Prison Experiment Research Articles

Famished for Freedom: Pellagra and Medical Clemency at the Mississippi State Penitentiary.

This paper provides a case study of one medical experiment conducted in 1915 by the United States Public Health Service in collaboration with the Mississippi State Penitentiary. The experiment was non-therapeutic and its objective was to induce pellagra (a vitamin deficiency disease) in twelve healthy White male prisoners to confirm its etiology. Extant archival records produced by the convict participants, state politicians, and health researchers underscore that the men selected for the pellagra experiment were unique among incarcerated people in Mississippi at the time: they were White, wealthy, and politically well-connected. This paper contends that the convict participants leveraged a wide range of social and political connections to secure their participation in the pellagra experiment as an expeditious pathway to pre-arranged executive pardon, a phenomenon that I term medical clemency. By situating the 1915 pellagra prison experiment amid the broader landscape of incarceration, public health research, and systems of political patronage in Mississippi, this paper highlights the ways in which penal systems are embedded in broader social and political contexts. Not only did the experiment exacerbate pre-existing social inequalities behind bars, it also had lasting consequences for those involved in prison medical research - namely, the power to determine which kinds of convicts could ultimately re-enter the social order.

Sacrifices on the Altar of Science: The Case of Model Organisms

This research traces and examines specific examples of the application of model organisms during the experimentation of biomedical sciences and psychology. The main purpose of the study is to compare how scientists utilize animal models for experiments with specific cases of humans who were used as test subjects, focusing on methodologies and main motivations. A core question that motivated this work is: Can we use the term ‘‘model organisms’’ to refer to human beings? In other words, can human beings be considered analogue models, specifically model organisms? This study will try to respond to the above question, by drawing upon theoretical frameworks and definitions from the field of philosophy of science, particularly focusing on the concepts of the analogue model, model organisms, and animal model. It will also analyze specific examples of experimental utilization of animal models, such as Hippocratic physicians’ experiments involving goat brains, Galen's experiments on a pig during the Greco-Roman period, and the utilization of guinea pigs in modern scientific research. Finally, the study will examine historical examples where humans were used as test subjects including the Nazi medical experiments during World War II and the Stanford prison experiment conducted by psychology professor Philip G. Zimbardo.

Psychedelics and Desistance From Crime: Lessons From the Concord Prison Experiment

Recent investigations of naturalistic psychedelic use purport that psychedelic therapies may be useful in criminal justice contexts for reducing recidivism. The present study applies interactionist theories of desistance to critically explore how psychedelic therapies could facilitate agentic self-transformation to support desistance from crime. Psychedelic experience reports written by inmates as part of the “Concord Prison Experiment” (CPE) were collected from the New York Public Library. Reports from 29 participants were then analyzed using a qualitative content analysis that employed both conventional and directed approaches. Participants frequently reported on changes in emotion and sense perception, interactions with other participants, and self-knowledge. Reports of self-knowledge often emerged from cognitive shifts that led to reflexive thought and novel insights regarding crime and criminality. These findings demonstrate how psychedelics can facilitate cognitive shifts in meaning conducive to inspiring desistance from crime. However, shortcomings of the CPE indicate that the social environment can hinder integration, by constraining the potential to enact changes in one’s life or realize meaningful insights through prosocial relationships. The combination of potentially harmful prison environments and the vulnerable states of consciousness generated by psychedelics should preclude investigations among actively incarcerated participants. Without addressing common social and structural barriers to successful reentry such as housing and employment, the efficacy of psychedelic-assisted therapy as a recidivism reducing intervention will be limited. Alternative approaches might explore how psychedelic therapy can address the psychological impacts of incarceration.

