Zimbardo’s most famous study was the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, which was a classic demonstration of the power of social situations to distort personal identities and long-held values and morality. The purpose was to understand the development of norms and the effects of roles, labels, and social expectations in a simulated prison environment. In this study, participants internalized identities in their roles as prisoners and guards.
Zimbardo conducted the study with graduate student researchers W. Curtis Banks and Craig Haney, who went on to distinguished careers in psychology.
The Stanford Prison Experiment first gained media and public attention following the prisoner rebellion events that followed shortly thereafter at San Quentin, California, and Attica Prison in New York in 1971.
The Stanford Prison Experiment website at www.PrisonExp.org, (managed by the Social Psychology Network) presents the story and details of that research. The website features media and a section of additional resources for more information including related links of frequently asked questions, discussion prompts, responses to critics, and further reading.
Zimbardo produced a prize-winning documentary of the experiment, “Quiet Rage: The Stanford Prison Experiment,” (1989) which has been widely used in classrooms, civic groups and in guard training. Materials from the experiment have been preserved and made accessible to researchers by the Center for the History of Psychology and the Stanford University Archives.
“Multiple forces shape human behavior: they are internal and external, historical and contemporary, cultural and personal. The more we understand all of these dynamics and the complex way they interact with each other, the better we will be at promoting what is best in human nature.”
– Philip G. Zimbardo
Further inquiries about the experiment should be directed to Distinguished Professor of Psychology Craig Haney, Department of Psychology, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA (psylaw@ucsc.edu), who was one of the principal researchers in the study.
Selected Publications:
- Haney, C., Banks, W., & Zimbardo, P. (1973). Interpersonal dynamics in a simulated prison. International Journal of Criminology and Penology, 1, 69-97.
- Zimbardo, P. G., Haney, C., Banks, W. C., & Jaffe, D. (1973, April). The mind is a formidable jailer: A Pirandellian prison. The New York Times Magazine, Section 6, pp. 38, ff.
- Zimbardo, P. G. (1973). On the ethics of intervention in human psychological research: With special reference to the Stanford Prison Experiment. Cognition, 2, 243–256. doi:10.1016/0010-0277(72) 90014-5.
- Zimbardo, P. G., Haney, C., Banks, W. C., & Jaffe, D. (1974). The psychology of imprisonment: Privation, power and pathology. In Z. Rubin (Ed.), Doing unto others: Explorations in social behavior (pp. 61–73). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
- Haney, C., & Zimbardo, P. (1998). The past and future of US prison policy: Twenty-five years after the Stanford Prison Experiment. American Psychologist, 53(7), 709.
- Zimbardo, P. G., Maslach, C., & Haney, C. (1999). Reflections on the Stanford prison experiment: Genesis, transformations, consequences. In Obedience to authority (pp. 207-252). Psychology Press. In T. Blass (Ed.), Obedience to authority: Current Perspectives on the Milgram paradigm (pp. 193-237). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
- Zimbardo, P. G. (2007). The Lucifer Effect: Understanding how good people turn evil. New York, NY: Random House.
- Zimbardo, P. G. (2017). On the ethics of intervention in human psychological research: With special reference to the Stanford prison experiment. In Research Ethics (pp. 353-366). Routledge.
- Zimbardo P.G., & Haney, C. (2020). Continuing to acknowledge the power of dehumanizing environments: Comment on Haslam et al. (2019) and Le Texier (2019). The American Psychologist. 75: 400-402.
Related Links:
- Official Stanford Prison Experiment website
- Stanford Libraries Online Exhibit
- Faculty page for Distinguished Professor Craig W. Haney, UC Santa Cruz