Zimbardo Prison Experiment

Abstract Social psychologist Philip Zimbardo (b. 1933) conducted a well‐known prison study known as the Stanford Prison Experiment. Funded by the US Navy to investigate conflict in military prisons, Zimbardo and his graduate students, Craig Haney and W.

Curtis Banks, rejected the idea that the personality characteristics of prisoners and guards in the prison system were primarily responsible for conflicts as they occurred in the prison system. Broadly consistent with Goffman's (1961) concept of a total institution, Zimbardo and his team identified individual anonymity and loss of identity as the most prominent characteristics of prisons, which Zimbardo's (1970) deindividuation theory linked to antisocial behavior. Without room for individual identities, Zimbardo and colleagues reasoned that the social roles of prisoner and guard would be the dominant influence on behavior and allow participants to behave in ways that would otherwise be unimaginable to them.