The end of American exceptionalism: An enlightened corrections

AbstractResearch SummaryThe United States is at a turning point in the history of corrections. Suddenly and surprisingly, the era of mass incarceration ended around 2010. Since that time, prison populations, public punitiveness, and get‐tough rhetoric have declined. A challenging question remains, however: Now what? Doing more of the same is foolish but likely. Prison reform is inhibited by the twin realities that states have limited budgets and have existing prisons that are rarely shuttered. New thinking is needed to move beyond these restrictions. One guide for a cognitive shift is Steven Pinker'sEnlightenment Nowin which he argues that sustained improvement in human well‐being in the United States and across the globe is due to the Enlightenment principles of reason, science, humanism, and progress. In this context, an “enlightened corrections” is possible in which policies and practices are evaluated by the four ideals articulated by Pinker. As one example, mass imprisonment is shown to be irrational, unscientific, inhumane, and bereft of a future. By contrast, more promising policies seek to nourish offenders by offering redemption and by using community supervision to build quality relationships that provide a means for targeting risk factors for intervention.Policy ImplicationsThe key policy implication is the proposal to place prison reform within the Biden Administration's support for infrastructure improvement. Funded by the federal government, a “Build Back Better Prison Experiment” would be undertaken in which 10 experimental prisons—designed from a clean slate and selected through a competition—would be created and evaluated. The goal is to establish prisons that are rational in their planning, are evidence based, improve offenders’ lives, and foster a new era of progress in American corrections.

Thinking Does Not Make It So

Thinking Does Not Make It So

The Vaccine Skeptics of 1721

The Vaccine Skeptics of 1721

Wyjaśnić zło. Filozoficzna interpretacja eksperymentu więziennego Philipa Zimbardo

The main problem of this paper is the issue of the evil and attempts at explaining this phenomenon. It is an analysis and reinterpretation of the Stanford Prison Experiment conducted by Philip Zimbardo. The leading argumentation is composed of Hannah Arendt's thesis of the banality of evil and philosophy of Immanuel Kant and Paul Ricoeur. Facing the radical experiment's conclusions, questions about human free will, motives and responsibility was raised. Therefore, the main thesis of this paper is an objection against the radical postulate of social psychologists about a profound influence a situation has on our moral decisions. The conclusion leads us to assumption of the incomprehensible character of evil and a strong need to expand our ability of self-reliant thinking allowing us to make a morally right choices and to counteract evil.

Don't Breathe a Word by Jordyn Taylor

Reviewed by: Don't Breathe a Word by Jordyn Taylor Alaine Martaus Taylor, Jordyn Don't Breathe a Word. HarperTeen, 2021 [352 p] Trade ed. ISBN 9780063038882 $17.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9780063038905 $9.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R Gr. 8-12 In spring 1962, as the Cold War breeds fears of nuclear annihilation, six students at prestigious Hardwick Prep, including sixteen-year-old Connie, are chosen to test the school's new bomb shelter; something goes horribly wrong, and only five come out alive. In the current day, lonely new junior Eva is about to get drawn into that tragic event's dark legacy. Desperate for friends, Eva is thrilled to learn she's been tagged to join the Fives, an elite secret society of the school's best and brightest. Hooked by the sense of belonging, Eva is initially happy to ignore signs that the group is less social networking, more student surveillance. Soon her misgivings and a friendship with fellow outsider Erik lead her to investigate the Fives' history and its ties to that horrific day sixty years ago. As twisted secrets are revealed, Eva must decide whether to stay loyal or reveal the truth. Unfolding alongside Connie's narration of what really happened in the fallout shelter, itself a nailbiter subplot that's part Milgram test, part Stanford prison experiment, Eva's story is a psychological thriller that's both gripping and thought provoking. Chapters alternate between Connie and Eva, drawing attention to a web of power and secrets whose strands reach from the past to entangle each new generation of students, while the perfectly paced reveals build pressure to a single moment of breathtaking violence and satisfying, if imperfect, final showdown. The girls' narrative voices, meanwhile, offer a compelling glimpse at how easy it is to fall in line, even against a gut feeling that something is wrong. Overall, it's a bingeworthy pageturner that will leave readers asking themselves "What would I have done?" [End Page 441] Copyright © 2021 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Revisitando el concepto de la banalidad del mal desde la perspectiva del liderazgo de identidad

