Zimbardo has his knickers in a twist….

Some of you know that I was a participant in a televised experiment back in 2002. For those who don’t here's a quick explanation….

Back in the 1970’s a top psychology bloke devised an experiment which involved a mock up of a prison (within a university) some students as prison guards and some as prisoners. He was interested in the inequality of groups and how it all worked… … to cut a long story short, after 6 days it all had to be stopped as the guards were giving the prisoners a hard time. It’s better known as the Stanford Prison Experiment and the psychology bloke is Philip G. Zimbardo….

As you can tell, I know nothing about psychology….. being able to spell it is good enough for me.

Anyhow, because of the extreme nature of his experiment Zimbardo decided that the experiment should never be repeated again and his findings will therefore have to be gospel forever more….. which comes in really handy if you want to sell countless books on group psychology for the rest of your working life.

Whiz forward about 30 years and you get two Psychology professors who are up for a repeat of the Stanford Prison Experiment except this time they would put some safeguards in so no one got too upset or there arses sued.

This is the bit where I come in……

While surfing the BBC website looking for interesting things to watch that evening I came across a web advert for a TV program. It basically wanted people to apply to the BBC for a “Reality” type program. I applied thinking nothing of it….. Few weeks later I get a phone call asking me to pop down to the BBC and have a chat with some nice people. After many hours of filling in psycho forms & stuff I was eventually told I’d been selected as one of the 15 participants in “The Experiment”. I ended up being a prisoner….. and no, I didn’t end up in the showers with Mr Big.

It’s been four years since the TV program (BBC’s “The Experiment”, 4 one hour episodes) and not really heard a lot from anyone… until this week. I had an email from Professor Alex Haslam asking how I was. He and his colleagues have put together a few papers on the experiment and had some interesting comments from Zimbardo who seems to have got his knickers in a right twist about the whole thing. It makes for some very interesting reading, although most of the “science” is well beyond me.