Hi, thank you for the interesting question. I have compiled a lot of
literature on the subject and hope this suits your needs.
The Stanford Prison Experiment is the most comprehensive and respected
studies on the subject. I will provide an overview of the study and
then some analysis as to how it relates to anger in the prison
environment. The experiment was and is controversial because of the
extreme and frightening results. Some question whether the experiment
was ethical. Thus, there are very few similar experiments and it
stands as a landmark study of conformity, obedience and authority.
Background:
Stanford Prison Experiment; Official Web Site:
http://www.prisonexp.org/
Overview of the experiment from the official site:
Quiet Rage: The Stanford Prison Experiment
http://www.prisonexp.org/legnews.htm
A Pirandellian Prison
The New York Times
April 8, 1973
http://www.prisonexp.org/pdf/pirandellian.pdf
The Fine Line Between "Normal" and "Monster" (New York Times, May 6, 2004)
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/06/international/middleeast/06PSYC.html?ex=1084852029&ei=1&en=1f6b98c33b560cf2
Summary of the experiment:
American Buddha.com
http://www.american-buddha.com/stanford.prison.htm
Pathology of Imprisonment, 1972
(original article about the experiment)
http://www.angelfire.com/or/sociologyshop/path.html
About.com
http://psychology.about.com/library/weekly/aa060100b.htm
?Seventeen years earlier, a famous social psychology experiment -- the
Stanford Prison Experiment -- took place at the basement of Jordan
Hall, the location of the Psychology Department at Stanford
University.
In August 1971, an advertisement appeared in the Palo Alto Times:
"Male college students needed for psychological study of prison life.
$15 per day for 1-2 weeks..." Seventy men responded. Among them, two
dozen were chosen to participate in the experiment because based on
interviews and a battery of psychological tests they were judged to be
the most normal, average and healthy. They were then assigned
randomly, by a flip of coin, either to be guards or prisoners. ?
It didn?t take long for the individuals involved in the experiment to
exhibit extreme behavior:
About.com
http://psychology.about.com/library/weekly/aa060100b.htm
?Two days into the experiments, the prisoners started to exhibit
rebellious behavior. They began to taunt and curse the guards and even
stage a revolt. The guards were enraged and retaliated, initially by
using a fire extinguisher. They broke into each cell, stripped the
prisoners naked, took the beds out, forced the ringleaders of the
prisoner rebellion into solitary confinement, and generally began to
harass and intimidate the prisoners. They also applied psychological
tactics such as setting up a "privilege cell" for model prisoners to
break the solidarity among prisoners. Alternately, they also put "bad
prisoners" in the "privilege cell" in order to create confusion,
suspicion, and aggression among prisoners. By then, these research
participants had really taken on the roles that they were randomly
assigned to play.?
Both the guard and prisoners quickly fell into their randomly assigned roles.
Guards:
About.com
http://psychology.about.com/library/weekly/aa060100b.htm
?Guards applied total control on each prisoner's life, including going
to the toilet. Prisoners were often not allowed to use the toilet and
forced to urinate or defecate in a bucket in their cell, but not
allowed to empty the buckets. Repeatedly, guards also punished
prisoners by forcing them to do push-ups, jumping jacks, cleaning out
toilet bowls with their bare hands, and acting out other degrading
scenarios. Often, they also coerced prisoners to become snitches in
exchange for reduced abuse. Especially when they were bored or thought
that the experimenters were not watching, their treatment to the
prisoners would escalate and became more pornographic. The humiliation
and dehumanization got so severe, that the experimenters had to
frequently remind the guards to refrain from such tactics.?
Prisoners:
About.com
http://psychology.about.com/library/weekly/aa060100b.htm
?The prisoners, on the other hand, started to experience acute
emotional disturbance and rage. They exhibited disorganized thinking,
uncontrollable crying, withdrawing, and behaving in pathological ways.
As a result, researchers had to release five prisoners from the
experiment prematurely.?
Reflections from Zimbardo, Maslach, and Haney, 2000
http://www.prisonexp.org/pdf/blass.pdf
A Situationist Perspective on the Psychology of Evil, Dr. Zimbardo, 2004
http://www.prisonexp.org/pdf/evil.pdf
SPE: Still Powerful After All These Years (Press Release, January 8, 1997)
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/pr/97/970108prisonexp.html
Thirty-Year Retrospective (Stanford Report, August 22, 2001)
http://www.prisonexp.org/30years.htm
The BBC attempted to recreate the experiment for television but were
forced to stop based on the psychological stress on the participants:
The Guardian 1/24/02
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,638243,00.html
Erich Fromm's critique of the experiment:
from The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (Fawcett Books, 1973)
http://www.angelfire.com/or/sociologyshop/frozim.html
Anger and the Stanford Prison Experiment:
This experiment sought to explore the issues of conformity and
compliance in relation to roles and group identification in the
specific prison environment. The results seemed to confirm primary
researcher Dr. Zimbardo?s contention that "most evil is the product
of rather ordinary people caught up in unusual circumstances that they
are not equipped to cope with in the normal ways" (Zimbardo, 1999).
On aggressive behavior; from Dr. Zimbardo?s lecture on the Holocaust:
Holocaust Studies Center, Sonoma State University
http://www.sonoma.edu/users/g/goodman/zimbardo.htm
?I failed to mention that in my Deindividuation research and Bandura's
Dehumanization research, that aggression, once it got past initial
inhibitions, rapidly escalated and increased over time and trials, as
it seemed to become self-reinforcing, violence became its own reward.
We do not want to recognize the pleasure many people take in
participating in violent acts, whether directly or vicariously, as in
spectators at boxing or wrestling matches, The Roman Circuses, men in
mass rape, police in riots, and soldiers in massacres. It is not alien
to human nature but a shard of its non-reflective surface.?
