Handing out Prison Sentences and Fines?

In 1971, Phil Zimbardo tested how situations make people do horribly evil things. He took otherwise stable and normal young men and divided them as guards and prisoners. The guards wore uniforms culled from the army surplus store and weilded wooden batons. The prisoner wore poorly-fitted clothes, no underwear, shower thongs, and even tight-fitting nylon stocking on their heads.

No violence was permitted, but everything else was fair game.

You can create in the prisoners feelings of boredom, a sense of fear to some degree, you can create a notion of arbitrariness that their life is totally controlled by us, by the system, you, me, and they’ll have no privacy… We’re going to take away their individuality in various ways. In general what all this leads to is a sense of powerlessness. That is, in this situation we’ll have all the power and they’ll have none. — The Stanford Prison Study video, quoted in Haslam & Reicher, 2003.

Riots broke out on day 2, and guards actually volunteered extra hours to plan and execute an attack against the prisoners with fire extinguishers.

One prisoner objected. One. Prisoner #416. He went on a hunger strike, so the guards made him kiss and hug sausages. The other prisoners saw him as a troublemaker, so the guards capitalized on that feeling. They told the other prisoners that they could give up their blankets or see #416 in solitary. All kept their blankets but one.

Zimbardo’s girlfriend and now wife was the only objector out of fifty outsiders. Only she questioned the ethics of the situation.

The experiment proved that when you’re caught in the grips of an ideology, you’ll do anything to maintain it. Anything.