Experiments In Human Behaviour

From locking students in a basement to encouraging violence towards an inflatable doll, social psychology studies have proven highly controversial – but they have uncovered important truths that teachers would do well to remember.

- Callum Jacobs

On a quiet Sunday morning in the summer of 1971, a police patrol car made its way through the streets of Palo Alto, California, rounding up a group of 24 undergraduate students. The students were read their rights, handcuffed, fingerprinted and deposited, not in the local jail but in the basement of Stanford University’s psychology department and into the care of Professor Philip Zimbardo. And so began one of the most astounding and controversial experiments in the field of social psychology.

The educational press today abounds with research telling teachers what works and what doesn’t work when it comes to classroom practice. Little by little, our understanding of what make effective teaching strategies is becoming clearer as we increasingly rely on research and evidence rather than guesswork and supposition. But what can we learn from the early pioneers of social research, who, although they weren’t necessarily studying classrooms, certainly discovered a great deal about human behaviour?

In the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment, Zimbardo asked his participants to become either prisoners or guards, hoping to discover whether people would alter their behaviour when given a specific social role to perform.

The “prisoners” soon began to show signs of frustration with their situation, and found ways to rebel, barricading themselves inside their cells and refusing to follow instructions. In response, the “guards” developed inventive ways of controlling the prisoners, including sleep deprivation, withholding food and ritual humiliation.