the MILGRAM experiment

http://psychcentral.com/psypsych/Milgram_experiment

Milgram experiment

The Milgram experiment was a famous scientific experiment of social psychology. The experiment was first described by Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University in an article titled Behavioral Study of Obedience published in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology in 1963, and later summarized in his 1974 book Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. It was intended to measure the willingness of a participant to obey an authority who instructs the participant to do something that may conflict with the participant’s personal conscience.

The experiments began in July 1961, a year after the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram devised the experiment to answer the question “Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?” (Milgram, 1974)

Milgram summed up in the article “The Perils of Obedience” (Milgram 1974), writing:
“The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous import, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects’ [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects’ [participants'] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.”

Results
Milgram created a documentary film showing the experiment and its results, titled “Obedience”, legitimate copies of which are hard to find today. He also produced a series of five other films on social psychology with Harry From, some of which touched on his experiments [1] (http://www.stanleymilgram.com/films.html). They may all be obtained from Penn State Media Services (http://www.mediasales.psu.edu/).
Before the experiment was conducted Milgram polled fellow psychologists as to what the results would be. They unanimously believed that only a few sadists would be prepared to give the maximum voltage.
In Milgram’s first set of experiments, 65 percent of experimental participants administered the experiment’s final 450-volt shock, though many were quite uncomfortable in doing so. No participant stopped before the 300-volt level. Variants of the experiment were later performed by Milgram himself and other psychologists around the world with similar results. Apart from confirming the original results the variations have tested variables in the experimental setup.
Thomas Blass of the University of Maryland (who is also the author of a biography of Milgram, called The Man who shocked the World) performed a meta-analysis on the results of repeated performances of the experiment (done at various times since, in the US and elsewhere). He found that the percentage of participants who are prepared to inflict fatal voltages remains remarkably constant, between 61% and 66%, regardless of time or location (a popular account of Blass’ results was published in Psychology Today, March/April 2002). The full results were published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology. [Blass, 1999]

Reactions
The experiment raised questions about the ethics of scientific experimentation itself because of the extreme emotional stress suffered by the participants (even though it could be said that this stress was brought on by their own free actions). Most modern scientists would consider the experiment unethical today, though it resulted in valuable insights into human psychology.
In Milgram’s defense, 84 percent of former participants surveyed later said they were “glad” or “very glad” to have participated and 15 percent chose neutral (92% of all former participants responding). Many later wrote expressing thanks. Milgram repeatedly received offers of assistance and requests to join his staff from former participants.
Why so many former participants reported they were “glad” to have been involved despite the apparent levels of stress, one participant explained to Milgram in correspondence six years after he participated in the experiment, during the height of the Vietnam War:
“While I was a subject [participant] in 1964, though I believed that I was hurting someone, I was totally unaware of why I was doing so. Few people ever realize when they are acting according to their own beliefs and when they are meekly submitting to authority. … To permit myself to be drafted with the understanding that I am submitting to authority’s demand to do something very wrong would make me frightened of myself. … I am fully prepared to go to jail if I am not granted Conscientious Objector status. Indeed, it is the only course I could take to be faithful to what I believe. My only hope is that members of my board act equally according to their conscience…”
In contrast to the life-changing experience reported by some former participants, however, participants were not fully debriefed by modern standards and many seemed to never fully understand the nature of the experiment according to exit interviews.
[edit]
Variations
Milgram describes 19 variations of the experiment that he conducted in Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. In general, he found that when the immediacy of the victim was increased, compliance decreased, and when immediacy of the authority increased, compliance increased (Experiments 1-4). For instance, in one variation where participants received instructions from the experimenter only by telephone (Experiment 2), compliance greatly decreased; interestingly, a number of participants deceived the experimenter by pretending to continue the experiment. In the variation where immediacy of the “learner” was closest, participants had to physically hold the learner’s arm onto a shock plate, which decreased compliance (Experiment 4). In this latter condition 30 percent still completed the experiment.
In Experiment 8, women were used as participants (all of Milgram’s other experiments used only men). Obedience did not differ significantly, though they indicated experiencing higher levels of stress.
In one version (Experiment 10), Milgram rented a modest office in Bridgeport, Connecticut, purporting to be run by a commercial entity called “Research Associates of Bridgeport” with no apparent connection to Yale, in order to eliminate the prestige of the university as a possible factor influencing participants’ behavior. The results of this experiment did not significantly differ from those conducted at the Yale campus.
Milgram also combined the power of authority with that of conformity. In these experiments, the participant was joined by one or two additional “teachers” (who were actually actors, like the “learner”). The behavior of the participants’ apparent peers strongly affected results. When two additional teachers refused to comply (Experiment 17), only four participants of 40 continued the experiment. In another version, (Experiment 1 the participant performed a subsidiary task with another “teacher” who complied fully. In this variation only three of 40 defied the experimenter. [2] (http://www.stanleymilgram.com/oldanswers.html)
[edit]
External links and references
Blass, Thomas. The Milgram paradigm after 35 years: Some things we now know about obedience to authority, Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 1999, Vol. 25, pp. 955-978.
Blass, Thomas. (2002), “The Man Who Shocked the World”, Psychology Today, Mar/Apr 2002, Vol. 35 Issue 2.
Blass, Thomas. (2004), The Man Who Shocked the World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram. (ISBN 0738203998)
American Scientist book review Official site (http://www.stanleymilgram.com/main.html)
Milgram, Stanley. (1963). “Behavioral Study of Obedience (http://www.radford.edu/~jaspelme/gradsoc/obedience/Migram_Obedience.pdf).” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67, 371-378.
Milgram, Stanley. (1974), Obedience to Authority; An Experimental View (ISBN 006131983X)
Milgram, Stanley. (1974), “The Perils of Obedience” (http://home.swbell.net/revscat/perilsOfObedience.html), Harper’s Magazine
Abridged and adapted from Obedience to Authority
Miller, Arthur G., (1986). The obedience experiments : a case study of controversy in social science, New York : Praeger, 295 p.
Parker, Ian, Obedience, published in Granta magazine ( http://www.granta.com/ ), issue 71, Autumn 2000. Includes an interview with one of Milgram’s volunteers, and discusses modern interest in, and scepticism about, the experiment.
Wu, William, (http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~wwu/psychology/compliance.shtml) Practical Psychology: Compliance: The Milgram Experiment.
[edit]
Film
Obedience (http://tango.outreach.psu.edu/Tango/wpsx/medianew2.taf?function=detail&Layout1_uid1=43955), May 1962. (link broken 2005-04-29) Black-and-white film of the experiment, shot by Milgram. Distributed by The Pennsylvania State University Media Sales
The Milgram Reenactment (http://www.milgramreenactment.org), 2002. Colour, Exact reenactment of one condition of the obedience experiment. Created by conceptual UK artist Rod Dickinson