Both the guards and the prisoners experienced anger and exhibited in
the form of aggressive behavior. For the guards, the aggression seemed
to stem from their identification with their role as authority
figures. The role required them to control a group of frustrated
prisoners. The chaotic nature of this situation led to anger which
manifested itself in severely aggressive behavior towards the
prisoners.
The prisoners also experienced intense anger in the study. They became
increasingly frustrated with their mistreatment and became
aggressively rebellious and violent in response.
A mental health website on anger cites the Stanford Prison Experiment
as an example of anger ?without justification?:
Mental Help.net
http://mentalhelp.net/psyhelp/chap7/chap7f.htm
<<In his famous "Prison Experiment," Zimbardo (1973) demonstrated how
ordinary, well-adjusted college students could transform
themselves--with no directions from authorities--in just six days into
authoritarian, brutal, sadistic "prison guards" who enjoyed their
power to degrade and punish others. A good description of this amazing
study is given in the Zimbardo site, including pictures and a frank
admission by the principle investigator of how emotionally involved he
became?The evidence suggests that we may be mean by following the
rules of a violent group or the orders of a violent person or the
urging of a violent feeling inside.>>
Additional Links/ Bibliography:
Homepage of Dr. Zimbardo
http://www.zimbardo.com/
International Centre for Prison Studies
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/depsta/rel/icps/home.html
Federal Bureau of Prisons Library
http://bop.library.net/
Castine Research Corporation
http://www.castineresearch.org/
FOB Office of Research and Evaluation
http://www.bop.gov/orepg/oreindex.html
Prisons and Jails
http://www.prisonsandjails.com/
Prison Activist Resource Center
http://www.prisonactivist.org/issues/
The Other Side of the Wall
http://www.prisonwall.org/
Teaching Anger Management in Prisons
http://www.thubtenchodron.org/PrisonDharma/teaching_anger_management.html
NPR Interview with Dr. Zimbardo on Iraqi Prisoner Abuse (May 4, 2004)
http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=1870756
The Psychological Impact of Incarceration:
Implications for Post-Prison Adjustment
Craig Haney University of California, Santa Cruz December 2001
http://aspe.hhs.gov/hsp/prison2home02/Haney.htm
Zimbardo, Philip G. On the ethics of intervention in human
psychological research: With special reference to the Stanford prison
experiment. [Journal Article] Cognition. Vol 2(2), 1973, 243-256.
Banuazizi, Ali; Movahedi, Siamak. Interpersonal dynamics in a
simulated prison: A methodological analysis. [Journal Article]
American Psychologist. Vol 30(2), Feb 1975, 152-160.
DeJong, William. Another look at Banuazizi and Movahedi's analysis of
the Stanford Prison Experiment. [Journal Article] American
Psychologist. Vol 30(10), Oct 1975, 1013-1015.
Haney, Craig; Zimbardo, Philip. The past and future of U.S. prison
policy: Twenty-five years after the Stanford Prison Experiment.
[Journal Article] American Psychologist. Vol 53(7), Jul 1998, 709-727.
Haney, Craig. Ideology and crime control. [Journal Article] American
Psychologist. Vol 54(9), Sep 1999, 786-788.
Ireland, J. L. (2002) Bullying Among Prisoners: Evidence, Research and
Intervention Strategies. Brunner-Routledge, London: UK
Gresham Sykes, >The Society of Captives: A Study of a Maximum Security
Prison. Princeton: Princeton University Press (1958), at 63.
Richard McCorkle, "Personal Precautions to Violence in Prison,"
Criminal Justice and Behavior, 19, 160-173 (1992), at 161.
Paul Keve, Prison Life and Human Worth. Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press (1974), at 54.
Masten, A., & Garmezy, N., Risk, Vulnerability and Protective Factors
in Developmental Psychopathology. In F. Lahey & A Kazdin (Eds.)
Advances in Clinical Child Psychology (pp. 1-52). New York: Plenum
(1985), at 3.
Veneziano, L., Veneziano, C., & Tribolet, C., The special needs of
prison inmates with handicaps: An assessment. Journal of Offender
Counseling, Services & Rehabilitation, 12, 61-72 (1987).
Streeter, P., "Incarceration of the mentally ill: Treatment or
warehousing?" Michigan Bar Journal, 77, 166 (1998), at p. 167.
Human Rights Watch, Out of Sight: Super-Maximum Security Confinement
in the United States. Feburary, 2000.
Greene, S., Haney, C., and Hurtado, A., "Cycles of Pain: Risk Factors
in the Lives of Incarcerated Women and Their Children," Prison
Journal, 80, 3-23 (2000).
Lois Forer, A Rage to Punish: The Unintended Consequences of Mandatory
Sentencing. New York: W. W. Norton (1994).
Michael Tonry, Malign Neglect: Race, Crime, and Punishment in America.
New York: Oxford University Press (1995).
Mauer, M. (1990). More Young Black Males under Correctional Control in
US than in College. Washington: The Sentencing Project.
King, A., "The Impact of Incarceration on African American Families:
Implications for Practice," Families in Society: The Journal of
Contemporary Human Services, 74, 145-153 (1993), p. 145..
Chambliss, W., "Policing the Ghetto Underclass: The Politics of Law
and Law Enforcement," Social Problems, 41, 177-194 (1994), p. 183.
Google Search Terms Used:
"prison experiment" or "prison study"
://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=%22prison+experiment%22+or+%22prison+study%22
psychology and prison
://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=psychology+and+prison
anger, prison, psychology
://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=anger%2C+prison%2C+psychology
I hope this helps. Feel free to let me know if you need any
clarification. Thanks again.
Regards,
Anthony (adiloren-ga) |
