The Stanford prison study and Stanley Milgram’s experiments on obedience have been challenged as misleading or fraudulent. Yet public interest in both has endured: a Netflix reality series released in October revisited Philip Zimbardo’s 1971 prison simulation, bringing the study back into the spotlight.
Part of their lasting appeal may come from the force of the original findings. During the mid-20th-century heyday of American social psychology, researchers examined how groups and authority could shape the actions of ordinary people. Solomon Asch found that participants sometimes agreed with a group’s plainly incorrect judgment about line lengths. In Milgram’s Yale experiments, volunteers were told to administer increasingly severe electric shocks to a person in another room. The shocks were fake and the person was an actor, but participants did not know that; in the initial version, 65% went to the highest level when instructed to continue by a man in a lab coat.
Other research from the period examined why people might fail to help in an emergency. Psychologists John Darley and Bibb Latané found that volunteers were less likely to seek help when they believed more people could also hear someone apparently having a seizure.
Zimbardo’s study placed 24 male students in the roles of guards or prisoners in a simulated jail at Stanford. Intended to last two weeks, it ended after six days, following reports that some guards had become cruel and some prisoners had suffered breakdowns.
The studies have faced substantial criticism. Researcher Thibault Le Texier argued in a 2019 analysis of Stanford’s archives that Zimbardo’s team instructed guards on how to behave, undermining the idea that their actions arose spontaneously. Some prisoners later said they had exaggerated their distress. Critics of Milgram’s work have also argued that the experiments manufactured obedience rather than uncovering it, and that across the versions of the study more participants disobeyed than obeyed.
Some of these details were disclosed by the researchers themselves. In his 2007 book, “The Lucifer Effect,” Zimbardo credited students with the original idea and described his own role as the prison’s “superintendent,” including instructing and training the guards. Milgram published results from variations of his experiments, noting that obedience dropped sharply in some of them, although those versions differed from the original setup.
Social psychologists Alex Haslam and Stephen Reicher have proposed that obedience alone does not explain what happened. In a 2002 televised BBC prison study, guards did not become cruel spontaneously. The researchers argue that participants may have believed in the scientific purpose of the study and chosen to carry on, a process they call “engaged followership.” Their account has also drawn criticism, including claims that it overlooks evidence from the original Milgram and Zimbardo sessions.
The experiments remain influential, the article argues, because they confront audiences with a troubling moral question: why might ordinary people choose to do harm when they could choose otherwise? Their methods and ethics may fall short of current standards, but the unresolved question about how people respond to authority and pressure continues to make the studies difficult to dismiss.
Sources: Folha Ciência.