the MILGRAM experiment

http://psychcentral.com/psypsych/Milgram_experiment

Milgram experiment

The Milgram experiment was a famous scientific experiment of social psychology. The experiment was first described by Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University in an article titled Behavioral Study of Obedience published in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology in 1963, and later summarized in his 1974 book Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. It was intended to measure the willingness of a participant to obey an authority who instructs the participant to do something that may conflict with the participant’s personal conscience.

The experiments began in July 1961, a year after the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram devised the experiment to answer the question “Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?” (Milgram, 1974)

Milgram summed up in the article “The Perils of Obedience” (Milgram 1974), writing:
“The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous import, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects’ [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects’ [participants'] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.”

Results
Milgram created a documentary film showing the experiment and its results, titled “Obedience”, legitimate copies of which are hard to find today. He also produced a series of five other films on social psychology with Harry From, some of which touched on his experiments [1] (http://www.stanleymilgram.com/films.html). They may all be obtained from Penn State Media Services (http://www.mediasales.psu.edu/).
Before the experiment was conducted Milgram polled fellow psychologists as to what the results would be. They unanimously believed that only a few sadists would be prepared to give the maximum voltage.
In Milgram’s first set of experiments, 65 percent of experimental participants administered the experiment’s final 450-volt shock, though many were quite uncomfortable in doing so. No participant stopped before the 300-volt level. Variants of the experiment were later performed by Milgram himself and other psychologists around the world with similar results. Apart from confirming the original results the variations have tested variables in the experimental setup.
Thomas Blass of the University of Maryland (who is also the author of a biography of Milgram, called The Man who shocked the World) performed a meta-analysis on the results of repeated performances of the experiment (done at various times since, in the US and elsewhere). He found that the percentage of participants who are prepared to inflict fatal voltages remains remarkably constant, between 61% and 66%, regardless of time or location (a popular account of Blass’ results was published in Psychology Today, March/April 2002). The full results were published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology. [Blass, 1999]

