The dirty work of the Stanford Prison Experiment: Re-reading the dramaturgy of coercion

Abstract

Almost 50 years on, the Stanford Prison Experiment of 1971 remains one of the most notorious and controversial psychology studies ever devised. It has often been treated as a cautionary tale about what can happen in prison situations if there is inadequate staff training or safeguarding, given the inherent power differentials between staff and inmates. But what exactly was the ‘situation’ in the simulated prison at Stanford University, and how exactly did the participants respond to it? This article provides a new analysis of the behaviour of the nine Stanford ‘guards’, which draws on unpublished archival records and original interviews with some of the participants. It adopts an interactionist approach, whereby the individual backgrounds and personalities of the participants are seen to inform their behaviour within the situation provided, as well as vice versa. A key suggestion to emerge from this analysis is that the conduct of the three guard shifts, within the experiment, differed significantly according the interaction of the men on each shift and their influence on each other. The article is framed by the concept of ‘dirty work’ and uses theoretical sources including Goffman and Festinger to explore the extent to which the adoption of a particular social role (in this case, that of prison guard) affects change in the behaviour and beliefs of individual role players. The argument seeks to show that some of the Stanford guards adopted strategies of ‘role distancing’ to insulate themselves from the coercive demands of their positions, while others found the guard role impacting troublingly on their senses of self.