On this day, August 14, 1971, police cars pulled up at various houses in middle-class Stanford and “arrested” a bunch of young men.
These fake arrests happened with the arrestees consent, because they’d agreed to take part in what was supposed to be a two week experiment. Half the participants were randomly selected to be prisoners, the others guards. The experimenters thought they’d have to study video tapes, tease out nuance…
Ha ha ha ha.
After 6 days the experiment had to be ended because the guards had – basically – gone completely fascist apeshit.
Turns out humans are a lot more susceptible to some gnarly ways of thinking and being than they want to believe.
That insight will be a great comfort as the Great Acceleration leads us all to accelerate off the Great Cliff onto the rocks of the Great Post-Anthropocene below.
On this day the PPM was 325.43 ppm. Now it is 421ish- but see here for the latest.
Why this matters.
Obedience, conformity, hatred of “The Other” – all just below the surface, as Dr Bernie Rieux rieuxfully warned us….
What happened next?
No long-term studies on the effects on the young men, but it profoundly affected the grad student, Craig Haney, who went on to do enormous amounts of advocacy work around Death Row inmates, and criminology. I was lucky enough to do a class of his (Social Psychology) at University of California at Santa Cruz, 20 years after the Stanford study.