El concepto de la banalidad del mal ha sido utilizado para explicar la maldad humana. Este concepto ha sido muy influyente en la psicología social y en el resto de las ciencias sociales. Los resultados obtenidos en los experimentos de Milgram sobre obediencia y en el experimento de la prisión de Stanford (EPS) han sido considerados como muestras de apoyo empírico al concepto de la banalidad del mal. Pero este concepto está recibiendo importantes críticas desde la historia y desde la propia psicología social. El reanálisis de los estudios de Milgram y del EPS no apoya las formulaciones teóricas clásicas formuladas por Milgram y Zimbardo. La variabilidad de los niveles de obediencia en los experimentos de Milgram y en el comportamiento mostrado por los guardias y prisioneros en el EPS requieren otro modelo teórico explicativo de tales resultados. Enmarcados dentro de la perspectiva de la identidad social, Haslam y Reicher proponen que el papel del liderazgo de identidad es un concepto clave para explicar los resultados obtenidos en estos estudios.

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

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.

Revisiting the Stanford Prison Experiment from the Perspective of the Social Model of Disability: A Teaching Experience

This article aims to revisit the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) from the perspective of disability studies. The SPE is an issue that inevitably comes to light while teaching Social Psychology and how it contributes to a different course titled Psychological, Social and Cultural Aspects of Disabilities. The SPE presents a pioneering piece of research within Social Psychology. Similarly, the social model has reformed the concept of disability. The SPE and further studies demonstrate the importance of social forces in shaping human behaviour; i.e. they explore how good people might turn evil in particular circumstances. The social model of disability emphasises the role of social oppression in creating disability. As these two courses contribute to each other, it is discussed that an appropriate level of analysis within the discipline of psychology has much to contribute to the inherently interdisciplinary field of disability studies and vice versa. Interdisciplinary curriculums might be a step towards inclusive higher education.

Debate around leadership in the Stanford Prison Experiment: Reply to Zimbardo and Haney (2020) and Chan et al. (2020).

Access to the Stanford University archive has revealed new material that makes it possible to debate the precise nature and causes of events in the Stanford Prison Experiment. What the authors see as important is that these materials show the experimenters engaged in processes of identity leadership, which encouraged guard cruelty by presenting it as necessary for the achievement of noble collective goals. However, the authors encourage students, teachers, and researchers to engage with this new material themselves to explore alternative perspectives on what actually occurred in the study. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Continuing to acknowledge the power of dehumanizing environments: Comment on Haslam et al. (2019) and Le Texier (2019).

Decades after it was conducted, the Stanford Prison Experiment endures as a classic, dramatic demonstration of the potentially destructive psychological dynamics that can be created when one group of people is given nearly total power over a group of derogated others in a powerful, dehumanizing environment such as prison. The authors of the study value the intellectually engaged alternative perspectives that continue to be used to discuss its unsettling results but reject those that are ad hominem, misleading, inaccurate, and unscientific. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Identity leadership is manifested via integrative complexity: Comment on Haslam et al. (2019).

Haslam, Reicher, and Van Bavel (2019) convincingly argued that experimenters in the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) influenced prisoners via identity-based communication. However, Haslam et al. focused on direct mechanisms of identity communication. In our comment, we discuss a less direct-but potentially equally important-communication mechanism by which leaders in the SPE may have influenced followers: integrative complexity. This consideration of integrative complexity not only bolsters the basic point of Haslam et al.'s article also provides new avenues for understanding the mechanisms by which leader identity processes work in cases like the SPE. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Reflections on Social Psychology while reading Hannah Arendt

Two recent articles in the American Psychologist (Vol 74, no. 7, 2019) on the Stanford Prison Experiment induced me to re-read Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (1958), On Totalitarianism (1973). and Eichmann in Jerusalem (Arendt and Kroh, 1964). This re-reading and reflection deepened my understanding of the value and role of social psychology and Arendt’s deep understanding of human speech and action as it relates to the Human Sciences and understanding our role in the social and political world. The review includes an experiment by Arthur Asch on “Opinion and social pressure” published in 1955 and then looks at Stanley Milgram’s experiment on obedience published in 1963. The review of these articles provides a context for looking at Philip Zimbardo’s Sanford Prison Experiment (1973) and a critique of that experiment which led to my re-reading Hannah Arendt. This article continues an exploration of my efforts (Morehouse, 2012; Morehouse, 2015; Morehouse et al, 2019) at integrating some elements of psychology and philosophy with the goal of deepening understanding of contemporary issues.

