Somehow two of the most infamous experimental psychologists of the twentieth century went to high school together.
What exactly was in the water in the Bronx in the 1950?
In the second of our two part Moment of Science… Zimbardo’s Prison.
Philip Zimbardo was born into a family of Italian immigrants in 1933 in the Bronx, his childhood marked by severe poverty. Growing up, he experienced prejudice by proxy for every ethnicity he was mistaken for; Puerto Rican, Jewish, Black. Most often in his young life, he recalled prejudice for being poor. The discrimination he experienced led him to want to understand how we dehumanize people, shaping the course of his research.
Fellow psychologist Stanley Milgram and Zimbardo never worked together, despite living somewhat parallel lives for a few decades. They graduated in the same high school class and, per Zimbardo, they got to know each other a bit during their time at Yale. They’ll forever be associated for groundbreaking experiments and for taking a metaphorical flamethrower to the concept of ethics.
A decade after Milgram pretended to shock people to death, Zimbardo made a pretend prison.
Volunteers were split into nine guards and nine prisoners to observe them in a simulated prison of Zimbardo’s own construction for two weeks. The Stanford Prison Experiment was funded by the Office of Naval Research. Zimbardo’s curiosity about the nature of dehumanization aligned with their need to better understand friction between guards and prisoners in the military.
They created friction like Ben Shapiro going in dry, and the trial was shut down in just six days. Guards put prisoners into solitary confinement for hours on end. Someone had a mental breakdown. By the end, prisoners were referring to themselves by their assigned prisoner numbers.
Howthefuckever.
With the benefit of time, it appears that this study was not original, groundbreaking, or unbiased. It also seems there was a heavy dose of purposeful acting on the part of some of the subjects.
Mistakes were made.
One volunteer guard, Dave Eshleman, confessed that he consciously made the decision to act the part of cuntwhistle cop. Because otherwise they were just 18 guys sitting in a basement, and he was fucking bored. “I took it as a kind of an improv exercise.(…) I believed that I was doing what the researchers wanted me to do, and I thought I’d do it better than anybody else by creating this despicable guard persona.” Hooboy, that’s some bonked data.
To be fair, Eshleman was just following orders. The guards were heavily coached by Zimbardo, telling them to be “tough.” Zimbardo himself participated in the experiment as the prison superintendent, adding another layer of interference to the volunteers’ behavior.
Douglas Korpi, a volunteer assigned the role of prisoner, faked his mental breakdown. He said in an interview in 2018 that any “clinician would know that I was faking. If you listen to the tape, it’s not subtle. I’m not that good at acting.” Other participants said they asked to leave and Zimbardo himself told them they couldn’t. He denied this for years until official transcripts were unearthed confirming it.
It’s often reported that the prisoners staged a hunger strike, which is true. However, it was not just in opposition to the guards’ cruelty; it was an attempt to be let out of the experiment.
This all reads more like cosplay for clueless dumbasses than a groundbreaking experiment. Zimbardo even said it “seemed like college kids playing cops and robbers.”
Much like cosplay, it was based on someone else’s work.
A few of his students ran a simulated prison experiment on campus at Toyon Hall months earlier. His experimental design borrowed heavily from it. Zimbardo has defended himself against accusations of not giving informed consent, claiming he didn’t realize how out of hand it could get. But he knew what happened at Toyon Hall; the experiment ended early for largely the same reasons his experiment was shut down. It’s naive to believe he was either unaware or expected a different outcome.
Milgram and Zimbardo’s experiments share some commonalities. They deceived the public and their volunteers about the nature of their research. Their work was considered groundbreaking for decades, until it wasn’t. Perhaps their biggest lasting impact is that, because of experiments like theirs, experiments like theirs are unable to be conducted again. Something about ethical standards.
Can we learn anything from this study? Maybe it’s that Zimbardo, when he wanted to understand dehumanization, showed he was capable of dehumanizing others.
At 87, Zimbardo still works today in several capacities, including serving as an advisor to an anti-bullying organization Bystander Revolution founded by Mackenzie Scott.
This has been your daily Moment of Science reminding you that there were metric fucktonnes of lead in the water in the Bronx in the 1950s.
Wow, I hadn’t heard the names of Milgram and Zimbardo together since grad school. Thanks for the trip down memory lane. The single positive thing about these troubling exercised in bad science is that they created an opportunity for social psychologists to think outside the normal lab confines, and do some “real world’ experimentation with much better controls and ethical standards.