Reactions
The experiment raised questions about the ethics of scientific experimentation itself because of the extreme emotional stress suffered by the participants (even though it could be said that this stress was brought on by their own free actions). Most modern scientists would consider the experiment unethical today, though it resulted in valuable insights into human psychology.
In Milgram’s defense, 84 percent of former participants surveyed later said they were “glad” or “very glad” to have participated and 15 percent chose neutral (92% of all former participants responding). Many later wrote expressing thanks. Milgram repeatedly received offers of assistance and requests to join his staff from former participants.
Why so many former participants reported they were “glad” to have been involved despite the apparent levels of stress, one participant explained to Milgram in correspondence six years after he participated in the experiment, during the height of the Vietnam War:
“While I was a subject [participant] in 1964, though I believed that I was hurting someone, I was totally unaware of why I was doing so. Few people ever realize when they are acting according to their own beliefs and when they are meekly submitting to authority. … To permit myself to be drafted with the understanding that I am submitting to authority’s demand to do something very wrong would make me frightened of myself. … I am fully prepared to go to jail if I am not granted Conscientious Objector status. Indeed, it is the only course I could take to be faithful to what I believe. My only hope is that members of my board act equally according to their conscience…”
In contrast to the life-changing experience reported by some former participants, however, participants were not fully debriefed by modern standards and many seemed to never fully understand the nature of the experiment according to exit interviews.
[edit]
Variations
Milgram describes 19 variations of the experiment that he conducted in Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. In general, he found that when the immediacy of the victim was increased, compliance decreased, and when immediacy of the authority increased, compliance increased (Experiments 1-4). For instance, in one variation where participants received instructions from the experimenter only by telephone (Experiment 2), compliance greatly decreased; interestingly, a number of participants deceived the experimenter by pretending to continue the experiment. In the variation where immediacy of the “learner” was closest, participants had to physically hold the learner’s arm onto a shock plate, which decreased compliance (Experiment 4). In this latter condition 30 percent still completed the experiment.
In Experiment 8, women were used as participants (all of Milgram’s other experiments used only men). Obedience did not differ significantly, though they indicated experiencing higher levels of stress.
In one version (Experiment 10), Milgram rented a modest office in Bridgeport, Connecticut, purporting to be run by a commercial entity called “Research Associates of Bridgeport” with no apparent connection to Yale, in order to eliminate the prestige of the university as a possible factor influencing participants’ behavior. The results of this experiment did not significantly differ from those conducted at the Yale campus.
Milgram also combined the power of authority with that of conformity. In these experiments, the participant was joined by one or two additional “teachers” (who were actually actors, like the “learner”). The behavior of the participants’ apparent peers strongly affected results. When two additional teachers refused to comply (Experiment 17), only four participants of 40 continued the experiment. In another version, (Experiment 1 the participant performed a subsidiary task with another “teacher” who complied fully. In this variation only three of 40 defied the experimenter. [2] (http://www.stanleymilgram.com/oldanswers.html)
[edit]
External links and references
Blass, Thomas. The Milgram paradigm after 35 years: Some things we now know about obedience to authority, Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 1999, Vol. 25, pp. 955-978.
Blass, Thomas. (2002), “The Man Who Shocked the World”, Psychology Today, Mar/Apr 2002, Vol. 35 Issue 2.
Blass, Thomas. (2004), The Man Who Shocked the World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram. (ISBN 0738203998)
American Scientist book review Official site (http://www.stanleymilgram.com/main.html)
Milgram, Stanley. (1963). “Behavioral Study of Obedience (http://www.radford.edu/~jaspelme/gradsoc/obedience/Migram_Obedience.pdf).” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67, 371-378.
Milgram, Stanley. (1974), Obedience to Authority; An Experimental View (ISBN 006131983X)
Milgram, Stanley. (1974), “The Perils of Obedience” (http://home.swbell.net/revscat/perilsOfObedience.html), Harper’s Magazine
Abridged and adapted from Obedience to Authority
Miller, Arthur G., (1986). The obedience experiments : a case study of controversy in social science, New York : Praeger, 295 p.
Parker, Ian, Obedience, published in Granta magazine ( http://www.granta.com/ ), issue 71, Autumn 2000. Includes an interview with one of Milgram’s volunteers, and discusses modern interest in, and scepticism about, the experiment.
Wu, William, (http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~wwu/psychology/compliance.shtml) Practical Psychology: Compliance: The Milgram Experiment.
[edit]
Film
Obedience (http://tango.outreach.psu.edu/Tango/wpsx/medianew2.taf?function=detail&Layout1_uid1=43955), May 1962. (link broken 2005-04-29) Black-and-white film of the experiment, shot by Milgram. Distributed by The Pennsylvania State University Media Sales
The Milgram Reenactment (http://www.milgramreenactment.org), 2002. Colour, Exact reenactment of one condition of the obedience experiment. Created by conceptual UK artist Rod Dickinson

ANOTHER VICTORY IN COURT!!!

