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

ABSTRACT

The 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.

KEYWORDS:

• Demand characteristics
• imprisonment
• P.G. Zimbardo
• social psychology
• Stanford prison experiment

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Data-availability

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/rdfm3/ (DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/RDFM3).

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open science badges for Open Data and Open Materials through Open Practices Disclosure. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/rdfm3/ (DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/RDFM3).

Notes

1. The materials that support the findings of both studies are openly available in Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/rdfm3/ (DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/RDFM3). There is sufficient information for an independent researcher to reproduce the reported results.

2. The results reported here for study 1 included participants that indicated they recognized the study but could not name it. In order to ensure that inclusion of these individuals was not accounting for the differences between the two groups, the analyses were re-run with these participants eliminated (N = 108). This reanalysis produced similar results with all comparisons statistically significant. For example, ANOVA results indicated that those in the Stanford orientation expected greater negative responses from others as guards (F = 48.01, p < .01), from themselves as guards (F = 13.38, p < .01), and believed the experimenter expected greater negative responses (F = 45.11, p < .01) relative to the control condition. Thus, participants who indicated that they recognized the study but were unable to name it were included in subsequent analyses.

3. Brown-Forsythe statistic is reported in Table 1.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jared Bartels

Jared Bartels is an Assistant Professor of Psychological Science at William Jewell College. His research interests include achievement motivation and the history of psychology.