To simulate authenticity, the prisoners were arrested on a Sunday by real policemen, handcuffed, blindfolded and taken to the prison where they were stripped and put in smocks without underwear. This was only the beginning of the humiliation. Then the ‘guards’ – uniformed fellow students wearing mirror shades – met them. When they wanted to go to the toilet down the hall, the inmates were led out with bags on their heads. Their guards gave them a long list of rules that they had to memorize and failure to do so led to punishment. Within a very short time, things began to deteriorate. Even though they had never been instructed to harm the inmates, the guards began to spontaneously torment and torture the inmates. In this authoritarian atmosphere, the inmates became psychologically distressed while their guards were getting increasingly out of control.
From a scientific perspective, this was exhilarating. Even though everyone involved knew the set-up was not real, the situation was creating real cruelty and suffering. Thrilled by the speed and ease at which morality seemed to be deteriorating, Zimbardo pushed on, largely as the scientist overseeing the project but also as his role as the Superintendent in charge of the prison. He was becoming a player immersed in his own fantasy story.
His girlfriend at the time, another psychology professor, Christina Maslach, visited to see how the experiment was progressing and was shocked by what she observed. She told Zimbardo, ‘What you’re doing to those boys is a terrible thing!’ A heated row between the lovers ensued and she would later recall, ‘Phil seemed so different from the man I thought I knew. He was not the same man that I had come to love.’ Zimbardo had lost the plot. He seemed unable to see what cruelty he had created. After six days, largely at the bequest of Christina, he terminated the experiment. He married her the following year.
For the next forty years, the Stanford Prison Experiment has remained a controversial study both in terms of the ethics of putting people in this situation as well as the interpretation.33 Zimbardo thinks that the devil is in the deindividuation whereas others claim that all that was demonstrated was over-enthusiastic role-playing. That may be true to some extent. Maybe some of the students had watched too many prison movies like Cool Hand Luke where the guards also wore the same mirrored sunglasses and behaved sadistically.34 One of the student guards even adopted a Southern American accent indicating a well-formulated stereotype of the typical correctional officer. They behaved as they thought the officers and prisoners should. But even if it was all acting, one is still left wondering what is the difference between role-playing and reality. What does it mean to say: that I may act in a terrible way but that’s not the way I really am? Who is the real me, or self?
The Man in the White Coat
Some questioned the authenticity of the Stanford Prison Experiment. What would happen in a real situation of authority? This is where the work of Stanley Milgram is so relevant. Milgram was one of Solomon Asch’s research assistants, and in the early 1960s he wanted to take his mentor’s work further. In what has become one of the most notorious psychology studies, Milgram demonstrated the power of authority when compliance becomes blind obedience.35
It began with a simple advertisement in which participants were asked to volunteer and would be paid $4 an hour to take part in an experiment on learning and punishment to be conducted at prestigious Yale University. When each of the volunteers arrived at the laboratory, they met with the experimenter, wearing a white lab coat, and another middle-aged man, who was introduced as another participant but who was actually a trained actor. After a supposedly random decision, the experimenter explained that the volunteer would play the role of teacher and the actor would play the role of learner. The learner was led off to another room and it was explained that the teacher would read words to the learner over an intercom. The learner would then repeat the words back to the teacher. If the learner made a mistake, the teacher would press a button that delivered an electric shock to the learner in the other room. There were thirty levels of shock rising in 15-volt increments from an initial 15 volts to 450 volts. Each switch had the level and a description of the shock, ranging from ‘mild’ at the start, through the tenth level (150 volts), ‘strong’; thirteenth level (195 volts), ‘very strong’; seventeenth level (255 volts), ‘intense’; twenty-first level (315 volts), ‘extremely intense’; twenty-fifth level (375 volts), ‘danger, severe shock’. The final two levels of 435 and 450 volts had no label other than an ominous ‘XXX’. To give them an idea of what it felt like, the participant teacher was given a taste of the third level (45 volts), which induced a very real, tingly pain.
Initially the experiment began fairly well as the learner repeated back the correct answers. However, when the learner began to make errors, the teacher was instructed by the man in the white coat to administer punishment shocks. Of course, the actor in the next room was not really receiving any shocks but duly gave a more and more distressing performance as the intensity of the punishment shocks increased. At first, he started to complain that the shocks hurt. Then they were painful. As the punishment voltages increased, so did the intensity of the screams. Soon the learner was pleading with the teacher and telling him that he had a heart condition. Many of the participants protested that they could not go on but the man in the white coat replied impassively, ‘Please continue.’ At this point the teachers were clearly stressed, shaking and sweating, and yet they went on. Even after the intercom went silent and they reached the twentieth level of 300 volts, they were told that the learner’s failure to answer the question was an error and that the teacher must proceed with the punishment.
What do you think you would do in such a situation? Before Milgram had started his study, he consulted a panel of forty psychiatrists and asked what they predicted that members of the public would do. As experts on human psychology, they agreed that fewer than one in 100 participants would go all the way to the end. How wrong could they be? It turned out that two out of every three of the participants in Milgram’s shocking study went all the way to the end at 450 volts. They were prepared to kill another human being at the request of the man in the white coat.
Maybe the participants knew that this was all a trick and that no one was being hurt. I doubt it. I have watched the early recordings of this study and it is fairly disturbing viewing as the teachers are clearly distressed as they become resigned to administering the lethal shocks. In a later study that would never get ethical approval today, researchers conducted the almost identical experiment using puppies punished with real electric shocks.36 This time there was no charade. The animals were clearly suffering (although they were not receiving lethal shocks and the voltages were way below the descriptions the teachers thought they were administering). Half of the male teachers went all the way to the maximum punishment and, surprisingly, all of the female teacher participants obeyed the order to give the maximum shocks.
The authority figure does not even have to be in the room. In another study with real nurses in a hospital,37 the participants received a telephone call from an unknown doctor who asked them to administer a 20-millilitre dose of a drug, ‘Astrogen’, to a patient that he was on his way to visit. The label on the drug indicated that 5 millilitres was a normal dose and it should not exceed 10 millilitres. All but one of twenty-two nurses knowingly gave the dose that was double the safety limit. This is a very old study and guidelines have changed over the years to prevent exactly this sort of blind obedience operating, but Zimbardo documents more recent examples where people working in hierarchical organizations succumb to the pressure of their superiors even when they know that what is requested is wrong.