ANOTHER VICTORY IN COURT!!!

Thursday, July 21, 2005
According to local Arcata man, Rasta John, the case against him was thrown out of court at the Humboldt County court house on Thursday. He was charged with having cannabis medicine.

ANOTHER VICTORY IN COURT!!!

ANOTHER VICTORY IN COURT!!!

Thursday, July 21, 2005
According to local Arcata man, Rasta John, the case against him was thrown out of court at the Humboldt County court house on Thursday. He was charged with having cannabis medicine.

EARLY TARGETS of nazi persecution

The Early Targets

The first concentration camp in Germany opened in Dachau in 1933, at a time when the Nazi government was still consolidating its power. Accordingly, it focused on political prisoners—communists, social democrats, and dissidents who posed a threat to the new regime and were unpopular with most other Germans.

Soon Nazi authorities and the police began to consign members of other groups to the new camps: homosexual men arrested as criminal offenders; Jehovah’s Witnesses who refused to obey demands to cease their activities; women accused of prostitution; people labeled “asocial” because they were homeless, begged, or for some other reason did not fit into Nazi society.

In 1936, in preparation for the Olympic Games in Berlin, German police “cleaned up” the city, arresting people deemed inappropriate—prostitutes, street people, petty thieves—and forcing hundreds of Gypsies (Sinti and Roma) into makeshift camps.

All of these early victims were easy targets, people whom other Germans did little or nothing to protect, and whose disappearance from the public scene they often welcomed.

Nazis Increase Power and Targeted Populations

Mass attacks on Nazi targets that included widely respected members of German society did not start until 1938, five years after Hitler was named chancellor. By then Nazis had firm control of all the instruments of state power—the police, courts, laws, civil service, military and press—so they could afford to be less cautious.

The “Euthanasia” Program

During the following year, 1939, Nazi authorities began deadly attacks on one of their major targets: people considered handicapped. Rather than sending them to concentration camps where they would have to be housed and fed along with people who were being held and then sometimes released, disabled people were taken from hospitals and other institutions and sent to designated locations for “special treatment.” That “special treatment” was killing. In just a few years, with the cooperation of scores of doctors, social workers, hospital administrators, and others, Nazi officials organized and carried out the murder of at least 70,000 Germans deemed “unfit for life.” To the extent possible, the authorities tried to hide these killings from the rest of the population, so that family members would not protest.
http://www.pbs.org/auschwitz/40-45/background/ideology.html

All of these early victims were easy targets, people whom other Germans did little or nothing to protect, and whose disappearance from the public scene they often welcomed.
http://www.pbs.org/auschwitz/40-45/background/ideology.html

“Do not forget that every people deserves the regime it is willing to endure!”
from the first leaflet of the “White Rose.” The White Rose began distributing anti-government leaflets in mid 1942 protesting against the brutality and evil of the nazi government, and against the extermination of the Jews, which was beginning to become known to more and more people at this time.
http://www.jlrweb.com/whiterose/leafoneeng.html

the Stanford Prison Experiment

http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/relaged/970108prisonexp.html

The Stanford Prison Experiment

In the prison-conscious autumn of 1971, when George Jackson was killed at San Quentin and Attica erupted in even more deadly rebellion and retribution, the Stanford Prison Experiment made news in a big way. It offered the world a videotaped demonstration of how ordinary people ­ middle-class college students ­ can do things they would have never believed they were capable of doing. It seemed to say, as Hannah Arendt said of Adolf Eichmann, that normal people can take ghastly actions.

Details of the experiment are well known. They are included in most basic psychology texts and in a public television psychology course, “Discovering Psychology,” that Zimbardo wrote and narrates. Movie rights have been optioned, “60 Minutes” has filmed a segment on the experiment, and even a punk rock band in Los Angeles calls itself Stanford Prison Experiment.

In summary:

On Sunday morning, Aug., 17, 1971, nine young men were “arrested” in their homes by Palo Alto police. At least one of those arrested vividly remembers the shock of having his neighbors come out to watch the commotion as TV cameras recorded his hand-cuffing for the nightly news.

