The Experiment - Controversy

Controversy

The series courted controversy, and was criticised by Philip Zimbardo who said that his original experiment did not need repeating. He also claimed that The Experiment was simply reality television and that it had no scientific base or value, as participants would be playing for the cameras and not acting "normally" (Zimbardo, 2006). In turn, Haslam and Reicher have responded that their goal was not to replicate the Stanford study, but rather to expose limitations in Zimbardo's own theorizing and method. In particular, they sought to demonstrate that internalized group membership could be a basis for resistance as well as tyranny. This prediction was derived from social identity theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1979) and the study incorporated manipulations designed to test some of its core hypotheses.

Haslam and Reicher also argue that Zimbardo's own findings in the Stanford study arose from the leadership role that he had assumed as Prison superintendent — explicitly encouraging the guards to demean the prisoners (see Banyard, 2007). Accordingly, in their study, Haslam and Reicher had no formal role within the prison. They also took non-reactive psychometric and physiological measures to back up and triangulate their behavioural observations and address concerns that the processes observed in the study were somehow 'unreal'.

Zimbardo's (2006) final criticism is that the findings of the BBC study lacked external validity, since prisoner domination of guards is not observed "anywhere in the known universe". Haslam and Reicher have countered that the purpose of their study was to demonstrate the theoretical possibility of resistance, noting that this is a feature of most social systems in which tyranny prevails (e.g., as argued by Michel Foucault). They also observe that the imprisonment of leaders is often important for the development of resistance movements and for processes of social change. Notable recent cases include Robben Island and the Maze where it was ultimately the prisoners who ran the prisons, not the guards. The stress observed among guards in the BBC study (see Haslam & Reicher, 2006) also accords with a large body of evidence from the UK and the US that prison officers are particularly prone to high levels of stress and burnout. In 2001 a major report by the US-based group Human Rights Watch also concluded that cases of prison authorities ceding control to inmates was "an all too common occurrence".