Twenty-four college students, recruited from a newspaper ad to participate in a study of prison life, first completed a battery of psychological tests and surveys (in order to establish that they were healthy and normal, and had not had any prior experience of breaking the law). It was an exploratory investigation of the extent to which the power of situational forces could transform individual behaviors of participants. What was the Stanford Prison Experiment, and what serendipitous events catapulted this academic experiment about situational power into national prominence? The SPE was a study conducted at Stanford University over six days, August 14-19, 1971, designed and conducted by me, as principal investigator, along with my research team of graduate students, Craig Haney and William Curtis Banks, undergraduate David Jaffe, and prison consultant, Carlo Prescott. Rather, the SPE serves as a cautionary tale of what might happen to any of us if we underestimate the extent to which the power of social roles and external pressures can influence our actions. The SPE’s core message is not that a psychological simulation of prison life is the same as the real thing, or that prisoners and guards always or even usually behave the way that they did in the SPE. In this response to my critics, I hereby assert that none of these criticisms present any substantial evidence that alters the SPE’s main conclusion concerning the importance of understanding how systemic and situational forces can operate to influence individual behavior in negative or positive directions, often without our personal awareness. For example, after watching a video that I deposited with the Stanford Archives, Brian Resnick wrote, “This damning video debunks the famed experiment” (VOX, June 14, 2018), and Jay Van Bavel told LIVE-SCIENCE (June 12, 2018), “The bottom line is that conformity isn't natural, blind or inevitable.” French author Thibault LeTextier (2018) even published a book-length critique entitled History of a Lie. Blogger Ben Blum ( Medium, June 7, 2018) recently questioned the authenticity and value of the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE), labeling it a “fraud” and a “lie,” and other commentators have followed suit.
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