The arrestees were among about 70 young men, mostly college students eager to earn $15 a day for two weeks, who volunteered as subjects for an experiment on prison life that had been advertised in the Palo Alto Times. After interviews and a battery of psychological tests, the two dozen judged to be the most normal, average and healthy were selected to participate, assigned randomly either to be guards or prisoners. Those who would be prisoners were booked at a real jail, then blindfolded and driven to campus where they were led into a makeshift prison in the basement of Jordan Hall.

Those assigned to be guards were given uniforms and instructed that they were not to use violence but that their job was to maintain control of the prison.

From the perspective of the researchers, the experiment became exciting on day two when the prisoners staged a revolt. Once the guards had crushed the rebellion, “they steadily increased their coercive aggression tactics, humiliation and dehumanization of the prisoners,” Zimbardo recalls. “The staff had to frequently remind the guards to refrain from such tactics,” he said, and the worst instances of abuse occurred in the middle of the night when the guards thought the staff was not watching. The guards’ treatment of the prisoners ­ such things as forcing them to clean out toilet bowls with their bare hands and act out degrading scenarios, or urging them to become snitches ­ “resulted in extreme stress reactions that forced us to release five prisoners, one a day, prematurely.”

Zimbardo’s primary reason for conducting the experiment was to focus on the power of roles, rules, symbols, group identity and situational validation of behavior that generally would repulse ordinary individuals. “I had been conducting research for some years on deindividuation, vandalism and dehumanization that illustrated the ease with which ordinary people could be led to engage in anti-social acts by putting them in situations where they felt anonymous, or they could perceive of others in ways that made them less than human, as enemies or objects,” Zimbardo told the Toronto symposium in the summer of 1996.

“I wondered, along with my research associates Craig Haney, Curtis Banks and Carlo Prescott, what would happen if we aggregated all of these processes, making some subjects feel deindividuated, others dehumanized within an anonymous environment in the same experimental setting, and where we could carefully document the process over time.”

full article on the ineternet at: http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/relaged/970108prisonexp.html

Public Servants or SECRET POLICE?!?

ARCATA POLICE DEPARTMENT:

PUBLIC SERVANTS
OR
SECRET POLICE?

One Saturday night, May 21 2005, Arcata police officer Ed Cashman shot James States with a taser stun-gun as he walked away from the officer on the plaza in downtown Arcata.

After public pressure, Arcata police captain Tom Chapman conducted an internal investigation. According to chief of Arcata police Randy Mendosa, the results of the investigation will NOT be disclosed to the public because the investigation into officer conduct is a personel matter.
(see the Arcata Eye, 7/5/05)

Don’t the people of Arcata deserve to know if their tax dollars are paying to commit assault with a deadly weapon against an innocent person?
right in front of everybody?
Is it ok NOT to know?

EARLY TARGETS of nazi persecution

The Early Targets

The first concentration camp in Germany opened in Dachau in 1933, at a time when the Nazi government was still consolidating its power. Accordingly, it focused on political prisoners—communists, social democrats, and dissidents who posed a threat to the new regime and were unpopular with most other Germans.

Soon Nazi authorities and the police began to consign members of other groups to the new camps: homosexual men arrested as criminal offenders; Jehovah’s Witnesses who refused to obey demands to cease their activities; women accused of prostitution; people labeled “asocial” because they were homeless, begged, or for some other reason did not fit into Nazi society.

In 1936, in preparation for the Olympic Games in Berlin, German police “cleaned up” the city, arresting people deemed inappropriate—prostitutes, street people, petty thieves—and forcing hundreds of Gypsies (Sinti and Roma) into makeshift camps.

All of these early victims were easy targets, people whom other Germans did little or nothing to protect, and whose disappearance from the public scene they often welcomed.

Nazis Increase Power and Targeted Populations

Mass attacks on Nazi targets that included widely respected members of German society did not start until 1938, five years after Hitler was named chancellor. By then Nazis had firm control of all the instruments of state power—the police, courts, laws, civil service, military and press—so they could afford to be less cautious.

