Social Dimensions of Evil – The Stanford Prison Experiment

This week in class we read chapters 5-8 in Dr. Philip Zimbardo’s book The Lucifer Effect. In these chapters, we followed more of the Stanford Prison Experiment, including their visit from a former church Pastor as well as a visitation day with their families. Amongst all of the chaos in the ‘prison’, there is a clear demeanor of who is in charge and who is following orders. The ‘guards’ are proving to take their roles perhaps a bit too seriously, and while some ‘prisoners’ do choose to rebel, they always seem to fall back onto following the guards rules. With this, we have a clear topic for the week; The Bystander Effect.

The Bystander Effect is a social psychology theory in which individuals will see something wrong happening, but still not intervene as they assume that someone else will do it. In the case of the prisoners, it is easy to think that they were waiting for someone else to intervene such as Zimbardo himself or even the other prisoners. However in the experiment, we can also see the prisoners rebelling and one prisoner even needing to leave, and these prisoners are punished or humiliated for doing so. Similarly to this, when one guard voices his opinion in noting that their tactics might be going a bit too far and that they (the guards) might need to tone it down a bit, he is also humiliated for not being “man” enough for the job. With this, we must ask whether it is the bystander effect, or the fear of one’s safety. At the same time, aren’t these two somewhat explaining the same thing? The bystander effect can be noted as a lack of acting, but we must look farther into it to understand why some people may not act; we can see that perhaps some of the students may not have acted because they felt that if they had, it would only result in more punishment to themselves. Some of the guards may not have acted as they saw how the other guard had been treated when he spoke up. It is also clearly easier to not speak up because it is easier to follow the crowd, this way there is no standing out, no possibility for humiliation and one will fit in easily if they just follow suit.

When looking at the bystander effect, a study by Moisuc and Brauer (2018) investigated how an individual would react to a situation involving bullying based on the relationship they held with the individual being bullied. The study involved 1386 students from both middle schools and high schools, and using a between-subjects design, they were randomly assigned to a group wherein the [immoral] scenarios they would be asked about would be happening to a stranger, an acquaintance or a friend. Within this study, the results demonstrated that the closer the individual was with the subject in the scenario, the more likely they were to intervene with interventions for strangers being the least likely, interventions for acquaintances being more likely, and interventions for friends being most likely. The researchers determined that this is due to what they identified as a “moral closeness” to the situation and to the individual in the scenario. This essentially means that the closer the person is to the person being bullied the more likely they are to intervene, and I think that this provides a strong pull for understanding how people in the Stanford Prison Experiment did not intervene. The students in the experiment were all strangers going in, and why should they feel the need to stand up for someone when they did not know them? According to this study it would be less likely for them to intervene as they are not friends, but after a few days it is easy to assume that at that point they may have been closer to acquaintances than to being strangers, so this could explain intervening in some instances but not in others.

Intervention in scenarios where one is being treated as less than another is very important, though. It can do amazing things for the person being defended, and it can make a show to the person doing the discriminating that there is someone on the others’ side. A perfect example of this in today’s news would be the Wet’suwet’en protesters, those who stand with them and those who stand against them. After weeks of protests, The National Post released an article explaining that there has been a draft agreement reached with ministers and protesters in British Columbia. This agreement comes from a place of pressure that was put on the ministry and the government as a whole by the Wet’suwet’en people, other Indigenous Canadians as well as Canadians of all other ethnicities who are able to understand the severity of the situation. Had there been no intervention from the Wet’suwet’en people and their supporters, the government would have continued their plans to lay the pipeline without land consent, however now the government is forced to look at the impact this could have.

The impact of bystander influence is a large one, and perhaps if there had been more of a bystander intervention in the ‘prison’, then maybe there would have been a chance that less bad things would have happened, maybe there would have been less of a divide against the two groups, or maybe the study would have ended even earlier than it did. While these things are hypotheticals, the impact of bystander intervention is one that has been proven and should be focused more on as a means to solve issues. There are many programs that encourage individuals to stand up for others when it comes to bullying and our society has been very keen on outing social injustices, which makes me want to believe that situations such as the Stanford Prison Experiment would not have ended in the way that it did. On the other hand though, is there any way that we could ever truly know?