The Experiment on:
[Wikipedia]
[Google]
[Amazon]
''The Experiment'' is a 2002 BBC documentary series in which 15 men are randomly selected to be either "prisoner" or guard, contained in a simulated prison over an eight-day period. Produced by Steve Reicher and Alex Haslam, it presents the findings of what has subsequently become known as the BBC Prison Study. These findings centered around "the social and psychological consequences of putting people in groups of unequal power" and "when people accept inequality and when they challenge it".
Background
The findings of the study were very different from those of the
Stanford Prison Experiment. Specifically, (a) there was no evidence of guards conforming "naturally" to the role, and (b) in response to manipulations that served to increase a sense of shared identity amongst the prisoners, over time, they demonstrated increased resistance to the guards' regime. This culminated in a prison breakout on Day 6 of the study that made the regime unworkable. After this, the participants created a "self-governing commune" but this too collapsed due to internal tensions created by those who had organized the earlier breakout. After this, a group of former prisoners and guards conspired to install a new prisoner-guard regime in which they would be the "new guards". Now, however, they wanted to run the system along much harsher lines – akin to those seen in the Stanford study. Signs that this would compromise the well-being of participants led to early termination of the study.
Stanford experiment
The genesis of the programme was the 1971
Stanford prison experiment carried out by
Philip Zimbardo at
Stanford University, in which a group of students were recruited to perform the roles of 'prisoner' and 'guard' as a psychological experiment to test how human beings conform to roles. That study was brought to a premature end as a result of the extreme brutality displayed by guards towards prisoners.
Milgram experiment
This itself was related to the
Milgram experiment
The Milgram experiment(s) on obedience to authority figures were a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram. They measured the willingness of study participants, 40 men in the age range ...
at
Yale University
Yale University is a Private university, private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Sta ...
in 1961.
The BBC Experiment was led by psychologists Professor
Alex Haslam
S. Alexander (Alex) Haslam (born 1962) is a professor of psychology and ARC Australian Laureate Fellow in the School of Psychology at the University of Queensland.
His research focuses on areas of social psychology, organisational psychology ...
(
University of Queensland
, mottoeng = By means of knowledge and hard work
, established =
, endowment = A$224.3 million
, budget = A$2.1 billion
, type = Public research university
, chancellor = Peter Varghese
, vice_chancellor = Deborah Terry
, city = B ...
) and Professor
Steve Reicher (
University of St Andrews
(Aien aristeuein)
, motto_lang = grc
, mottoeng = Ever to ExcelorEver to be the Best
, established =
, type = Public research university
Ancient university
, endowment ...
) who planned and designed the psychological experiment with the series' executive producer Nick Mirsky and producer Gaby Koppel of the
BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC
Here i going to introduce about the best teacher of my life b BALAJI sir. He is the precious gift that I got befor 2yrs . How has helped and thought all the concept and made my success in the 10th board exam. ...
...
. At the time, Reicher was editor of the ''
British Journal of Social Psychology'' and Haslam was editor-elect of the ''
European Journal of Social Psychology
The ''European Journal of Social Psychology'' is a peer-reviewed academic journal covering research in social psychology, including social cognition, attitudes, group processes, social influence, intergroup relations, self and identity, nonverbal ...
''.
Ethical considerations
Before ''The Experiment'' could proceed, the researchers had to secure formal ethical approval from the University of Exeter. This approval was conditional on the BBC putting in place a range of safeguards to protect against psychological damage to the participants. Key safeguards included:
* Screening of participants by clinical psychologists, together with medical and police checks
* Round-the-clock monitoring by clinical psychologists, medics and security personnel
* The creation of a six-person
ethics committee
An ethics committee is a body responsible for ensuring that medical experimentation and human subject research are carried out in an ethical manner in accordance with national and international law.
Specific regions
An ethics committee in the E ...
, chaired by
Lembit Öpik
Lembit Öpik (, ; born 2 March 1965) is a former British politician. A former member of the Liberal Democrats, he served as the Member of Parliament (MP) for the constituency of Montgomeryshire in Wales from 1997 until he lost his seat at the ...
MP. Members of this Committee included Dr Stephen Smith of the
Beth Shalom Holocaust Centre
Beth Shalom (lit. "House of Peace"), also named the National Holocaust Centre and Museum, is a Holocaust memorial centre near Laxton in Nottinghamshire in England. Opened in 1995, it is England's only dedicated Holocaust museum, though there is ...
, and
Steven Taylor, a
prison reform
Prison reform is the attempt to improve conditions inside prisons, improve the effectiveness of a penal system, or implement alternatives to incarceration. It also focuses on ensuring the reinstatement of those whose lives are impacted by crimes ...
campaigner. This committee was given the power to stop ''The Experiment'' at any time if a majority of the six members felt that participants were coming to psychological or other harm. This was the first time the BBC had given such power to an external, independent body. This power was used when ''The Experiment'' was brought to an end two days earlier than planned, after consultation with Haslam and Reicher.
Phases of the study
Arrival
On the first day, the guards arrive at the prison. They are given uniforms and instructions on how to run the prison. Before the prisoners even arrive, the guards have gained a sense of ownership towards the prison.
Creating social identity
Next, the prisoners arrive and are immediately ordered to shower and change into uniforms. All their personal items are taken away, even their hair, which is cut off. Prisoners are unhappy with their mistreatment but acknowledge that there is nothing they can do to change their situation. They accept their position, just as the guards have accepted their privilege.
The first test
The first test begins when the prisoners are informed by the "experimenters" over intercom that they have the chance to be promoted to guard status. This is done to see whether prisoners will work individually, and fail. Or whether they can work together as a group to form a collective resistance to beat the guards altogether. In the series, they depict a split between the prisoners as not everyone wants to be a guard. This split keeps them from acting as a group.
Cognitive dissonance
In both groups, there are several members trying to distance themselves from their assigned roles. Later that evening, the guards acknowledge how different they feel and act as soon as they put on their uniform, which they are uncomfortable with. Although some wish they weren't guards, their privileged resources are too valuable to give up.
Power play
At breakfast the second day, the guards attempt to relieve their guilt, by offering one of the most valuable resources to the prisoners, food. The prisoners are unhappy that the guards are only doing this out of guilt, so they decline despite eating little the day before. In denying the food the guards have offered, the prisoners have denied their power. Later there was an announcement that there would be no further promotions, leaving the prisoners angry and resentful.
Concluding the study
After the third day, the prisoners accepted their position, uniting them as a group and allowing them to overthrow the guards. In rebuttal, the guards formed their own government with stricter rules and harder punishment. Finally, Reicher and Haslam were forced to terminate the experiment due to the anticipated breach of ethics due to the newly formed government.
Themes
Individual identity
Within the series we see an example of
social identity. We can see that the guards not only acted like guards, but internalized this term, taking on "guard" as a part of their identity. However, the attainment of this social identity would not have been possible if the prisoners did not take on "prisoner" as their social identity as well.
Group identity
As a reaction of individual social identity, groups were able to form through shared goals and identities. There are two distinct groups in the series, "prisoner" and "guard", each striving to achieve their own goals through
collective self-realization. "Collective self-realization has immense psychological benefits for individual group members. As we saw when the Prisoners first confronted the Guards and later when the Commune was established, the success of groups in bringing about social change is uplifting for their members."
This helped group members to ward off
mental health
Mental health encompasses emotional, psychological, and social well-being, influencing cognition, perception, and behavior. It likewise determines how an individual handles stress, interpersonal relationships, and decision-making. Mental hea ...
conditions like
stress
Stress may refer to:
Science and medicine
* Stress (biology), an organism's response to a stressor such as an environmental condition
* Stress (linguistics), relative emphasis or prominence given to a syllable in a word, or to a word in a phrase ...
and
depression. However destructive the group was to the opposite group and their own mental health, they were effective in their loyalty and maintained consensus.
Reception
The series courted controversy, and was criticised by
Philip Zimbardo who said that his original experiment did not need repeating. He also claimed that ''The Experiment'' was simply
reality television
Reality television is a genre of television programming that documents purportedly unscripted real-life situations, often starring unfamiliar people rather than professional actors. Reality television emerged as a distinct genre in the early ...
and that it had no scientific base or value, as participants would be playing for the cameras and not acting "normally".
[Zimbardo, 2006] In turn, Haslam and Reicher have responded that their goal was not to replicate the Stanford study, but rather to expose limitations in Zimbardo's own theorizing and method. In particular, they sought to demonstrate that internalized group membership could be a basis for ''resistance'' as well as tyranny. This prediction was derived from
social identity theory, and the study incorporated manipulations designed to test some of its core hypotheses.
Haslam and Reicher also argue that Zimbardo's own findings in the Stanford study arose from the leadership role that he had assumed as prison superintendent: explicitly encouraging the guards to demean the prisoners. Accordingly, in their study, Haslam and Reicher had no formal role within the prison. They also took non-reactive psychometric and physiological measures to back up and triangulate their behavioural observations and address concerns that the processes observed in the study were somehow "unreal".
Zimbardo also criticised the lack of external validity of the findings of the BBC study, since prisoner domination of guards is not observed "anywhere in the known universe".
Haslam and Reicher have countered that the purpose of their study was to demonstrate the theoretical possibility of resistance, noting that this is a feature of most social systems in which tyranny prevails (e.g., as argued by
Michel Foucault). They also observe that the imprisonment of leaders is often important for the development of resistance movements and for processes of social change. The stress observed among guards in the BBC study also accords with a large body of evidence from the UK and the US that prison officers are particularly prone to high levels of stress and burnout. In 2001, a major report by the US-based group
Human Rights Watch
Human Rights Watch (HRW) is an international non-governmental organization, headquartered in New York City, that conducts research and advocacy on human rights. The group pressures governments, policy makers, companies, and individual human r ...
also concluded that cases of prison authorities ceding control to inmates was "an all too common occurrence".
Academic output
The findings of the production were published as ''Rethinking the Psychology of Tyranny'' (2006), providing more detail on the findings of Zimbardo's prison study. What Haslam and Reicher attempted to challenge was the effects of
social theory
Social theories are analytical frameworks, or paradigms, that are used to study and interpret social phenomena.Seidman, S., 2016. Contested knowledge: Social theory today. John Wiley & Sons. A tool used by social scientists, social theories rel ...
in the initial experiment. Furthermore, they sought to find how people conformed to a group and who would conform.
Confounding initial criticism, findings of the BBC study were reported in scientific papers that were published in leading peer-reviewed journals. These papers addressed the dynamics of tyranny, resistance, stress and leadership. Indeed, it is possible that the study has formed the basis for more academic papers than any other single field experiment in psychology.
These papers challenged the role-based analysis forwarded by Zimbardo and served to elaborate ideas associated with a social identity approach to social, clinical and organizational psychology. One of their central arguments is that individuals only move towards tyranny once they have come to identify with a group and its leadership (in a way that Zimbardo's briefing of his guards encouraged) and once an authoritarian agenda has come to define that group's identity and to be seen as a solution to its problems.
Reflecting its contribution to ongoing debate in this area, in 2007 the BBC Prison study was included in the
OCR examination board's Psychology
A-level syllabus.
Haslam and Reicher were also able to produce several questions to apply for future studies. The first was whether or not the participants were affected by the camera crew that constantly watched them. Participants were fully aware that they could quit at any moment, a luxury that many people do not have in reality.
Production
Filmed at
Elstree Studios
Elstree Studios is a generic term which can refer to several current and demolished British film studios and television studios based in or around the town of Borehamwood and village of Elstree in Hertfordshire, England. Production studios ha ...
in December 2001, the four one-hour programmes were broadcast on 14, 15, 21, and 22 May 2002. The four episodes dealt sequentially with each of the main phases of the study: Conflict, Order, Rebellion and Tyranny.
Credits
Other persons involved in the making of this production include clinical psychologists: Andrew Eagle and Scott Galloway. An independent ethics panel composed of: Lembit Öpik, MP for Montgomeryshire (Chair), Dr Mark McDermott (Senior Lecturer in Psychology), University of East London, Dr. Stephen Smith (Co-founder Holocaust Memorial and Education Centre), Steve Taylor (Council member Howard League for Penal Reform), Andrea Wills, (Chief advisor and BBC Editorial Policy Unit)). A team of research advisors were also used in the process, members included: Andrew Livingstone, Brian Young, David Corner, Denis Sindic, Eva Loth, Fabio Sani, Grant Muir, Lloyd Carson, Nick Hopkins, Huw Williams, Inma Adavares-Yorno,
, Lucy O’Sullivan, Mike Howe, Paul Webley, Stephanie Sonnenberg, Stephen Wilks, and Tom Postmes.
References
Overviews
• Haslam, S. A., & Reicher, S. D. (2005). The psychology of tyranny. ''Scientific American Mind'', ''16'' (3), 44–51.
• Reicher, S. D., & Haslam, S. A. (2006). Rethinking the psychology of tyranny: The BBC Prison Study. ''British Journal of Social Psychology'', ''45'', 1–40.
On tyranny and social issues
• Reicher, S. D. & Haslam, S. A. (2006). On the agency of individuals and groups: Lessons from the BBC Prison Study. In T. Postmes & J. Jetten (Eds.) ''Individuality and the group: Advances in social identity'' (pp. 237–257). London: Sage.
• Haslam, S. A. & Reicher, S. D. (2006). Debating the psychology of tyranny: Fundamental issues of theory, perspective and science. ''British Journal of Social Psychology'', ''45,'' 55–63.
• Haslam, S. A. & Reicher, S. D. (2007). Beyond the banality of evil: Three dynamics of an interactionist social psychology of tyranny. ''Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin'', ''33,'' 615–622.
On leadership and organizational issues
• Reicher, S. D., Haslam, S. A., & Hopkins, N. (2005). Social identity and the dynamics of leadership: Leaders and followers as collaborative agents in the transformation of social reality. ''Leadership Quarterly'', ''16,'' 547–568.
• Haslam, S. A. & Reicher, S. D. (2007). Identity entrepreneurship and the consequences of identity failure: The dynamics of leadership in the BBC Prison Study. ''Social Psychology Quarterly'', ''70,'' 125–147.
• Haslam, S. A., & Reicher, S. D. (2007). Social identity and the dynamics of organizational life: Insights from the BBC Prison Study. In C. Bartel, S. Blader, &
A. Wrzesniewski (Eds.) ''Identity and the modern organization'' (pp. 135–166). New York: Erlbaum.
On stress and clinical issues
• Reicher, S. D. & Haslam, S. A. (2006). Tyranny revisited: Groups, psychological well-being and the health of societies. ''The Psychologist'', ''19'', 46–50.
• Haslam, S. A. & Reicher, S. D. (2006). Stressing the group: Social identity and the unfolding dynamics of stress.'' Journal of Applied Psychology'', ''91'', 1037–1052.
Responses
• Turner, J. C. (2006). Tyranny, freedom and social structure: Escaping our theoretical prisons. ''British Journal of Social Psychology'', ''45'', 41–46.
• Zimbardo, P. (2006). On rethinking the psychology of tyranny: The BBC Prison Study. ''British Journal of Social Psychology'', ''45'', 47–53.
• Banyard, P. (2007). Tyranny and the tyrant. ''The Psychologist'', ''20'', 2–8.
External links
*
BBC Prison Study official web site
{{DEFAULTSORT:Experiment, The
British reality television series
BBC television documentaries
2002 British television series debuts
2002 British television series endings
English-language television shows
Television shows shot at Elstree Film Studios