Quotations

The following quotations concern some of the key findings and conclusions of the BBC Prison Study (the BPS).

The BBC Prison Study was designed to examine the factors that determine how people respond when a system of inequality is imposed upon them by others. At the start, almost all the participants rejected this system. However, by the end, they were close to instituting a new and more tyrannical social system…. This raises a new and unexpected issue. What are the conditions under which people create a system of inequality for themselves? 
7 Reicher & Haslam, 2006

People do not automatically act in terms of group memberships or roles ascribed by others.
8 Reicher & Haslam, 2006

[Shared] social identity was a source of strength and resilience for the prisoners just as its absence was a basis for weakness and disintegration among the guards. United, the prisoners overcame their stress; divided, the guards buckled.
9 Haslam & Reicher, 2006

Failing groups almost inevitably create a host of problems for their own members and for others. These problems have a deleterious impact on organization, on individuals’ clinical state and … on society. For it is when people cannot create a social system for themselves that they will more readily accept extreme solutions proposed by others.
10 Reicher & Haslam, 2006

Authoritarians are only able to exercise leadership and set about creating an authoritarian world when circumstances move them from a position of extremism to one where they represent the wider group.
11 Haslam & Reicher, 2007
 

Sources

Reicher, S. D., & Haslam, S. A. (2006). Rethinking the psychology of tyranny: The BBC Prison Study. British Journal of Social Psychology, 45, 1–40. (p.24)

Reicher, S. D., & Haslam, S. A. (2006). Rethinking the psychology of tyranny: The BBC Prison Study. British Journal of Social Psychology, 45, 1–40. (pp.4-5)

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. (p.1049)

10 Reicher, S. D., & Haslam, S. A. (2006). Rethinking the psychology of tyranny: The BBC Prison Study. British Journal of Social Psychology, 45, 1–40. (p.33)

11 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. (p.620)

 

How have we summarized our key findings and conclusions?

How have we summarized our key findings and conclusions?