Coverage of the Stanford Prison Experiment in Introductory Psychology Textbooks

Abstract

Zimbardo’s 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE), one of the most famous studies in psychology, is discussed in most introductory textbooks. The present study is concerned with the nature of this coverage, given that there have been myriad criticisms, especially recently, of the SPE. These criticisms concern both Zimbardo’s situationist explanation of the outcome and the study’s methodology, such as the presence of strong demand characteristics. Thirteen contemporary introductory textbooks were analyzed for their coverage of the SPE and the ensuing criticisms of it. Eleven of these texts discussed the SPE, but only six even mentioned any of the criticisms. Possible explanations for such coverage and a plan to incorporate more accurate coverage within the discussion of research methods are offered.

Keywords

Stanford Prison Experiment introductory psychology introductory textbook analysis

In a recent Psychology Today blog, Susan Krauss Whitbourne stated that Zimbardo’s 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) is “depicted in movies, television, and of course all introductory psychology textbooks” (Whitbourne, 2013). Three months later, Peter Gray, in a response to Whitbourne’s blog, pointed out that the SPE is not depicted in all introductory texts because it is not covered in his text and never has been (Gray, 2013). In Whitbourne’s defense, she likely meant to say almost all or something to that effect. Of interest here though is why Gray decided not to include a discussion of Zimbardo’s SPE in his text. After all, the SPE is definitely one of the most famous experiments, and arguably the most famous experiment, in the history of psychology (Gregoire, 2013). Haslam and Reicher (2012) reported that the SPE website (www.prisonexp.org) has an average of more than 7,000 visitors a day, and the American Psychological Association reported in 2004 that the SPE website had received 15 million unique page views in the past 4 years and more than a million a week in the weeks following the exposé of the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers in Abu Ghraib Prison (American Psychological Association, 2004). So, given the SPE’s notoriety and impact, why didn’t Gray include the coverage of the SPE in his introductory text? The answer should be of interest to both psychology teachers and other introductory textbook authors.

Gray (2013) reported that when writing the first edition of his text (Gray, 1991), he not only carefully read the original journal article on the SPE (Haney, Banks, & Zimbardo, 1973b) but also a methodological critique of the experiment by Banuazizi and Movahedi (1975). After reading both, he decided to omit the SPE because he could not “in good conscience” present the experiment with its usual situationist interpretation—Zimbardo’s claim that due to the power of their situational roles, the participating college students had truly “become” guards and prisoners. In brief, he decided that the SPE was “poorly conceived and improperly interpreted.” As it turns out, this decision appears to be justified in light of other, more recent criticisms of both the SPE and the situationist explanation of its outcome (e.g., Banyard, 2007; Haslam & Reicher, 2012; Reicher & Haslam, 2006). I will next provide more detail on both Gray’s rationale for his decision and these newer criticisms.

Gray’s critique focused on the SPE being confounded by strong demand characteristics. Banuazizi and Mohavedi (1975) provided data that indicate that the SPE may have been confounded in this manner. They presented students with a questionnaire that included a brief description of the procedures followed in the SPE and some open-ended questions to determine their awareness of the experimental hypothesis and their expectancies regarding the outcomes of the experiment. Of the 150 students responding, a vast majority determined the experiment’s hypothesis (80%) and predicted that the behavior of the guards toward prisoners would be oppressive, hostile, and so on (89.9%). Thus, it certainly seems plausible that most of the participants in the SPE would have guessed how Zimbardo and his colleagues wanted them to behave.

However, the participants, especially those who were assigned to be guards, did not have to guess. Subsequent revelations by Zimbardo himself about his active leadership in the SPE (Zimbardo, 2007) disclosed that these participants were largely told how they were supposed to behave (Banyard, 2007; Gray, 2013; Haslam & Reicher, 2012). This is because in his role as prison superintendent, Zimbardo gave the guards an orientation that seems to have provided clear guidance about how they should behave. Zimbardo (2007) recounted the following from this orientation:

We can create boredom. We can create a sense of frustration. We can create fear in them, to some degree. We can create a notion of the arbitrariness that governs their lives, which are totally controlled by us, by the system, by you, me.…They’ll have no privacy at all, there will be constant surveillance—nothing they do will go unobserved. They will have no freedom of action. They will be able to do nothing and say nothing that we don’t permit. We’re going to take away their individuality in various ways.…In general, what all this should create in them is a sense of powerlessness. We have total power in the situation. They have none. (p. 55)

As Banyard (2007; see also Haslam & Reicher, 2003) pointed out, notice the use of pronouns in this orientation. Zimbardo aligns himself with the guards (“we”) and gives clear instructions for the hostile environment that “we” are going to create for “them.” Thus, Zimbardo’s leadership seems to have legitimized oppression in the SPE. Banyard concludes that, “It is not, as Zimbardo suggests, the guards who wrote their own scripts on the blank canvas of the SPE, but Zimbardo who creates the script of terror” (p. 494).

