Point taken. And Zimbardo’s potential agenda can be questioned as well. Here’s an instruction from the wiki page:
“You can create in the prisoners feelings of boredom, a sense of fear to some degree, you can create a notion of arbitrariness that their life is totally controlled by us, by the system, you, me, and they’ll have no privacy… We’re going to take away their individuality in various ways. In general what all this leads to is a sense of powerlessness. That is, in this situation we’ll have all the power and they’ll have none.”
That seems like pretty loaded language to me. And it speaks to the password hypothesis. It also steps beyond what I would consider to be any sort of attempt at an ethical prison system. To say that it’s the unspoken “truth” of any prison situation is a huge leap made by Zimbardo.
Building on your blue collar kid example, if you moved the experiment to a service academy (West Point say), give the guards the instructions to uphold military code as they know it, assign an officer who was in charge of an actual prison to be the warden, and have the situation independently monitored, and I would guess you don’t get the same situation as the SPE. Zimbardo seems to acknowledge that the presence of clear rules is a mitigating factor, as he states numerous times that it was the laxness of the night shift at Abu Ghraib that led to the prisoner abuse (in his view). That’s a confound with the explicit instructions he gave in the situation he created.
Point taken. And Zimbardo’s potential agenda can be questioned as well. Here’s an instruction from the wiki page:
“You can create in the prisoners feelings of boredom, a sense of fear to some degree, you can create a notion of arbitrariness that their life is totally controlled by us, by the system, you, me, and they’ll have no privacy… We’re going to take away their individuality in various ways. In general what all this leads to is a sense of powerlessness. That is, in this situation we’ll have all the power and they’ll have none.”
That seems like pretty loaded language to me. And it speaks to the password hypothesis. It also steps beyond what I would consider to be any sort of attempt at an ethical prison system. To say that it’s the unspoken “truth” of any prison situation is a huge leap made by Zimbardo.
Building on your blue collar kid example, if you moved the experiment to a service academy (West Point say), give the guards the instructions to uphold military code as they know it, assign an officer who was in charge of an actual prison to be the warden, and have the situation independently monitored, and I would guess you don’t get the same situation as the SPE. Zimbardo seems to acknowledge that the presence of clear rules is a mitigating factor, as he states numerous times that it was the laxness of the night shift at Abu Ghraib that led to the prisoner abuse (in his view). That’s a confound with the explicit instructions he gave in the situation he created.