Why did our findings differ from Zimbardos?
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 de
