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Frosty Piss [soylentnews.org] writes:

https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/19/us/philip-zimbardo-stanford-death/index.html [cnn.com]

Philip G. Zimbardo [philipzimbardo.com], the psychologist behind the controversial "Stanford Prison Experiment [wikipedia.org]" that was intended to examine the psychological experiences of imprisonment, has died. In the 1971 prison study funded by the US Office of Naval Research, Zimbardo and a team of graduate students recruited male college students to spend two weeks in a mock prison in the basement of a building on the Stanford campus. The United States Navy and the United States Marine Corps wanted to understand anti-social behavior and investigate conflict between military guards and prisoners. After psychologist Christina Maslach visited to evaluate the conditions, she was troubled to see how study participants were behaving and she confronted Zimbardo. After psychologist Christina Maslach [wikipedia.org] (later to become his wife) visited to evaluate the conditions, she was troubled to see how study participants were behaving and she confronted Zimbardo. He ended the experiment on the sixth day.

Selected student participants were assigned randomly to be "prisoners" or "guards" in a mock prison located in the basement of the psychology building at Stanford. Prisoners were confined to a 6 by 9 feet cell with black steel-barred doors. The only furniture in each cell was a cot. Solitary confinement was a small unlit closet. In his book Humankind - a hopeful history (2020) historian Rutger Bregman [wikipedia.org] discusses charges that the whole experiment was faked and fraudulent; Bregman argued this experiment is often used as an example to show that people succumb easily to evil behavior, but Zimbardo was less than candid about the fact that he told the guards to act the way they did.

Zimbardo's primary reason for conducting the experiment was to focus on the power of roles, rules, symbols, group identity and situational validation of behavior that generally would repulse ordinary individuals. "I had been conducting research for some years on deindividuation, vandalism and dehumanization that illustrated the ease with which ordinary people could be led to engage in anti-social acts by putting them in situations where they felt anonymous, or they could perceive of others in ways that made them less than human, as enemies or objects," said Zimbardo.

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