
I Was a Guard in the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment - sergeant3
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2y5sbt/iwasa_guard_in_the_1971_stanford_prison/
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sheensleeves
Oddly I was thinking about this experiment this morning. Perhaps I opened HN
and forgot.

My thinking was along his lines. Now I think that I was in denial. In The
Banality of Evil book, the main clerk of the genocide had "the personality of
a mailman." He had "winged words." He fuggedaboudit. He forgot what his mind
wanted to.

The Nazis were not sorry for their genocide victims. They were only sorry for
themselves that they had to be the bad guys. De Nile runs deep.

Battle for the Mind: A Physiology of Conversion and Brain-Washing (Sargant,
1957) says that you need total neurological collapse to convert someone. I
guess this is why the book of Nash the mentally ill math genius has better
information than the misleading movie that people take seriously. He never got
better until he was in a cheap state hospital and they broke out old fashioned
insulin comas and such techniques on him. Total brain shock.

There is a debate now about whether torture works. It is all wishful thinking.
People are innately convertable. There was a k5 essay about this. Slavery from
raids used to be common. The adaptive behavior is Stockholm Syndrome -- you
break down and reintegrate to the new tribe. Like Blue Jacket play (no longer
being shown since it is ahistorical like the Simpsons play).

~~~
stavrogin
Hannah Arendt is widely praised and its Jerusalem book is often quoted all
around the world, yet this portrayal of a "mailman" is more than dubious. The
historian Hermann Langbein, who survived Auschwitz and later wrote the
authoritative "Men and women at Auschwitz", showed that her ideas didn't match
the facts. Recently, the first integral study of Eichmann's papers completely
broke this "mailman" picture: he was a typical intellectual, who read
philosophy books and even poetry, and liked writing. This "personality of a
mailman" is a nonsense, unless writing long commentaries of Hegel's philosophy
is "banal" for any "mailman".

Taking the Nazis as a whole is another big mistake. Some were sorry, some
tried to mitigate the violence, at different levels. Primo Levi (also very
critical of Arendt) remembered a young woman that became a guardian: at first
she was horrified, she couldn't stand the violence and felt ill the first
days, she tried to resign. A few weeks later, she was accustomed and hit
prisoners. It's a pity his "grey zone" concept is despised by our Manichean
world.

Apart from this, I totally agree with the denial aspect. The Standford
experiment was very probably a trauma for this former guard, and his
denegating discourse seems strongly biased by this. His main claims are:

\- This experiment is a fraud, it claims to prove that we, the guards, became
"evil" (his term), but that's wrong. \- The experiment was biased because the
main experimenter made some important decisions along the way. \- We, the
guards, did not loose our humanity, the material settings were inhumane and
made us behave like this. For instance, we were sleep deprived. \- If a guard
became violent, it's not because he was violent, it's because he was an
amateur actor that had endorsed a violent role just for fun. \- The experiment
author manipulated the students into saying things they didn't thought, and he
kept their identities secret to give him "more control of the narrative".

Sure, this experiment is morally questionable and it's hard to build strong
conclusions upon it, but if it was a fraud, why wasn't it debunked long ago?
Why didn't most of the students protest they were wronged? Why caricature it
with notions of good/evil? And would actors play a "violent cop" role for many
days just on an impulse, with graduating violence? And, most of all: if an
inhumane setting made them behave with less empathy, less humanity, isn't that
a very interesting experimental result?

~~~
philwelch
The Stanford Prison Experiment _was_ debunked long ago. It's mostly taught
today as a cautionary tale of how not to do psychological research, and as a
case study in research ethics demonstrating why we have IBR's.

------
thaumaturgy
His comments are pretty interesting. He seems to lay the entire blame for the
conditions of the experiment on Professor Zimbardo.

> _Looking at the prisoners, they were all just like me. Unlike in real
> prisoners, there wasn 't social or racial disparity. There was no animosity.
> They looked just like me, or people I knew._

This is an odd comment to make; I'm not sure what he'd be trying to get at
here. The most charitable interpretation I could give it is that abuse is more
expected if there are racial or social differences between prisoners and
guards.

I'm really disappointed that nobody thought to ask him directly why he didn't
object to anything that he observed. He says a couple of times that there were
parts of the experiment he didn't agree with, but that he didn't want to taint
or harm the experiment. So, he seemed to be willing to at least passively
accept the abuse of other people -- his own schoolmates -- for the sake of a
purpose.

He wasn't apparently aware of how the experiment is taught in modern Psych
classes, and it's funny, some of his comments reinforce what those classes
teach:

> _We used the Stanford experiment to talk about prison mentalities actually
> and how prison effects people and changes them. How people become what the
> situation calls for. Like you said above that Lombardo set up that
> experiment and you did what you were told as a kid_

and

> _While the popular idea from this may be the inherent evil, I hope you at
> least know that those who learn about this in college /university do not
> learn it that way, it's more along the topics of conformity, and diffusion
> of responsibility._

...in response to his saying,

> _In that prison experiment, leaving would have been an option, but I didn 't
> for several reasons: first off, from my perspective, I didn't see that much
> happening that was bad. People looking back now ... can see it in black-and-
> white, two-dimensionally. At the time, it went on pretty much as advertised.
> ... Also, I felt a commitment when I agreed to participate in the
> experiment. For all I knew, if I left, the whole experiment could have
> unraveled. Also, I felt like this was a unique experience and I enjoyed
> getting paid for doing something unusual._

~~~
saraid216
It's a little disingenuous to use the word "schoolmates" to describe his
fellow prisoners. This was at Berkeley; as far as I'm aware, none of the
guards knew the prisoners before the experiment.

Honestly, if it weren't unethical, I'd be curious as to the results of a re-
run of the SPE except that you spend the first day out-of-character doing
icebreakers before role assignment. I suspect that it'd make things better on
the whole, but you'd have the occasional case where a guard uses it as an
occasion to fish for ways to get under a prisoner's skin much more quickly and
effectively.

