时间：2025年8月4日 15:00—17:00
地点：清华大学人文楼B206
主题：Breaking Bad and the Problem of Conformity: Revisiting the Stanford Prison Study
主讲人：Mark Solovey (University of Toronto)
讲座摘要：
In August of 1971, renowned social psychologist Philip Zimbardo started the Stanford Prison Study. To examine how conformity affects a person’s behavior, volunteer undergraduate students were assigned to play either the role of guards or the role of prisoners in a mock prison set up in the Stanford University psychology building's basement. The experiment was expected to run for two weeks. However, Zimbardo ended it earlier because of the disturbing conduct of both guards and prisoners. In particular, a number of guards had become excessively punitive towards the prisoners. This raised a profound question: What led these young men to become abusive? According to Zimbardo, the answer centers on the power of the prison situation and supporting social systems to induce conformity to the roles that had been assigned to those volunteer subjects. Following the study's termination, news about what had happened spread far and wide - in psychology, in academia, and in the broader society and culture. Today, more than half a century later, the SPS remains one of the most famous social psychology studies ever undertaken. It has also been deeply controversial, for several ethical and epistemological reasons.
My presentation will revisit this (in)famous study. I will review what happened in that mock-prison back in 1971, situating the study in its social and intellectual contexts, and examining Zimbardo's evolving interpretation over the years. I will also consider some major criticisms, assessing their strengths and limitations. Based on this analysis, I will propose that the Stanford Prison Study has many flaws. At the same time, however, it still deserves its status as a landmark piece of research that is richly provocative and that continues to help us think about the power and dangers of conformity in breaking bad.
主讲人简介：
Mark Solovey is a Professor at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (IHPST) at the University of Toronto. He did his undergraduate studies at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, with a major in psychology and minor in philosophy, before going to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he did a joint Ph.D. in History of Science and History (with a focus on U.S. history). He taught at Arizona State University West in Phoenix, was a visiting scholar and researcher at Harvard University (History of Science Department, History Department, and Charles Warren Center) and a visiting scholar at MIT (Science, Technology and Society program). Since 2006 he has taught at the University of Toronto (IHPST).
