Stanford Prison Experiment

We interviewed Philip G. Zimbardo on April 19, 2011, in anticipation of the 40th anniversary of the Stanford Prison Experiment in August 2011. While Zimbardo's name is mentioned often in tandem with the experiment, he has distinguished himself in many other areas within psychology before and after the experiment, beginning with an accomplished early career at New York University in which he took interest in social psychology research on deindividuation. We discussed the Stanford Prison Experiment in the greater context of his varied and illustrious career, including recent pioneering work on heroism, the establishment of The Shyness Clinic at Stanford University, and the iconic Discovering Psychology series. We also addressed his adroit and candid approach to the experiment itself over the years.

name is mentioned often in tandem with the experiment, he has distinguished himself in many other areas within psychology before and after the experiment, beginning with an accomplished early career at New York University in which he took interest in social psychology research on deindividuation. We discussed the Stanford Prison Experiment in the greater context of his varied and illustrious career, including recent pioneering work on heroism, the establishment of The Shyness Clinic at Stanford University, and the iconic Discovering Psychology series. We also addressed his adroit and candid approach to the experiment itself over the years.

A tanulmány a stanfordi börönkísérlettel kapcsolatos kételyeket vizsgálja meg kritikai elemzéssel, kontextusba helyezve a kísérlet megszületésének, lefolytatásának, és utóéletének körülményeit.  A konklúzió kitér a pszichológiai kutatásokra vonatkozó következtetésekre.

A consideration of the problem of how the Germans could have followed Hitler in implementing the Holocaust.  An examination of Hannah Arendt's treatment of Adolf Eichmann and the subsequent work of Stanley Milgram and Phil Zimbardo on obedience to authority.

The question of evil in contemporary political psychology is explained in terms of dispositions or situations. Dispositionists maintain that people have inherent tendencies to act the way they do, while situationists emphasize that circumstances cause bevaviour to go off-track. The current evil in Bangladesh must be explained using the latter methodology for, prior to 1990, the year of our democratic transition, the country was far from evil. One statistic alone underlines the shift: 80 percent of all hartals (keeping traffic off roads through violence by using an army of thumotic student thugs - innocent bystanders have been burnt alive!) since 1945, have occurred after the annus mirabilis/horribilis.

Democracy makes us civic/situational enemies.

This article aims to revisit the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) from the perspective of disability studies. The SPE is an issue that inevitably comes to light while teaching Social Psychology and how it contributes to a different course titled Psychological, Social and Cultural Aspects of Disabilities. The SPE presents a pioneering piece of research within Social Psychology. Similarly, the social model has reformed the concept of disability. The SPE and further studies demonstrate the importance of social forces in shaping human behaviour; that is, they explore how good people might turn evil in particular circumstances. The social model of disability emphasises the role of social oppression in creating disability. As these two courses contribute to each other, it is discussed that an appropriate level of analysis within the discipline of psychology has much to contribute to the inherently interdisciplinary field of disability studies and vice versa. Interdisciplinary curriculums might be a step towards inclusive higher education.

In 1971, Professor Philip Zimbardo and his team  staged a controversial experiment in the basement of the psychology department at Stanford University. 24 healthy male students were chosen among 70 applicants and arbitrarily divided into guards and prisoners. Surprise arrests  were made in Palo Alto (by real police officers), a makeshift prison was set up and interactions between the subjects were filmed.
The Stanford Prison Experiment, as it is now universally known, was meant to last two weeks but had to be terminated after 6 days only “when it became apparent that many of the ‘prisoners’ were in serious distress and many of the ‘guards’ were behaving in ways which brutalized and degraded their fellow subjects.” Mental breakdowns, sadistic behavior and eventually a hunger strike demonstrated “the power of situational determinants in both shaping behavior and predominating over personality, attitudes and individual values” (Zimbardo 1973).
Despite the sustained attention paid to verbal behavior during and after the experiment (debriefing sessions were held with all the participants), Zimbardo’s perspective remained primarily behavioral and socio-psychological, with a strong focus on “environmental contingencies” and interpersonal dynamics.
The aim of the present study is to establish the centrality of language-based mechanisms in the processes at work: the enactment of power through the systematic defacement of prisoners, the grammatical orchestration of authority and submission through a small set of modal constructions. The mixed data used will be taken from the original video footage available and three successive film adaptations: Das Experiment (Hirschbiegel 2001), The Experiment (Scheuring 2010), The Stanford Prison Experiment (Alvarez 2015).

'Varieties of Psychological Inquiry' consists of twenty-five essays (distributed across two volumes) that venture into various facets of psychology - ranging from: Freud. Jung and Sullivan, to: Piaget, Sheldrake, and beyond. Among the topics explored are: Anxiety, dissociation, abuse, charisma, developmental psychology, the 'God gene', SSRIs, memory, chronobiology, neurobiology, consciousness, and holographic theories of mind. While no particular theory of psychology is espoused during the pages of this two volume work, a variety of theoretical and empirical issues are critically explored and reflected upon in considerable detail. In a sense, the direction in which the essays of this book point is toward epistemological horizons where what is known (possibly) seeks to merge with what is not, yet, known.

The 'Occupy Movement' took many people by surprise with both its scope, as well as with the manner in which it resonated with the deep sense of discontentment that appears to be felt by many people in the United States concerning the economic. legal and political character of American life. This book is intended to help bring a sharper focus to the concerns that are inherent in the dissatisfaction people feel concerning the idea of 'politics as usual' by offering a clear differentiation between the way of power (i.e., politics as usual) and the way of inalienable sovereignty that gives expression to a very different notion of democracy ... one that is constructive, not destructive.

