# Good people turned bad? Revisiting the Stanford Prison Experiment



## David Baxter PhD (May 10, 2007)

Can good people really turn bad? Revisiting the Stanford Prison Experiment 
Thursday, May 10, 2007

The idea that certain situations can turn good people evil has spread like wildfire ever since Philip Zimbardo's [in]famous Stanford Prison Experiment. The study ended prematurely when the 'ordinary' participants acting as 'guards' turned sadistic. Zimbardo has said this showed 'the evil that good people can be readily induced into doing to other good people', and recently he has explained the Iraqi prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib in similar terms.

But what if the participants in the Stanford Prison Experiment weren't 'good people'? What if the idea of participating in a prison experiment, or working at an interrogation facility, appeals to a certain type of character?

Thomas Carnahan and Sam McFarland posted two adverts, just like the ones used in Zimbardo's study, in several campus newspapers. One advert invited male participants for ?a psychological study of prison life?; the other invited participants for ?a psychological study?.

Just as in Zimbardo's study, all participants with mental health problems or a criminal or anti-social background were omitted. Crucially, the remaining 30 applicants to the 'prison study' scored significantly higher on measures of aggression, authoritarianism, Machiavellianism, social dominance, and lower on measures of altruism and empathy, than did the 61 volunteers for the 'psychological study'.

Contrary to Zimbardo's situationist perspective, the finding is compatible with a more interactionist view of human behaviour ? one that acknowledges that people's personalities affect the situations they find themselves in. ?We spend our lives selecting to be in some situations while avoiding others?, the researchers said. Moreover, like-minded individuals are likely to seek out similar situations. So, whether in Zimbardo's study, or in Abu Ghraib, similar characters may have ?mutually weakened each other?s constraints against abuse and reinforced in each other their willingness to engage in it?.

_Source:_ Carnahan, T. & McFarland S. (2007). Revisiting the Stanford Prison Experiment: Could Participant Self-Selection Have Led to the Cruelty? _Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin_, 2007, 33, 603-614.


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## ThatLady (May 12, 2007)

That's really interesting, David. I remember the original experiment, and remember thinking: "Oh, no! It's just not that simple!" It's good to see that it really isn't that simple.


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## pip (Jun 16, 2007)

See, now I'm wondering how you could tweak that experiment to make it more accurate. What could he have done in addition to omitting people to make the test more accurate?

I'm really curious now


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## David Baxter PhD (Jun 16, 2007)

I think that what the new study is saying is that the scope needs to be expanded to look at other personality characteristics before concluding that ALL people would necessarily act in this way. The suggestion is that the people who self-selected to volunteer for the study were more aggressive and less compassionate even befoe their participation in the study began. If so, the situation did not "make them evil" - it just brought out their pre-existing "evil" traits.


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