Jump to content

Talk:Stanford prison experiment

Page contents not supported in other languages.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Former good articleStanford prison experiment was one of the good articles, but it has been removed from the list. There are suggestions below for improving the article to meet the good article criteria. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake.
Article milestones
DateProcessResult
December 5, 2006Good article reassessmentDelisted
On this day...A fact from this article was featured on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "On this day..." column on August 20, 2021.

proposed revisions to lede

[edit]

The Stanford prison experiment (SPE) was designed to examine the effects of situational variables on participants' reactions and behaviors, in a two-week simulation of a prison environment. Stanford University psychology professor Philip Zimbardo led the research team who ran the study in the summer of 1971.[1]

Participants were recruited from the local community with an ad in the newspapers offering $15 per day to male students who wanted to participate in a "psychological study of prison life." Volunteers were chosen after assessments of psychological stability, and then randomly assigned to being prisoners or prison guards.[2] Critics have questioned the validity of these methods.[3]

Those volunteers selected to be "guards" were given uniforms specifically to deinividuate them, and instructed to prevent prisoners from escaping. The experiment officially started when "prisoners" were arrested by real Palo Alto police. Over the following five days, psychological abuse of the prisoners by the "guards" became increasingly brutal. After Christina Maslach visited to evaluate the conditions, she was so upset to see how study participants were behaving that she confronted Zimbardo. He ended the experiment on the sixth day. [4]

Like the Milgram experiment, SPE has been referenced and critiqued as one of the most unethical psychology experiments in history. The harm inflicted on the participants prompted universities worldwide to improve their ethics requirements for human subjects experiments to prevent them from being similiarly harmed. Other researchers have found it difficult to reproduce the study, especially given those constraints.[5]

References

  1. ^ Bekiempis, Victoria (August 4, 2015). "What Philip Zimbardo and the Stanford Prison Experiment Tell Us About Abuse of Power". Newsweek.
  2. ^ "2. Setting up". Stanford Prison Experiment. Retrieved 2021-08-19.
  3. ^ Le Texier, Thibault (2019-08-05). "Debunking the Stanford Prison Experiment". American Psychologist. 74 (7): 823–839. doi:10.1037/amp0000401. ISSN 1935-990X. PMID 31380664.
  4. ^ "8. Conclusion". Stanford Prison Experiment. Retrieved 2021-08-19.
  5. ^ "Intro to psychology textbooks gloss over criticisms of Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment". September 7, 2014.

3rd Wave

[edit]

This is a related study, also conducted in Palo Alto just prior to the SPE. Should it be added to this article? ErzsieHDR (talk) 22:01, 20 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

You're referring to The Third Wave (experiment), correct? That took place four years before the SPE, not just prior to it. It was a high school educational exercise, rather than a structured academic research study. It's not clear how it might be related, as doesn't seem to have played any role in Zimbardo's work. We'd need some reliable sources for confirmation before moving on this item. jxm (talk) 06:03, 24 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Interpretation and reproducibility of results

[edit]

In the text "Many have argued that the validity and merit of the research findings were significantly affected by the Demand characteristics § Notes and selection bias resulting from the Recruitment and selection § Notes.", is the subtext "§ Notes" really intended? Masonmilan (talk) 11:13, 22 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

See also: unabomber

[edit]

In the See Also section, there is a list and link to other related articles on similar questionable psychological studies. The list should include the psychological study at Harvard at which Ted Kaczynski spent 200 hours in 1959. The timeline of abusive psychological studies in U.S. should include ted given it predates Stanford Experiment. And the implication that this study may be the tipping point of his later pathology. Also has any behavioral study been conducted on the participants of the Stanford Experiment? Are any available on Wikipedia? Thanks. Stay safe. Elizabeth Spraygal109 (talk) 19:57, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

This is no Wikipedia article on that study specifically, so there isn't anything to link in the see also section. We can't just link to 'Ted Kaczynski', as that biography is not sufficiently related to the topic of this article. MrOllie (talk) 20:16, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]