Here is one of the most famous job advertisements in the history of psychology. In 1971, Professor Philip Zimbardo enlisted a number of highly educated men to participate in an experiment about prison life. Those who enrolled in the project knew more about what they were getting into than most participants of psychological tests, and they also came from a more privileged mental framework than most. And yet, within days, the enlistees tuned into radically different people — either passive and fearful, or aggressive and bullish. These roles flourished so quickly that the study was shut down after only six days because of the psychological damage it was causing. This was the Stanford Prison Experiment, which anyone who has ever taken a psychology course studies today.
The Stanford Prison Experiment pointed out some very grim realities about human nature. Given the right circumstances, we will fall into social roles that can lead us into the worst versions of ourselves. Zimbardo did this by randomly assigning his participants into either the role of guard or prisoner. The third slide gives a small image of how this played out — shaved prisoners, all dressed alike and forced to refer to themselves by a number, do pushups that the guards assigned to them for “bad” behavior.
Until someone spoke up. That someone was Christina Maslach. (Second image) A recent Ph.D out of Stanford, Maslach was brought into the experiment on the fifth day, but when she witnessed how shockingly successful the project had been at determining horrifying prisoner/guard dynamics, she got into a fight with Zimbardo. Despite the fact that she was teased for her response, she did not back down. As she later reported, “When it’s happening to you, it doesn’t feel heroic; it feels really scary. It feels like you are a deviant.” But Maslach’s anger brought Zimbardo around, and he credits her with being the only person of many witnesses who “ever questioned its morality.” Today Zimbardo spearheads the Heroic Imagination Project, designed to counter our human but deeply faulty instinct to be bystanders to human suffering and to instead draw out the Maslach potential in all of us.
Source(s): Images and info from “The Stanford Prison Experiment,” @prisonexp.org; @news.stanford.edu/pr/97/970108prisonexp.html, 1/8/1997, “The Stanford Prison Experiment: Still Powerful after All These Years,” Kathleen O’Toole. @heroicimagination.org, “Heroic Imagination Project”. A great description is in _Behave: the Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst_ by Robert Sapolsky, 2017, pp.463-468.
