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Reicher and Haslam (BBC prison study)
Reicher, S. & Halsam, S. A. (2006) Rethinking the psychology of tyranny. The BBC prison study.
Background
Stephen Reicher and Alexander Haslam set out to outline a theoretical framework for understanding tyranny.
Reicher and Haslam define tyranny as an unequal social system involving the arbitrary or oppressive use of power by one group or its agents over another.
An example of tyranny is the horrors of the genocide carried out during the Second World War when six million innocent people were systematically slaughtered on command by the Nazis during Hitler’s regime.
Stephen Reicher and Alexander Haslam carried out this ambitious social psychological experiment in conjunction with the BBC in December 2001. In part the study was aiming to revisit some of the issues raised by a study carried out nearly 30 years earlier by Philip Zimbardo known as the Stanford Prison Experiment.
It is important therefore that we are aware of some of the issues raised by the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE).
The participants were respondents to a newspaper advertisement, which asked for male volunteers to participate in a psychological study of ‘prison life’ in return for payment of $15 per day.
The respondents completed a questionnaire and based on the results of this 24 men were selected. These 24 were judged to be the most physically and mentally stable, most mature, and least involved in antisocial behaviours. The 24 participants were randomly assigned to the role of ‘prisoner’ or ‘guard’.
A simulated prison was built in the basement of the psychology building at Stanford University.
Those participants allocated the role of guards had to attend an orientation meeting the day before the induction of the prisoners.
The uniforms of both prisoners and guards were intended to increase group identity and reduce individuality within the two groups.
The guards’ uniform consisted of a plain khaki shirt and trousers, a whistle, a police night stick (a wooden batten) and reflecting sunglasses, which made eye contact impossible.
The prisoners’ uniform consisted of a loose-fitting muslin smock with an identification number on the front and back, no underwear, rubber sandals, a hat made from a nylon stocking and they had a light chain and lock around their ankle. The prisoners’ uniforms were designed to de-individuate the prisoners and to be humiliating and serve as symbols of subservience and dependence.
The results showed that the behaviour of the ‘normal’ students, who had been randomly allocated to each condition, was affected by the role they had been assigned, to the extent that they seemed to believe in their allocated positions.
The guards became more and more verbally and physically aggressive. Zimbardo described this as pathology of power. The prisoners became increasingly depersonalised and several experienced extreme emotional depression, crying, rage and acute anxiety.
The experiment had to be stopped after just six days instead of the planned 14 days, mainly because of the pathological reactions of the participants. Five prisoners had to be released even earlier because of extreme emotional depression.
Zimbardo argued that the study demonstrate the powerful effect roles can have on peoples’ behaviour. Basically the participants were playing the role that they thought was expected of, either a prisoner or prison guard.
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 – and they’ll have no privacy. They’ll have no freedom of action, they can do nothing, say nothing that we don’t permit. We’re going to take away their individuality in various ways. In general what all this leads to is a sense of powerlessness.
They also note that in the Zimbardo study there were individual differences whereby some of the guards were tough but fair and others less fair. Reicher and Haslam challenge the view that behaviour in the Stanford Prison Experiment is due to role acceptance.
Reicher and Haslam were also critical of some of the literature which explains tyranny such as the Holocaust. The work of Zimbardo has been used to explain that groups per se are the cause of tyranny. For example tyranny is seen as being a natural consequence of being in the uniform of a ‘guard’ and asserting the power inherent in that role. Immersion in a group is seen to undermine the constraints that normally operate upon people when they act as individuals. In addition, when those groups have power at their disposal, this is believed to encourage extreme antisocial behaviour.
Reicher and Haslam take issue with the notion that groups per se are the root of anti-social behaviour. They argue that powerful and effective groups provide an effective psychological safeguard against tyranny and that it is when groups prove ineffective that tyrannical forms of social organisation begin to become attractive.
Reicher and Haslam like Zimbardo also use a social psychological approach but they advocate the use of the social identity approach. This social cognitive theory was developed by Tajfel and Turner and is one of the main theories in European social psychology.
Social identity theory proposes that the membership of social groups and categories forms an important part of our self concept. Therefore when an individual is interacting with another person, they will not act as a single individual but as a representative of a whole group or category of people. Even during a single conversation an individual may interact with another person both on a personal level and as a member of a particular group.
There are three fundamental psychological mechanisms underlying Social Identity theory.
The first psychological process is categorisation which refers to the process whereby people are classified into categories. By doing so we tend to exaggerate the similarities of those in the same group and exaggerate the differences between those in different groups.
The second psychological process is social comparison. Social comparison refers to the process of comparing one’s own social group with others. Some social groups have more power, prestige or status than others and therefore members of a group will compare their own groups with others and determine the relative status of their own group. This also results in the tendency for members of a group to distance themselves from membership of a group which does not share the same beliefs and ideas of their group and take more account of the beliefs and ideas of their social group.
The third psychological process relates to the tendency for people to use group membership as a source of positive self esteem. Maintaining positive self esteem is seen as a basic motivation for humans therefore if a group does not compare favourably with others we may seek to leave the group or distance ourselves from it. However if leaving the group is impossible then people may adopt strategies such as comparing their own group to a group of a lower status.
Aim
This study attempted to create an institution to investigate the behaviour of groups that were unequal in terms of power, status, and resources.
Below is a summary of Reicher and Haslam’s aims.
To provide data relating to the interactions between groups of unequal power and privilege.
To investigate if dominant group members will identify with their group from the start and impose their power.
To investigate if subordinate group members will identify collectively and challenge intergroup inequalities when relations between groups are seen as impermeable and insecure.
