Philip G. Zimbardo, the psychologist behind the controversial "Stanford Prison Experiment" that was intended to examine the psychological experiences of imprisonment, has died. He was 91. Stanford University announced Friday that Zimbardo died Oct. 14 at his home in San Francisco. A cause of death was not provided. In the 1971 prison study, Zimbardo and a team of graduate students recruited college-aged males to spend two weeks in a mock prison in the basement of a building on the Stanford campus. The study only lasted six days.
It was ended after the students playing guards became psychologically abusive and those playing prisoners became anxious, emotionally depressed, and enraged, according to the Stanford statement. Zimbardo was criticized for taking the role of superintendent—becoming an active participant in the study and no longer a neutral observer. "The outcome of our study was shocking and unexpected," Zimbardo would later co-write with one of the graduate students who was part of the project. The experiment is "used as a case study in psychology classes to highlight both the psychology of evil as well as the ethics of doing psychological research with human subjects," Stanford said.
The Times of London details what transpired over those six days. By day three, the "psychological torture" began. The prisoners had staged a rebellion on night two, and those who were least involved in that got perks from the guards: "washing facilities and better food, eaten in the presence of those who had temporarily lost eating rights. The effect was to break the prisoners' sense of solidarity. Distrust began to spread. Meanwhile, the guards increasingly saw the prisoners as troublemakers and stepped up their control, surveillance, and aggression." (Read more here.) Zimbardo is survived by his wife, Christina Maslach Zimbardo, three children, and four grandchildren.
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