In working on Optimal Human Functioning, it has become clear that what it means to be a human being and how we treat human beings is changing. We realize now that an Individual Human Consciousness produces and integrates information unlike any other state of matter in the Cosmos. Through my own intuitions, during and after acquiring a General Studies Degree with a concentration in Mathematics, being hit by a car, singing to my mother for hours before she died, and most importantly living daily life with my wife and family, I have worked out an idea. Creative Conscious Mathematics, which is just a fancy word for one's relationship with the nature of Mathematics. My Journey has taken me to a working understanding of Mathematics, Physics and Biology in a way that has added to the way of life of my family. In optimizing our collective psychoneuroimmunological functioning, we must have a general working understanding of Mathematics, Physics and Biology, and put in daily effort to become a better person. Moreover this human progression produces unique tradable information actionable within high frequency quantitative finance! Mathematical Understanding, Physical Intelligence and Biological Empathetic Awareness generate an expansion of the utility of Consciousness that is beyond calculation, existing within every human being in a density and utility unlike Any other state or form of Matter in the Cosmos. Equally, it is each person's individual responsibility to work on their Altruistic Self-Mastery, not as a level of attainment, but more of a direction that guides daily practice.

In recent years, it has been argued more than once that situations determine our conduct to a much greater extent than our character does. This argument rests on the findings of social psychologists such as Stanley Milgram, who have popularized the idea that we can all be brought to harm innocent others. An increasing number of philosophers and ethicists make use of such findings, and some of them have argued that this so-called situationist challenge fatally undermines virtue ethics. As virtue ethics is currently the most popular underpinning for ethics education in the military, it is important to know to what extent the claim situationists make is correct. Fortunately, a closer look indicates that an interactionist perspective, with our character and the situation interplaying, is more accurate than the situationist perspective.

The word "leadership" is, and has been for some time, a buzz word which is espoused by many to be 'the' key to solving most, if not all, of the problems in the world.  If only there were the 'right' sort of leaders in the world – that is, the right kind of “control” -- then the political, economic, educational, business, scientific, environmental, military, judicial, and spiritual difficulties facing humankind could be resolved.

The desire for leadership is a pathological disorder that is engendered in others by those who already have succumbed to the malady.  Leadership is a delusional belief system in which a human being believes that he or she should be given (or usurp) the authority to organize and control the lives of other human beings.

Chaos is not the opposite of leadership.  The co-operation of equals stands in opposition to the idea of leadership.

Every human being is sovereign and has an inalienable right to seek to push back the horizons of ignorance free from interference as long as such efforts are consonant with honoring a like right in relation to others.  Reconciling the boundaries of sovereignty among human beings is a dynamic, complex, and nuanced process ... a process that can only be successfully navigated by means of an exercise of co-operation among sovereign individuals and not through the leadership of the few with respect to the many.

This book explores different aspects of the pathological character of 'leadership’ – the root of control  Once the underlying principles of the delusional disorder are appreciated, an individual might be in a better position to realize the character of the pathology of leadership (i.e., the desire to control others) and resist its seductive, Siren-like wail.

Three theories contend as explanations of perpetrator behavior in the Holocaust as well as other cases of genocide: structural, intentional, and situational. Structural explanations emphasize the sense in which no single individual or choice accounts for the course of events. In opposition, intentional/cutltural accounts insist upon the genocides as intended outcomes, for how can one explain situations in which people 'step up' and repeatedly kill defenseless others in large numbers over sustained periods of time as anything other than a choice? Situational explanations offer a type of behavioral account; this is how people act in certain environments. Critical to the situational account as I discuss it is the 'Asch paradigm', i.e. experimentally attested conditions for eliciting conformity of behavior regardlesss of available evidence of prior beliefs. In what follows, I defend what I term above a version of situational explanations of perpetrator behavior. Moreover, I maintain that the factors that explain provide an understanding as well. While not committed to the complete irrelevance or exclusion of cultural or structural factors, nonetheless situational analyses can account both for what happened and why. A cardinal virtue of this version of situational explanations consists in showing how shallow the problem of understanding turns out to be for such cases.

We interviewed Philip G. Zimbardo on April 19, 2011, in anticipation of the 40th anniversary of the Stanford Prison Experiment in August 2011. While Zimbardo's name is mentioned often in tandem with the experiment, he has distinguished himself in many other areas within psychology before and after the experiment, beginning with an accomplished early career at New York University in which he took interest in social psychology research on deindividuation. We discussed the Stanford Prison Experiment in the greater context of his varied and illustrious career, including recent pioneering work on heroism, the establishment of The Shyness Clinic at Stanford University, and the iconic Discovering Psychology series. We also addressed his adroit and candid approach to the experiment itself over the years.

Beginning with Talal Asad's (2007) claim that torture is a hermeneutic, this article investigates the ongoing relationship between torture and the US university's primary ways of making meaning about racialized difference. The Stanford prison experiment is routinely referenced as a seminal study revealing why people engage in torture. Through a close reading of Philip Zimbardo's The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, the major account of the SPE, I raise concerns about how torture is used to enable moral development and to promote an understanding of difference as a “problem” to be managed by institutionalized diversity projects.

This article concentrates on one form of creative practice, improvisation, considering how it has been used as an experimental method within filmmaking as well as in research enquiry. Drawing on my professional experience in the field of narrative fiction filmmaking, as well as interviews with film professionals, I show how a close examination of improvising processes opens up illuminating points of comparison with research methodologies across the academy. This article is an interdisciplinary review, drawing together ideas about improvisation beyond film, looking broadly across the creative arts and most pointedly, drawing an unexpected link between practice research in film and the traditions of laboratory research methodologies within Social Psychology.