Stanford Prison Experiment

The Stanford Prison Experiment has fascinated me since I was in college and first reading about it in my Psychology 101 textbook.

Essentially, a psychologist created a prison, consisting of college student prisoners and college student guards, all of whom volunteered for this experiment. The "prison" was to have lasted two weeks, but they had to end it after six days because of the brutality of the situation.

I didn't know too much about Dr. Zimbardo who created this experiment until I read a blog he wrote:
http://www.in-mind.org/special-issue/from-heavens-to-hells-to-heroes-2.html

What is fascinating to me is how his idea of the "banality of heroism" is really personal authority.

People who get caught up in positional authority are controlled by the labels that have been assigned them by whatever body, whether it is the rank they hold in the army, their position in a school system, or a false, temporary rank assigned randomly by a psychologist. When a person is caught up in positional or institutional authority and has no personal authority, that person is controlled by the terms of the position. It doesn't matter whether a person is in the authority position as the "guards" were or the power position as the "prisoners" were--people acted out the terms of those positions.

The whole point of Juanita's ideas is that a person does not have to be controlled by the position he or she occupies. That means we do not have to be limited to the terms of the position we occupy.

This is what Dr. Zimbardo is talking about when he discusses the whistleblower in the Abu Ghraib prison abuses. He just uses a different set of terminology.

This is also what Juanita did in the "turnaround" that she discusses in the interview (An Evening With Juanita Price) and also that she discusses in her book.

In her situation, there was an authority position of her husband and the power position of herself--which she illustrates in her book as the wolf and the rabbit. In order to get rid of the wolf, she had to stop being the rabbit.

The way you move outside of the boundaries of position is to use personal authority strategies. The whistleblower stepped outside of an authority position and Juanita stepped outside of a power position. White abolitionists stepped outside of authority positions and black freedom seekers stepped out of power positions.

People with personal authority use their full set of adult rights but they use them in ways that are responsible. Rights are balanced with responsibility. People who are in "deceptive power positions"--where they are being abused--often do not use their full range of adult rights. People in deceptive authority positions do not use their authority with responsibility. That is where being an adult comes in.

I am so glad for the internet and for the possibility of being able to find out more about something that has been interesting to me for many years--and now I know why it was interesting. I have always had an intuition about human relationships. Juanita gave us the words to articulate what is really going on between people.