Stanford Research Experiment

 

Defend or refute one of the following assertions:

 

To claim that the Stanford Research Experiment is a “metaphor” for our daily lives, as its author Zimbardo so grandly proclaims,  is an overstatement in which Zimbardo is straining to make his experiment relevant when in fact it is not. In fact, to compare the Stanford Research Experiment to the power struggles we face in our daily lives is a faulty comparison, for the experiment’s conditions are too contrived and too extreme to say anything insightful about the human condition other than the self-evident fact that humans do extreme things in extreme situations.

 

 

McMahon’s attempt to pooh-pooh Zimbardo and his experiment shows McMahon’s blindness to the parallels that occur in our every-day power struggles with the intense strain that is so evident in the Stanford Research Experiment.

Four: Write a research paper about the abuses in the American prison system and show how these abuses parallel the abuses rendered in the Stanford Prison Experiment. 

Research Links

Critique of Stanford Experiment

Skeptoid