~~~
gojomo
Not "at Berkeley". I suspect even going back to 1971, this sort of
'experiment' wouldn't have flown at Berkeley.

~~~
saraid216
Blah. I got my recollection confused with the Greater Good magazine, which is
at Berkeley. /facepalm

------
saraid216
Incidentally, Dr. Zimbardo has continued doing stuff in the last 40 years. He
testified as an expert for Abu Ghraib, wrote a book [1], and has been
promoting heroic imagination as an antidote. It's worth checking out his work
since, if this is an area you're interested in.

[1] [http://lucifereffect.com/](http://lucifereffect.com/)

------
gojomo
The real lesson of the Stanford Prison Experiment is that professors will do
awful things to trusting undergraduates for academic fame.

------
hurin
It's difficult to achieve some kind of objectivity. Of course no one wants to
believe that they are _innately bad_ or easily coerced into doing terrible
things to other human beings, so it seems like it would be very natural to
expect them to lash out at the methods of the experiment.

~~~
riffraff
Not to argue the basic concept, but in this specific case, AFAIK, it's very
arguable whether "people are innately evil" might have been proven.

I.e. the experiment was influenced by the author of the research by his own
admission, and the results were never replicated.

~~~
hurin
> Not to argue the basic concept, but in this specific case, AFAIK, it's very
> arguable whether "people are innately evil" might have been proven.

I definitely was not implying that a statement like that was (let alone ever
could be) proven; only that for the subjects that participated in the
experiment, who were exposed to that perhaps popular interpretation of the
results - could be expected have a significantly different perception of the
experiment on account of this.

------
moomin
There's a well-known psychological result that people will do awful things if
asked to do so in an authoritative context. What the guard is essentially
saying is that the behaviour documented originated more from that existing
result than any emergent behaviour.

~~~
chippy
The well-known psychological theory was in part developed because of this
experiment. This one, and Milgram's famous experiment.

------
sgnelson
"It wasn't my fault, we were just following orders. It was sleep deprivation,
the prisoners were dehumanized and we were told to play act as bad guys."
seems to be his excuse (from reading his comments) which to me, seems to
reinforce Zimbardo more than discredit him. But I might be missing something.

This is also just one person's opinion and memory from 40 years ago.

For better or worse, I think the Stanford Prison Experiment is a very
interesting piece of research, and if it wasn't, we still wouldn't be
discussing it and what it means.

~~~
saraid216
Well, it's worth noting that this has been John Mark's statement for some
time. Here's the earliest instance I can find online:
[https://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?artic...](https://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=43897)
(2011)

I'm also somewhat certain that his view was mentioned in Zimbardo's 2007 book;
I loaned out my copy, so I can't check.

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aaron695
It's kinda well known a lot of these old pop psychology experiments were not
scientifically valid yet peoples keep taking them at face value even in this
thread?

It's not to say the point was wrong, they were made fanciful to popularise a
point the researchers believed in.

But if you want to believe they were right please at least quote valid
research.

------
Htsthbjig
This man repeats over and over again that he believes humans are not
inherently Evil, while he justifies the behavior of guards on the way the
experiment was designed.

For me that proves that people could be inherently Evil while not realizing
about what they are really doing(until they suffer from it).

For example, at the start of the WWII killing and abusing for the Germans and
Japanese was so easy because there was such a power imbalance, like in the
experiment with guards weapons,horses against tanks in Poland in WWII, that
they actually abused and killed without actually thinking about it. They were
Evil, but most of them did not really knew at the time, because all the
propaganda they heard and so on(radio told them they were being heroes).

It was only when they started to loose that they understood what they had done
to others, because they started being on the Evil receiving side.

Today you see this power imbalance in Iraq, any American soldier could kill
100-200 people from the other side before one American dies. So they don't
really think about this until a terrorist attack kills 10-20 people in the
West. Control on the media means the thousands of people dying in Iraq is not
displayed on TV, so it does not exit.

~~~
neworder
Just for the record, "horses against tanks" is well known to be propaganda
bullshit.

~~~
Htsthbjig
We developed technology in order to help investigators access archives of
documents of the time.

Once of the most interesting things you discover when you read the archives is
that lost of things we consider obvious today, was not at the time.

One of those is the usefulness of airplanes at the start of WWI, proven at the
end, and the usefulness of tanks at the start of WWII.

The fact tanks were bad weapons at fist, bulky, difficult to operate, slow,low
range(compared with big cannons) easy targets, and no ability to cross
difficult terrain.

This was improved in an incredible way, for example tank suspension
improvements rendered the Maginot Line obsolete when finished.

Lots of people in the army were against change. Making tanks were very
expensive, they needed fuel, and they genuinely considered money was better
spent on other things.

------
tunap
Where's the IMDB link to the recent release of the Hollywood Docu-drama?

