Whenever we talk about the BBC Prison study people bombard us with questions about what we did (or didn’t do) and what we found (or didn’t find). In this section we provide our responses to some of the questions we are asked most frequently. These fall into three broad categories.
The first set of questions concern matters of reality and artifice. Was the prison real? What was the effect of TV? What was the impact of our interventions?
The second set of questions relate to various decisions and outcomes associated with designing and running the study. Why did we include only men? Why did we end the study when we did? Did we follow up the participants?
The third set of questions are ones of science and society. Was the research scientific? Does it tell us anything about the world at large? Here we also answer two questions that almost everyone asks us: Why were our findings so different from those of Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment? And how has Zimbardo reacted to our work?
If there is a question that you would like us to answer that we do not address here or elsewhere in the website, please contact us. Over time, if enough people ask the same question we will add a new page to this section.
No. Amongst other things, people do not volunteer to enter a real prison, they cannot choose to leave when they wish, and they cannot be promoted from Prisoner to Guard.
However, the primary goal of our study was not to simulate a prison. Instead, the environment we created was designed as a context in which to examine evolving relationships between dominant and subordinate groups. For this reason the prison was specifically designed in order to have points in common with many hierarchical institutions: not only prisons, but also places like barracks, offices, and schools.
What was important for us was not that participants saw their environment as a real prison but rather that they experienced the inequalities within that environment as real. All the evidence indicates that they did.
Correspondingly, we do not want to generalize directly from what participants did in our study to how people behave in prisons.
Instead, our aim was to use the study to develop theoretical understanding of why and when members of groups either accept or challenge inequality. It is on the basis of this theory that we then generalize to other contexts.
There is no doubt that the behaviour of participants in our study was affected by the knowledge that they were being filmed. In particular, it was a factor in the unwillingness of some Guards to impose discipline at the start of the study.
This implies that the willingness of powerful authorities to be tyrannical can be reduced by rendering them visible and accountable in particular ways. This is an important finding. It shows that we need to consider the impact of surveillance both in everyday life and in our theories of behaviour.
Moreover, it is wrong to reduce the significance of surveillance simply to participants’ concerns about the television audience. Their awareness of the cameras declined over time and, if anything, observational evidence suggests that they were most concerned about being watched by us, the experimenters.
The notion of ‘playing up to the cameras’ is also too simplistic to explain the full pattern of our findings. Most obviously, since the cameras were a constant, they cannot account for predicted variations in behaviour over time. And while it may be possible for people to fake some things for the camera, it is much harder to fake responses on psychometric and physiological tests.
The fact that all our different form of data tell the same story convinces us that the study’s findings were real rather than in any sense artificial.
Yes. In particular, it is clear that the two main interventions that we had planned (on the basis of social identity theory) had an impact on participants’ behaviour.
First, the manipulation of permeability associated with initially allowing promotion from Prisoner to Guard and then disallowing it, served to increase Prisoners’ sense of shared social identification and hence their resistance.
Second, the manipulation of cognitive alternatives associated with the introduction of the new Prisoner – the trade unionist, pDM – provided both Prisoners and Guards with a new vision of ways in which their relationship could be defined.
Evidence of this impact is provided by both qualitative behavioural data and quantitative psychometric tests. In particular, results on psychometric measures showed that Prisoners’ willingness to comply with Guards’ instructions decreased after promotion was ruled out, and all participants’ sense of cognitive alternatives increased after pDM had been introduced.
For us, the interventions are similar to the manipulations in an experimental study. They were theoretically designed in advance to investigate the factors that shape group identification and resistance.
There were two main reasons why we decided only to recruit men for the study.
First, we wanted to be sure that our results would be comparable with findings from previous research (in particular, the Stanford Prison Study). If we had included women as participants and obtained different results, it could be argued that this was simply because, unlike previous researchers, our participants were female.
Second, we were motivated to try to minimize the risk of harm to participants. There would be obvious ethical issues associated with locking men and women up in the same cells.
This is not to say that studying women would be uninteresting or unimportant. It would be fascinating. But it is for another study.
We ended the study when we did was because, in our judgement, the system was stuck and could neither move forwards nor backwards. The Commune was falling apart, but at the same time, the reintroduction of a Guard-Prisoner hierarchy was not going to occur without considerable unpleasantness – and possibly violence.
Scientifically, our feeling was that the blocked system meant we would not be able to collect any interesting new data. Ethically, we could not allow violence to occur, and, afterwards, the ethics committee indicated that, had we let things continue in the direction they were heading, they would have probably have intervened to stop the study anyway.
Moreover, we wanted participants to feel positive about their experience. By ending the study a day-and-a-half early, we were able to use the remaining time to conduct exercises designed to rebuild positive relationships between participants. This process was successful and hence we feel that our decision was justified – although it was certainly difficult to make at the time.
Yes. In early 2002 participants were all involved in the process of making final edits to episodes of The Experiment. This was a requirement of our ethical contract, and was also designed to ensure that the programmes and our scientific analysis of events in the study were faithful to participants’ experience and hence had phenomenological validity.
Four years after the study we also endeavoured to contact all participants and professionals involved in the study (members of the ethics committee and the clinical psychologists) in order to re-establish their thoughts about their experiences.
