The Situation

The “demand characteristics of the experimental situation” and the “experimenter bias” probably played a major role in the Stanford prison experiment. Zimbardo exerted a double influence on the guards and the prisoners, both as director of the prison and as chief scientist. Zimbardo consistently tried to link the Stanford experiment to real-world events, such as Attica, the Jonestown massacre, Auschwitz, the Rwanda genocide, and Abu Ghraib. He has always sustained a binary understanding of power.