Question

how did the participants of the standford prison experiment behave?

Answer 1

Briefly: participants rapidly and strongly conformed to the roles they were assigned. “Guards” became controlling and abusive; “prisoners” became passive, distressed, and sometimes rebellious. The situation produced extreme, pathological-seeming behavior in only a few days, and the study was stopped after six days (planned for two weeks).

More detail:

- Setup: 24 healthy male college volunteers were randomly assigned to be either guards or prisoners in a mock prison in Stanford’s psychology building basement.
- Guards’ behavior:
- Adopted authoritarian measures and invented degrading rules and punishments.
- Used psychological humiliation and harassment (verbal taunts, forced exercise, removal of privacy, arbitrary punishments).
- Employed tactics to assert control (frequent counts, night-time disturbances, sunglasses to reduce eye contact, role-based language).
- In some cases escalated to cruel, dehumanizing behavior (e.g., solitary confinement, forcing prisoners to perform humiliating tasks).
- Prisoners’ behavior:
- Quickly showed stress reactions: anxiety, crying, apathy, depression, uncontrollable laughter or rage.
- Became submissive, compliant, and dependent on guards; many accepted assigned prisoner numbers and loss of name/identity.
- Some organized a rebellion early on, which was suppressed and then led to increased passivity.
- Several had to be released early for severe emotional distress.
- Dynamics and outcome:
- Behaviors escalated over days as people adapted to role expectations and the environment.
- The lead researcher (Philip Zimbardo) acted as the prison superintendent, which influenced how the situation unfolded.
- The study was terminated on day 6 because of the psychological harm being inflicted.

Common psychological explanations: situational power of roles, deindividuation, conformity, obedience to perceived authority, and the influence of a constructed environment on behavior.

Caveats: The study’s ethics, methods, and interpretation have been heavily criticized (demand characteristics, researcher involvement, selection issues). But regardless of interpretation, the documented behaviors showed how quickly ordinary people can take on abusive or submissive roles in a powerful situational context.

If you want, I can summarize specific incidents from the study timeline, discuss the major criticisms, or explain the psychological mechanisms in more depth.