10 Unbelievably Cruel Studies (Done In The Name Of Science)

2. The Stanford Prison Experiment

Philip Zimbardo remains one of the smartest and most influential researchers working today, still conducting studies and making startling new discoveries in his field of psychology. Which, by all accounts, he should never have been allowed to do, considering the way one of his earliest and most famous studies turned out. Like his predecessors Skinner and Harlow, Zimbardo was interested in social psychology, and the way people developed and fell into certain roles in society. It just so happens that when he decided to give his own take on the subject it involved a load of college students being psychologically and physically tortured, degraded, and generally traumatised for the rest of their lives. The experiment was simple. In 1971 Zimbaro lead a team of researchers at Stanford University to set up and study a recreation of a prison block, with undergraduates volunteering to take the roles of either guards or prisoners. They would live in mock cells build in the basement of the college for a fortnight, allowing the psychologists on the outside to see how these opposing parts - the powerful guards versus the powerless prisoners - would play out, even with people who weren't actually prisoners or prison guards. How it worked out was that each group adapted to their roles all too easily and ended up far exceeding the boundaries set by the experiment and expected by the researchers, with a third of the guards judged to be exhibiting €œgenuine€ sadistic tendencies, emotionally traumatising many of the prisoners, two of which were removed from the study early. The guards only referred to the prisoners by their numbers and began submitting them to bizarre punishments, like solitary confinement and taking away their toilet privileges in favour of a bucket. Zimbardo finally pulled the plug on the whole thing after only six days.