In addition, Gray (2013) pointed out that when some of the guards began abusing the prisoners, Zimbardo provided tacit approval via his silence about the abusive behavior, thereby confirming to these guards that they were behaving as they should. But what about guards who were not behaving as they should? Zimbardo instructed the prison Warden, David Jaffe (one of Zimbardo’s student research associates), to chastise such guards for not being more responsive to the job for which they are getting paid (Zimbardo, 2007, p. 65) and to make them more assertive (p. 81). For example, Warden Jaffe told one such guard, “The guards have to know that every guard has to be what we call a ‘tough guard.’ The success of this experiment rides on the behavior of the guards to make it seem as realistic as possible” (Zimbardo, 2007, p. 65). Thus, not only was there tacit approval of the guards’ abusive behavior, there was also direct instruction to the nonabusive guards from the prison warden about how guards should act.

Gray (2013) also pointed out that Carlo Prescott, an African American ex-convict who was the SPE’s chief consultant on real prisons (Zimbardo 2007), claimed that he provided Zimbardo and his colleagues with information that enabled them to infuse the experiment with verisimilitude to real prison life (Prescott, 2005). In his 2005 letter in the Stanford Daily entitled “The lie of the Stanford Prison Experiment,” Prescott expressed great regret for his involvement in the SPE and disclosed that it was he who came up with the abusive and humiliating behaviors displayed by the guards. Here is what he wrote:

My opinion, based on my observations, was that Zimbardo began with a preformed blockbuster conclusion and designed an experiment to ‘prove’ that conclusion…ideas such as bags being placed over the heads of prisoners, inmates being bound together with chains and buckets being used in place of toilets in their cells were all experiences of mine at the old ‘Spanish Jail’ section of San Quentin and which I dutifully shared with the Stanford Prison Experiment braintrust months before the experiment started. To allege that all these carefully tested, psychologically solid, upper-middle-class Caucasian ‘guards’ dreamed this up on their own is absurd. How can Zimbardo…express horror at the behavior of the ‘guards’ when they were merely doing what Zimbardo and others, myself included, encouraged them to do at the outset or frankly established as ground rules?

Gray (2013; see Addendum, February 14, 2014) also provided some remarks by John Mark, one of the guards in the SPE, that mesh well with Prescott’s admissions. Mark’s comments appeared in “The Menace Within” by Romesh Ratnesar in the July/August 2011 issue of the Stanford Alumni magazine (available at http://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/? article_id=40741). Mark said:

I didn’t think it was ever meant to go the full two weeks. I think Zimbardo wanted to create a dramatic crescendo, and then end it as quickly as possible. I felt that throughout the experiment, he knew what he wanted and then tried to shape the experiment—by how it was constructed, and how it played out—to fit the conclusion that he had already worked out. He wanted to be able to say that college students, people from middle-class backgrounds—people (sic) will turn on each other just because they’re given a role and given power. Based on my experience, and what I saw and what I felt, I think that was a real stretch. I don’t think the actual events match up with the bold headline. I never did, and I haven’t changed my opinion.

Given Mark’s comments, Prescott’s admissions, Zimbardo’s description of his guard orientation along with his tacit approval of the bad guards’ later abusive behavior, and the prison warden’s talks with some of the nonabusive guards, it certainly seems likely that the guards’ abusive behavior was largely if not entirely a function of demand characteristics—their doing what they believed they were supposed to do.