To measure the social, organisational and clinical effects of the study on the participants.
To develop a practical and ethical framework for examining social psychological issues in large-scale studies.
Method/Procedure
The method used was an experimental case study. It is a case study because it was a detailed study of a group of people and it was an experiment because a number of interventions (independent variables) were introduced at specific points of the study.
The study was monitored throughout by an ethics committee and by independent psychologists.
The participants were all male and were recruited through advertisements in the national press and through leaflets. Applicants went through three phases of screening.
Firstly, they completed a battery of psychometric tests that measured both social variables (authoritarianism, social dominance, modern racism) and clinical variables (depression, anxiety, social isolation, paranoia, aggressiveness, de-motivation, self-esteem, self-harm, drug dependence).
Secondly, they underwent a full weekend assessment by independent clinical psychologists.
Thirdly, medical and character references were obtained, and police checks were conducted.
For ethical reasons only people who were well-adjusted and pro-social, scoring at low levels on all social and clinical measures were included in the study.
From an initial pool of 332 applicants the researchers reduced the sample to 27 men. Men were chosen so that the results could be compared with the SPE and because it was thought by the researchers to cause less ethical problems than using women.
The final sample of 15 was chosen to ensure diversity of age, social class, and ethnic background. They were randomly divided into two groups of 5 guards and 10 prisoners. The 15 participants were first divided into five groups of 3 people who were as closely matched as possible on personality such as racism, authoritarianism and social dominance. From each group of three, one participant was then randomly selected to be a guard (and the remaining two to be prisoners). One prisoner was not involved at the beginning of the filming.
The prison environment was designed in such a way that participants could be both video- and audio-recorded wherever they were.
There was also daily psychometric testing. The participants were tested on:
(a) Social variables: social identification, awareness of cognitive alternatives, rightwing authoritarianism;
(b) Organizational variables: compliance with rules, organizational citizenship; and
(c) Clinical variables: self-efficacy, depression.
In order to minimize fatigue, not every measure in the full battery was administered every day. However, each was administered on multiple occasions to allow for an analysis of development over time.
Furthermore, daily swabs of saliva were taken in order to ascertain cortisol levels.
The five guard participants were invited to a hotel the evening before they entered the prison and they were told that they would be guards in the study. They were told that their responsibility was to ensure that the institution ran as smoothly as possible and that the prisoners performed all their tasks. The five guards were then asked to draw up a series of prison rules under headings provided by the experimenters and to draw up a series of punishments for rule violations.
The guards were given no guidance about how they should achieve their goals. The only limits on what they could do were a set of ethically determined ‘basic rights’ for prisoners. All participants were told that physical violence would not be tolerated. Beyond this, however, it was stressed that the guards could act as they pleased.
On the morning of the study itself, the guards were taken in a blacked-out van to the prison (since this was meant to be their entire experiential world for the duration of the study, it was important that they could not imagine the outside). Once inside, they were given a full briefing by the experimenters on the prison layout and the resources available to them.
The guards had a series of means by which to enforce their authority, including keys to all doors inside the prison (including a punishment isolation cell), sole access to an upper level, a ‘guards’ station’ with a surveillance system from which they could see into the prisoners’ cells, resources (including snacks and cigarettes) to use as rewards or withdraw as punishments – and, in addition, the ability to put prisoners on a bread and water diet. They also had far better conditions than the prisoners, including superior meals, extra supplies of drinks and snacks, superior living conditions and well-made uniforms as opposed to the prisoners’ uniform of a t-shirt printed with a 3-digit number, loose trousers and flimsy sandals. The prisoners also had their hair shaved on arrival.
After their briefing, the guards changed into their uniforms and practiced the procedure for admitting the prisoners. The nine prisoners then arrived one at a time. They were given no information apart from the prison rules, a list of prisoners’ rights, which was posted in their cells and a very brief loudspeaker announcement from the experimenters. This introduced the permeability intervention (see below) and stressed that violence was not permissible.
There were three planned interventions – permeability, legitimacy and cognitive alternatives. These interventions can be seen as the independent variables.
Permeability refers to the degree to which it is perceived to be possible to move from one particular group into another.
At their initial briefing, the guards were told that they had been selected because of their reliability, trustworthiness and initiative from pre-selection assessment scales. However, they were also told that while these scales were reasonably reliable, they were not perfect. In particular, the experimenters stated that it was possible that they had misassigned one or more of the prisoners. Hence, the guards were told that they should observe the behaviour of the prisoners to see if anyone showed guard like qualities. If they did, they were told that there was provision for a promotion to be made on Day 3. This information was also announced to the prisoners over the loudspeaker. In the initial days of the study, participants were thus led to believe that movement between groups was possible. After the promotion of one prisoner to guard actually took place (the selection of the individual being made by the guards on the basis of a procedure suggested by the experimenters), the possibility of movement was removed by announcing that there would be no further promotions (or demotions).
Legitimacy refers to the extent to which relations and status differences between groups are perceived to be justified or not.
Three days after the promotion, participants were informed by the experimenters that there were in fact no differences between guards and prisoners. And they were told that it was impractical to reassign them and hence the groups would be kept as they were. The participants would now believe that the group division was not legitimate.
Cognitive alternatives refers to group members' awareness of ways in which social relations could be restructured in order to bring about social change.
Within a day of the legitimacy intervention (day 4) a new prisoner was introduced. He was chosen for this role because of his background as an experienced trade union official. Hence, it was expected that his introduction would enable the prisoners (and the participants more generally) to envisage the achievement of a more equal set of social relations.