They were from very different backgrounds than criminals, though they seemed to be very countercultural as well, which still makes the end result surprising.
Maybe not so much. If the Stanford undergraduate "guards" were part of the counterculture of 1971, their preexisting views of how a "prison guard" was supposed to behave would have been...unfavorable. When Zimbardo told them to role play a "prison guard," the obvious interpretation would be "act like a fascist pig." A non-countercultural blue collar kid from the same era, maybe one proud of his dad's service in World War II, might have interpreted the instructions differently.
Point taken. And Zimbardo's potential agenda can be questioned as well. Here's an instruction from the wiki page:
"You can create in the prisoners feelings of boredom, a sense of fear to some degree, you can create a notion of arbitrariness that their life is totally controlled by us, by the system, you, me, and they'll have no privacy... We're going to take away their individuality in various ways. In general what all this leads to is a sense of powerlessness. That is, in this situation we'll have all the power and they'll have none."
That seems l...
In March, a user on Reddit emailed psychologist Philip Zimbardo (leader of the Stanford Prison Experiment) to arrange an "IAmA" interview. Zimbardo agreed to answer the top 5 questions from this thread. Yesterday his answers were posted here.
The chosen questions touched on research ethics, what he originally expected to learn from the experiment, the role of psychoactive drugs in society, reading recommendations and more.
After responding, Zimbardo posed a question of his own to Reddit: