Social Psychology

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Social Psychology

• Social psychology studies the beliefs and
  behaviors of the individual (the self) within a
  group (others).
• Humans are social animals We view ourselves as
  others view us.

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Social Psychology Investigates

• Prejudice (unconscious prejudice,
• in group / out group bias)
• Social influence (e.g., obedience, altruism)
• Group dynamics (e.g., groupthink)
• Attitude change (e.g., persuasion)

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Where does evil lie? Inside the person? (the
apple) or Inside the situation? (the barrel)
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Stanley Milgram asked a similar question in a
series of famous studies on obedience to
authority. He was partly motivated by a desire
to understand how individual members of a
civilized society could cooperate in the torture
and murder of over 6,000,000 civilians. While a
professor of psychology at Yale, he brought over
1,000 research participants into an experimental
situation to study the conditions under which
participants would willingly administer high
levels of painful electric shock to fellow
research participants.
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Psychiatrists predicted that less than 1 person
in 100 would administer the highest level of
shock requested.
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In the situation depicted 65 of participants
complied fully!
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Stanford Prison Study

• In 1971 Philip Zimbardo randomly assigned
  Stanford University students to be either
  prisoners or guards for a 2 week experiment.
  The experiment had to be discontinued after 6
  days, because of extreme prisoner abuse.

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Stanford Prison Experiment
Overall purpose of the study To investigate the
psychological effects of prison -- for both
prisoners and guards
Participants Originally 70 volunteers (via
newspaper ads) Screening Diagnostic interviews
and psychological test administered, existence of
medical problems, criminal background, substance
abuse
Total of 24 participants
Paid 15/day for participating
Random assignment
12 Prisoners
12 Guards
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Stanford Prison Experiment (cont.)
Procedure of the Study

• Prisoner recruitment -- Picked up at home by a
  police car
• Booked, fingerprinted, sprayed, blindfolded and
  put into holding cell
• Uniforms dress, or smock worn with no
  underclothes. Prisoner ID number was on front and
  back of the uniform. Made to wear a heavy chain
  on their right ankles at all times and a
  stocking cap over their heads

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Stanford Prison Experiment (cont.)

• Construction of the Prison Environment (to ensure
  realism)
• Use of consultant team including a former
  prisoner
• Input from prisoners and correctional personnel
  involved
• in course entitled The Psychology of
  Imprisonment
• Cells were small enough room for only three
  cots with room for little else

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• Prisoner Treatment -- Some Examples
• Use of "counts" to familiarizing the prisoners
  with their numbers and exercise control over the
  prisoners (counts took place several times each
  shift and often at night)
• Punishments (e.g., push-ups) -- sometimes
  stepping on prisoners backs or having others sit
  on top of the backs of prisoners while doing
  push-ups
• After an early prisoner rebellion ---
• Guards used a fire extinguisher to shoot a
  stream of skin-chilling carbon dioxide on the
  prisoners.
• Guards broke into cells, stripped the prisoners
  naked, took beds out, forced the ringleaders of
  the rebellion into solitary confinement

• Going to the toilet became a privilege which a
  guard could grant or deny at his discretion
• After the nightly "lock-up," prisoners were
  often forced to urinate or defecate in a bucket
  in their cells. Sometimes the guards did not
  allow prisoners to empty the buckets
• Forcing prisoners to perform degrading,
  repetitive work such as cleaning out toilet bowls
  with their bare hands

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Behavior of the Prisoners

• Negative Affect (e.g., anxiety, depression,
  rage)
• Learned Helplessness
• Conversation between prisoners
• Use of numbers to refer to themselves (in
  conversation with a Catholic priest)
• Loss of group unity
• Parole Board -- Most prisoners willing to
  forfeit the money they had earned up to
• that time in order to be paroled
• Several behavioral reactions of prisoners (e.g.,
  emotional breakdowns, psychosomatic rash)

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The Guards

• Wore khaki uniforms, carried a whistle around
  their neck and a billy
• club and wore dark sun-glasses
• Worked eight-hour shifts
• Use of arbitrary control by the guards (e.g.,
  Privilege cell)
• Most aggressive guard viewed as role models
• Overall, three types of guards emerged (1)
  tough, fair ones who followed prison rules, (2)
  "good guys" who did favors for the prisoners and
  never punished them, and (3) guards (about 1/3)
  who were hostile, arbitrary, and inventive in
  humiliating prisoners they appeared to enjoy the
  power they possessed
• No guard ever came late for his shift, called in
  sick, left early, or demanded extra pay for
  overtime work

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Premature Ending
Christina Maslach, a recent Stanford Ph.D., was
brought in to conduct interviews with the guards
and prisoners After viewing prisoners being
marched on a toilet run (bags over their heads,
legs chained together, hands on each other's
shoulders) she strongly objected in an outrage by
saying, "It's terrible what you are doing to
these boys! The study was stopped after only 6
days --- the plan was for a 2-week timeframe
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Stanford Prison ExperimentWhat would you have
done?

• If you were a prisoner, how would you have acted?
• If you were a guard, how would you have acted?
• After the study, how do you think the prisoners
  and guards felt when they saw each other in the
  same civilian clothes again?

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Bags were placed over students heads, they were
stripped, chained together, sexually
humiliated, tripped by guards, forced to clean
toilets with their hands.
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Abu Ghraib
1125 p.m., Nov. 12, 2003. The detainee is
covered in what appears to be mud and human
feces.
1150 p.m., Nov. 7, 2003. SPC HARMAN has camera
or video camera in hand as she stands behind the
detainees nude. SOLDIER(S) SPC HARMAN
859 p.m., Oct. 18, 2003. Detainees is handcuffed
in the nude to a bed and has a pair of panties
covering his face. The photograph is taken from
inside the cell and at a downward angle
All caption information is taken directly from
CID materials

• 9 Army soldiers (all enlisted) have been
  court-martialed and convicted of crimes at Abu
  Ghraib. Accountability stopped at the rank of
  staff sergeant -- no commanding officers have
  been prosecuted
• Commanders are legally responsible for orders
  given and "if he has actual knowledge, or should
  have knowledge ... that troops or other persons
  subject to his control are about to commit or
  have committed a war crime and he fails to take
  the necessary and reasonable steps to insure
  compliance with the law of war or to punish
  violators thereof. Paragraph 501 of Army Field
  Manual 27-10

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Abu Ghraib / Stanford Univ.
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Abu Ghraib under US Command
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• A few rotten apples
• or
• A rotten barrel?

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Milgrams studies at Yale, Zimbardos studies at
Stanford and a large number of other follow-up
studies all found that situational factors (not
personal factors) were the overwhelming cause of
inhumane behavior. Yet our tendency is to
erroneously blame the person.
This paradoxical bias can be conceptualized as a
special case of a general principle called The
Fundamental Attribution Error.
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Some Quotes

• Every time you build a prison, you close a
  school.- Victor Hugo
• No matter what the question has been in American
  criminal justice over the last generation, prison
  has been the answer.
• - Franklin E. Zimring
• We are tracking one group of kids from
  kindergarten to prison, and we are tracking one
  group of kids from kindergarten to college. -
  Lani Guinier

California has built 21 prisons since 1980. In
the same period, the University of California
system has opened one new campus. Although
California's prison population has declined in
recent years, the state's spending per prisoner
has increased 5 times faster than its spending
per K-12 student in the last two decades. The
Huffington Post    By Saki Knafo Posted
08/30/2013 150 pm EDT