The “Euthanasia” Program

During the following year, 1939, Nazi authorities began deadly attacks on one of their major targets: people considered handicapped. Rather than sending them to concentration camps where they would have to be housed and fed along with people who were being held and then sometimes released, disabled people were taken from hospitals and other institutions and sent to designated locations for “special treatment.” That “special treatment” was killing. In just a few years, with the cooperation of scores of doctors, social workers, hospital administrators, and others, Nazi officials organized and carried out the murder of at least 70,000 Germans deemed “unfit for life.” To the extent possible, the authorities tried to hide these killings from the rest of the population, so that family members would not protest.
http://www.pbs.org/auschwitz/40-45/background/ideology.html

All of these early victims were easy targets, people whom other Germans did little or nothing to protect, and whose disappearance from the public scene they often welcomed.
http://www.pbs.org/auschwitz/40-45/background/ideology.html

“Do not forget that every people deserves the regime it is willing to endure!”
from the first leaflet of the “White Rose.” The White Rose began distributing anti-government leaflets in mid 1942 protesting against the brutality and evil of the nazi government, and against the extermination of the Jews, which was beginning to become known to more and more people at this time.
http://www.jlrweb.com/whiterose/leafoneeng.html

the Stanford Prison Experiment

http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/relaged/970108prisonexp.html

The Stanford Prison Experiment

In the prison-conscious autumn of 1971, when George Jackson was killed at San Quentin and Attica erupted in even more deadly rebellion and retribution, the Stanford Prison Experiment made news in a big way. It offered the world a videotaped demonstration of how ordinary people ­ middle-class college students ­ can do things they would have never believed they were capable of doing. It seemed to say, as Hannah Arendt said of Adolf Eichmann, that normal people can take ghastly actions.

Details of the experiment are well known. They are included in most basic psychology texts and in a public television psychology course, “Discovering Psychology,” that Zimbardo wrote and narrates. Movie rights have been optioned, “60 Minutes” has filmed a segment on the experiment, and even a punk rock band in Los Angeles calls itself Stanford Prison Experiment.

In summary:

On Sunday morning, Aug., 17, 1971, nine young men were “arrested” in their homes by Palo Alto police. At least one of those arrested vividly remembers the shock of having his neighbors come out to watch the commotion as TV cameras recorded his hand-cuffing for the nightly news.

The arrestees were among about 70 young men, mostly college students eager to earn $15 a day for two weeks, who volunteered as subjects for an experiment on prison life that had been advertised in the Palo Alto Times. After interviews and a battery of psychological tests, the two dozen judged to be the most normal, average and healthy were selected to participate, assigned randomly either to be guards or prisoners. Those who would be prisoners were booked at a real jail, then blindfolded and driven to campus where they were led into a makeshift prison in the basement of Jordan Hall.

Those assigned to be guards were given uniforms and instructed that they were not to use violence but that their job was to maintain control of the prison.

From the perspective of the researchers, the experiment became exciting on day two when the prisoners staged a revolt. Once the guards had crushed the rebellion, “they steadily increased their coercive aggression tactics, humiliation and dehumanization of the prisoners,” Zimbardo recalls. “The staff had to frequently remind the guards to refrain from such tactics,” he said, and the worst instances of abuse occurred in the middle of the night when the guards thought the staff was not watching. The guards’ treatment of the prisoners ­ such things as forcing them to clean out toilet bowls with their bare hands and act out degrading scenarios, or urging them to become snitches ­ “resulted in extreme stress reactions that forced us to release five prisoners, one a day, prematurely.”

Zimbardo’s primary reason for conducting the experiment was to focus on the power of roles, rules, symbols, group identity and situational validation of behavior that generally would repulse ordinary individuals. “I had been conducting research for some years on deindividuation, vandalism and dehumanization that illustrated the ease with which ordinary people could be led to engage in anti-social acts by putting them in situations where they felt anonymous, or they could perceive of others in ways that made them less than human, as enemies or objects,” Zimbardo told the Toronto symposium in the summer of 1996.

“I wondered, along with my research associates Craig Haney, Curtis Banks and Carlo Prescott, what would happen if we aggregated all of these processes, making some subjects feel deindividuated, others dehumanized within an anonymous environment in the same experimental setting, and where we could carefully document the process over time.”

full article on the ineternet at: http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/relaged/970108prisonexp.html

Public Servants or SECRET POLICE?!?

ARCATA POLICE DEPARTMENT:

PUBLIC SERVANTS
OR
SECRET POLICE?

One Saturday night, May 21 2005, Arcata police officer Ed Cashman shot James States with a taser stun-gun as he walked away from the officer on the plaza in downtown Arcata.

After public pressure, Arcata police captain Tom Chapman conducted an internal investigation. According to chief of Arcata police Randy Mendosa, the results of the investigation will NOT be disclosed to the public because the investigation into officer conduct is a personel matter.
(see the Arcata Eye, 7/5/05)

Don’t the people of Arcata deserve to know if their tax dollars are paying to commit assault with a deadly weapon against an innocent person?
right in front of everybody?
Is it ok NOT to know?