Using new revelations about the Stanford prison experiment to address APA undergraduate psychology major learning outcomes.

Using new revelations about the Stanford prison experiment to address APA undergraduate psychology major learning outcomes.

Debunking the Stanford Prison Experiment.

The Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) is one of psychology's most famous studies. It has been criticized on many grounds, and yet a majority of textbook authors have ignored these criticisms in their discussions of the SPE, thereby misleading both students and the general public about the study's questionable scientific validity. Data collected from a thorough investigation of the SPE archives and interviews with 15 of the participants in the experiment further question the study's scientific merit. These data are not only supportive of previous criticisms of the SPE, such as the presence of demand characteristics, but provide new criticisms of the SPE based on heretofore unknown information. These new criticisms include the biased and incomplete collection of data, the extent to which the SPE drew on a prison experiment devised and conducted by students in one of Zimbardo's classes 3 months earlier, the fact that the guards received precise instructions regarding the treatment of the prisoners, the fact that the guards were not told they were subjects, and the fact that participants were almost never completely immersed by the situation. Possible explanations of the inaccurate textbook portrayal and general misperception of the SPE's scientific validity over the past 5 decades, in spite of its flaws and shortcomings, are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Rethinking the nature of cruelty: The role of identity leadership in the Stanford Prison Experiment.

The Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) is one of the most famous studies in the history of psychology. For nearly a half century it has been understood to show that assigning people to a toxic role will, on its own, unlock the human capacity to treat others with cruelty. In contrast, principles of identity leadership argue that roles are unlikely to elicit cruelty unless leaders encourage potential perpetrators to identify with what is presented as a noble ingroup cause and to believe their actions are necessary for the advancement of that cause. Although identity leadership has been implicated in behavior ranging from electoral success to obedience to authority, researchers have hitherto had limited capacity to establish whether role conformity or identity leadership provides a better account of the cruelty observed in the SPE. Through examination of material in the SPE archive, we present comprehensive evidence that, rather than guards conforming to role of their own accord, experimenters directly encouraged them to adopt roles and act tough in a manner consistent with tenets of identity leadership. Implications for the analysis of conformity and cruelty as well as for interpretation of the SPE are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Revisiting the Stanford prison experiment, again: Examining demand characteristics in the guard orientation

ABSTRACTThe day before the Stanford prison experiment began, the investigators held an orientation session for the guards in which they communicated expectations for hostile guard behavior, a flippant prisoner mindset, and the possibility of ending the study prematurely. While the study’s principal investigator has minimized the influence of this orientation, critics have speculated that it provided a “script” for guard abuse. In the present studies, participants were presented with a hypothetical prison simulation study and randomly assigned as guards to an orientation session that included these expectations (Stanford orientation) or one providing basic study information. Across three studies, participants exposed to the Stanford orientation relative to a control orientation, reported greater expectations for hostile and oppressive behavior on the part of the study’s investigator and from others and themselves as guards. The present results provide empirical support for speculation that the language of the guard orientation in the Stanford prison experiment sanctioned abuse among guards.

The Penal Origins of Colonial Model Villages: From Aborted Concentration Camps to Forced Resettlement in Angola (1930–1969)

ABSTRACTIn 1962, one year after the outbreak of the colonial war in Angola, the Portuguese military forces devised and tried to establish a concentration camp in the northern district of Zaire. This attempt failed to gather sufficient support among metropolitan civil servants, who preferred seemingly softer techniques of population control, such as village-building and resettlement plans. The case represents the first ever documented evidence of a relation between penal concentration and rural development policies in Portuguese Africa. There are competing accounts today on the structural origins and conjunctural aims of the Portuguese policy of population removal, regrouping and surveillance in Angola, mainly because resettlement plans and concentration camps became analytically ambiguous during the last fifteen years of the Portuguese colonial rule. This paper explores this ambiguity by showing that resettlement techniques were linked to penal reforms of the early 1950s. By studying the initial and subsequent plans of rural reordering proposed for the region of Zaire and by following the history of the first native prison experiment of aldeamento (in the penal colony of Damba of Malanje), I argue that counter-insurgency village-building in Angola corresponded to a form of ‘developmental repression’.