Talk:Stanford prison experiment

proposed revisions to lede
The Stanford prison experiment (SPE) was designed to examine the effects of situational variables on participants' reactions and behaviors, in a two-week simulation of a prison environment. Stanford University psychology professor Philip Zimbardo led the research team who ran the study in the summer of 1971.

Participants were recruited from the local community with an ad in the newspapers offering $15 per day to male students who wanted to participate in a "psychological study of prison life." Volunteers were chosen after assessments of psychological stability, and then randomly assigned to being prisoners or prison guards. Critics have questioned the validity of these methods.

Those volunteers selected to be "guards" were given uniforms specifically to deinividuate them, and instructed to prevent prisoners from escaping. The experiment officially started when "prisoners" were arrested by real Palo Alto police. Over the following five days, psychological abuse of the prisoners by the "guards" became increasingly brutal. After Christina Maslach visited to evaluate the conditions, she was so upset to see how study participants were behaving that she confronted Zimbardo. He ended the experiment on the sixth day.

Like the Milgram experiment, SPE has been referenced and critiqued as one of the most unethical psychology experiments in history. The harm inflicted on the participants prompted universities worldwide to improve their ethics requirements for human subjects experiments to prevent them from being similiarly harmed. Other researchers have found it difficult to reproduce the study, especially given those constraints.

3rd Wave
This is a related study, also conducted in Palo Alto just prior to the SPE. Should it be added to this article? ErzsieHDR (talk) 22:01, 20 August 2021 (UTC)


 * You're referring to The Third Wave (experiment), correct? That took place four years before the SPE, not just prior to it. It was a high school educational exercise, rather than a structured academic research study. It's not clear how it might be related, as doesn't seem to have played any role in Zimbardo's work. We'd need some reliable sources for confirmation before moving on this item. jxm (talk) 06:03, 24 January 2022 (UTC)

Interpretation and reproducibility of results
In the text "Many have argued that the validity and merit of the research findings were significantly affected by the Demand characteristics § Notes and selection bias resulting from the Recruitment and selection § Notes.", is the subtext "§ Notes" really intended? Masonmilan (talk) 11:13, 22 September 2023 (UTC)

See also: unabomber
In the See Also section, there is a list and link to other related articles on similar questionable psychological studies. The list should include the psychological study at Harvard at which Ted Kaczynski spent 200 hours in 1959. The timeline of abusive psychological studies in U.S. should include ted given it predates Stanford Experiment. And the implication that this study may be the tipping point of his later pathology. Also has any behavioral study been conducted on the participants of the Stanford Experiment? Are any available on Wikipedia? Thanks. Stay safe. Elizabeth Spraygal109 (talk) 19:57, 31 May 2024 (UTC)


 * This is no Wikipedia article on that study specifically, so there isn't anything to link in the see also section. We can't just link to 'Ted Kaczynski', as that biography is not sufficiently related to the topic of this article. MrOllie (talk) 20:16, 31 May 2024 (UTC)