Revisiting the Stanford Prison Experiment: Could Participant Self-Selection Have Led to the Cruelty?

Abstract

The authors investigated whether students who selectively volunteer for a study of prison life possess dispositions associated with behaving abusively. Students were recruited for a psychological study of prison life using a virtually identical newspaper ad as used in the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE; Haney, Banks & Zimbardo, 1973) or for a psychological study, an identical ad minus the words of prison life . Volunteers for the prison study scored significantly higher on measures of the abuse-related dispositions of aggressiveness, authoritarianism, Machiavellianism, narcissism, and social dominance and lower on empathy and altruism, two qualities inversely related to aggressive abuse. Although implications for the SPE remain a matter of conjecture, an interpretation in terms of person-situation interactionism rather than a strict situationist account is indicated by these findings. Implications for interpreting the abusiveness of American military guards at Abu Ghraib Prison also are discussed.

We will hunt them down: How social dominance orientation and right-wing authoritarianism fuel ethnic persecution of immigrants in fundamentally different ways

“…For example, in their recent and elegant experiment, Carnahan & McFarland (2007) used an identical recruitment ad to the one that was originally used in the Stanford prison study. Their results showed that individual differences in SDO predict one's likelihood of volunteering to participate in the prison study, long considered a classical demonstration of how social roles and situational identities shape the way we act towards other groups.…”

Some Ethical Implications of Individual Competitiveness

“…Machiavellianism is a personality trait exemplified by the cynical ''cool syndrome'' (Christie and Geis 1970), which suggests a calculating rationality little influenced by emotions, interpersonal attachments, empathy, or altruism (Carnahan and McFarland 2007;De Corte et al 2007;Locke and Christensen 2007;Wastell and Booth 2003), and thus questionable ethics. Machiavellians seem inclined to be disagreeable (Elfenbein et al 2008), mistrusting (Sakalaki and Richardson et al 2007), not conscientious (Schlenker 2008 , Table S1), uncooperative (Paal and Bereczkei 2007), emotionally manipulative (Austin et al 2007), exploitive in relationships (Mullins and Kopelman 1988), and have been observed to lie, cheat, and bend rules for personal advantage (e.g., Kashy and DePaulo 1996;McLeod and Genereux 2008;Schlenker 2008).…”

Persistent Dispositionalism in Interactionist Clothing: Fundamental Attribution Error in Explaining Prison Abuse

“…Suffice it to say that we believe it is impossible to draw any conclusions from the Carnahan and McFarland (2007) study that pertain directly to the SPE. We will focus at length on only one methodological problem to illustrate why.…”

“…Thus, the American public increasingly has been told that terrorism is the product of "evil" people, that insurgencies are incited by nothing more than a handful of "thugs" or "dead enders," and that when some members of our own armies of predominately "good" people commit atrocities, it is because they represent the few "rotten apples" in an otherwise properly designed and well run "barrel." Carnahan and McFarland (2007) appear to us to espouse a version of this kind of dispositional thinking, both in their critique of the SPE and, more importantly, in their suggestion that recent seemingly parallel real-world events (especially at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the scandals involving members of the American military) can be explained in terms of the pathology of those involved rather than the pathological circumstances to which they were exposed.…”