Social Deviance

Social Deviance

Zimbardo and colleagues construed the increasingly hostile behavior of the guards and increasingly passive behavior of the prisoners, each of which had started out as groups of normal young men, as evidence that the extreme nature of the prison situation breeds such volatile and desperate behavior. Indeed, the SPE is often cited as evidence for the strong role of the situation over individuals in ways in which they often do not predict. The researchers also compared their work to Stanley Milgram's research on obedience in that both provide support for the notion that given an extreme situation, good people can be coerced into doing evil things. Despite these exciting findings, the SPE has been criticized from both a methodological and ethical standpoint (Zimbardo, 2006).

The setting itself was designed to be as similar to an actual prison as possible. Constructed in the basement of the Psychology Department at Stanford University, the “Stanford County Prison” had barred doors on the small rooms that served as cells, cots on which the prisoners slept, a hallway area that was converted to a prison “yard” where group activities were conducted, and a small closet that served as a short-term “solitary confinement” cell that could be used for disciplining unruly prisoners. The prisoners wore uniforms that were designed to de-emphasize their individuality and underscore their powerlessness. Guards, on the other hand, donned military-like garb, complete with reflecting sunglasses and nightsticks. These guards generated a set of rules and regulations that in many ways resembled those in operation in actual prisons, and prisoners were expected to comply with their orders. However, guards were instructed not to resort to physical force to gain prisoner compliance(Zimbardo, 2006).

Despite the lack of any legal mandate for the “incarceration” of the prisoners and despite the fact that both groups were told that they had been randomly assigned to their roles (so that, e.g., guards knew that prisoners had done nothing to “deserve” their degraded prisoner status), the behavior that ensued was remarkably similar to behavior that takes place inside actual prisons and surprisingly extreme in intensity and effect. Thus, initial prisoner resistance and rebellion was met forcibly by guards, who quickly struggled to regain their power and then proceeded to escalate their mistreatment of prisoners throughout the study at the slightest sign of affront or disobedience. In some instances, the guards conspired to physically mistreat prisoners outside the presence of the experimenters and to leave prisoners in the solitary confinement cell beyond the 1-hour limit that the researchers had set (Zimbardo, 2006).

In one form or another, these basic theories have endured and are reflected in contemporary theories that assume real variations in measurable forms of conduct to be explained by measurable features of the social world. Modern “social control” and “self-control theories (Zimbardo, 2006) shares features with social disorganization theory in that they emphasize the absence of social and personal constraints as the crucial variables in the explanation of criminal and noncriminal deviance. Such theories focus on all forms of force ...