Many had changed address, but we were able to contact nearly two-thirds of the participants and all but one of the professionals. As well as providing very detailed and very insightful reflections on the science and ethics of the study (and the TV broadcasts), they also completed an extensive questionnaire that measured their views on these and other issues.
Responses to key questions were as follows:
| Participants | Professionals | |
| I am glad I participated in the study | 6.9 | 6.7 |
| I think this was a worthwhile scientific study | 6.8 | 6.5 |
| I am still stressed as a result of participating in the study |
1.3 | 1.0 |
| Scientists should be banned from conducting studies like this |
1.2 | 1.0 |
Note: Responses on 7-point scales where 1 = do not agree at all, 7 = agree completely
When The Experiment was first broadcast, several commentators observed that, although our study was fascinating and entertaining, they seriously doubted whether it had any serious scientific purpose or merit.
In a sense that is hardly surprising. The TV documentaries were never meant to provide a full scientific account – nor could they have. They were designed to engage and interest people in the ideas and issues we were addressing. As we put it, they were a “window on the science” rather than the science itself.
In the programs the focus was almost entirely on what happened in the study, rather than on our theoretical perspective, the rationale behind our interventions, and our predictions concerning their effects. There was no space for quantitative analysis of this data – no graphs, no tables, no tests of statistical significance. Not least, this was because these comprehensive analyses took us a long time to complete.
It took us even longer to write up formal scientific articles that brought together the various strands of theory and data. But it is in these articles that the full science of the study can be discovered. And the proof that is was good science is to be found precisely in the fact that we were able to publish our findings in a series of articles in many of the best psychology journals in the world – journals which use the traditional method of peer review by other academics and which only publish articles that meet stringent scientific criteria.
If you take our study as an attempt to reproduce real prison conditions, and think that we were trying to say that what happened in our study happens in exactly the same way in real prisons, then you might quite rightly doubt its relevance to the real world.
But as we have explained, that is not what we were trying to do. On the basis of social psychological theory, we were trying to investigate the factors (e.g., social identification, permeability, cognitive alternatives) that determine when people act as group members and how they respond to an unequal social system.
With the advantage of that knowledge, we can then identify these factors at work in different social situations and start to predict how people are likely to behave. In other words, we do not seek to generalize directly from the results of our study to the real world. We do this indirectly from the insights that the results give us about psychological processes.
In this way, our results have practical implications for many intergroup situations – and in fact they are currently being applied by practitioners in schools and in other organizations.
Viewed this way too, our study can also be applied to prisons and is being used for training in the Prison Service. For there are many prisons where Guards do not act as a group and the Prisoners do, where Guards are stressed and Prisoners resist. And quite often, the Prisoners do end up on top.
As Nelson Mandela recalled of his time as a prisoner on Robben Island: “The inmates seemed to be running the prison not the authorities”.
Many people have suggested that everything comes down to the fact that Zimbardo’s Californian students of the 1970’s are culturally very different from a cross-section of British men in 2001. That is doubtless true, but if one argues that our participants were less liberal than Californians then why, at the start of the study, did they rebel against mild inequalities? If one argues that people nowadays are more liberal than in the 1970’s, then why did they embrace tyranny at the end of the study? The fact is that simple cultural differences cannot explain the complex dynamics of the studies. For that one needs to look at differences in the ways that these studies were conducted.
In effect, the Stanford Prison Experiment was an exercise in leadership. Although Zimbardo writes that “participants had no prior training in how to play the randomly assigned roles” in fact he gave his Guards a very clear briefing:
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 … They can do nothing, say nothing, that we don't permit…
By contrast, we did not instruct our Guards on how to behave. We didn’t act as their leaders. We stood aside, even as they struggled to make the system work.
The SPE is a study of what happens when a powerful authority figure (Zimbardo) imposes tyranny. Our study tells the more complex story of what happens when you leave people to deal with inequality on their own, and of how they can end up creating tyranny for themselves.
Philip Zimbardo has been very critical of the BBC Study.
In his reply to our key article in the British Journal of Social Psychology, he makes a range of criticisms:
Many of these ideas are summarized in his belief
In short, Zimbardo's formal response accuses us of being both bad and dishonest scientists and dupes of the BBC. As he puts it: “I believe this alleged ‘social psychology field study’ is fraudulent and does not merit acceptance by the social psychological community in Britain, the United States, or anywhere except in media psychology”. More succinctly, when pressed by Stephen Sackur on BBC’s Hardtalk, he describes our study as "abominable" and “shameful” (relevant parts of this interview can be accessed on the right-hand side of this page*).
Over time, however, Zimbardo’s tone seems to have changed a little. In a recent exchange of messages, he acknowledged that it is important that students are exposed to both sides of the debate between himself and ourselves.
That is our position too. Science progresses by laying all the evidence out in the open and allowing people to make up their own minds on the basis of what they see. By looking in detail at the SPE, at our study, at Zimbardo’s criticisms, and at our rejoinder to them, you can reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of our different positions, and decide for yourself who provides a better analysis of the social psychology of tyranny and resistance.
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*This interview was broadcast on March 21, 2008 and is reproduced with permission of the BBC. Details of the Hardtalk programme can be accessed here.