Given the strong demand characteristics of the SPE, it is important to note that not all of the guards (only about a third of them) became sadistic “bad guards.” Some were tough but fair “by the book guards,” and others were “good guards” (Zimbardo, 2007). This variance in guard behavior argues against a strict situationist interpretation of the SPE results because such an interpretation cannot account for the clear individual differences observed among the participants. Erich Fromm sums this up nicely in his book, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness:

The authors [of the SPE] believe it proves that the situation alone can within a few days transform normal people into abject, submissive individuals or into ruthless sadists. It seems to me that the experiment proves, if anything, rather the contrary. If in spite of the whole spirit of this mock prison which, according to the concept of the experiment was meant to be degrading and humiliating (obviously the guards must have caught on to this immediately), two thirds of the guards did not commit sadistic acts for personal “kicks,” the experiment seems rather to prove that one can not transform people so easily into sadists by providing them with the proper situation. (1973, p. 81)

That Zimbardo and his research associates’ guidance may have been critical to the SPE outcome is also supported by some findings of a study of simulated prison environments conducted in Australia by Lovibond, Mithiran, and Adams (1979). These researchers found that changes in the experimental prison regime produced dramatic changes in relations between guards and prisoners. In both a more liberal prison condition in which security was maintained in a manner that allowed prisoners to retain their self-respect and in a participatory condition in which prisoners were treated as individuals and included in the decision-making process, the behavior of the guards and prisoners was rather benign and very dissimilar from the dramatic behavioral outcomes observed in the SPE.

In addition, social psychologists, Alexander Haslam and Stephen Reicher, in collaboration with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), recently conducted a re-creation of the SPE but with ethical procedures that ensured that the study would not harm participants. Filmed by the BBC and televised in 2002, this study has become known as the BBC Prison Study. Haslam and Reicher (2005, 2012; Reicher & Haslam, 2006) provide discussions of the study and its results, and more information can be found at the BBC Prison Study website, www.bbcprisonstudy.org. For our purposes, it is only important to know that, unlike Zimbardo, Haslam and Reicher took no leadership role in the study (in particular, they did not instruct their guards to subjugate the prisoners to their will in the way that Zimbardo did) and that the guards’ and prisoners’ behavior diverged markedly from that in the SPE, thereby bolstering the argument that demand characteristics (and Zimbardo’s leadership) were at least partially responsible for the outcome of the SPE.

In brief, Haslam and Reicher concluded that people do not automatically assume roles that are given to them, as is suggested by Zimbardo’s situationist account of the SPE, and that tyranny arises from a complex process in which group failure and powerlessness lead group members to identify with authoritarian regimes and their leaders (a process that was short-circuited in the SPE because, from the outset, Zimbardo encouraged identification with his own authoritarian leadership). At the very least, the results of the BBC prison study suggest that a simple situationist account of the SPE is probably just that, too simple.

Of course, it may be argued that the guards in the BBC Prison Study failed to display the brutality of the SPE guards because their behavior was filmed and would ultimately be broadcast on television. Against this, Haslam and Reicher (2012) note that toward the end of the study, once a group of new guards had come to identify with their role, they proved very willing to oppress prisoners. Indeed, here the regime that was in ascendancy closely resembled that in the SPE. However, the participants had arrived at that point because they believed in the authoritarian regime they were implementing and not because they were blindly conforming to role.

The SPE has also been criticized for the lack of generalizability and ecological validity (e.g., Fromm, 1973), the possibility of participant selection bias (Carnahan & McFarland, 2007; McFarland & Carnahan, 2009), for breaching research ethics (e.g., Savin, 1973), for providing no satisfactory account of the individual differences observed (McGreal, 2013), and for being a pseudoscientific experiment that is more aptly described as Kafkaesque absurdist performance (Ribkoff, 2013). Nevertheless, Ribkoff (2013) points out that “…despite the obvious conceptual, methodological, and ethical flaws in the SPE and the conclusions drawn from it by Zimbardo et al., the experiment continues to be appealed to in social scientific, pedagogical, political, legal, and popular circles as proof of the ‘power of the situation’…” (p. 3).

Given all of these criticisms, it is hard to believe that an SPE manuscript would have made it through the peer-review system of a mainstream social psychology journal. Indeed, it is notable that whereas many of the articles that are critical of the SPE were published in leading peer-review journals (e.g., American Psychologist, British Journal of Social Psychology, Cognition, and Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin), articles on the SPE were not. Early articles on the SPE were published in relatively “fringe” outlets, such as Society (Zimbardo, 1972), Naval Research Reviews (Haney, Banks, & Zimbardo, 1973a), the International Journal of Criminology and Penology (Haney et al., 1973b), and The New York Times Magazine (Zimbardo, Haney, Banks, & Jaffe, 1973). It is also important to note that these articles only provided a limited subset of the SPE’s findings. As Zimbardo himself points out in The Lucifer Effect (2007, p. 20), “the full story has never before been told.”

The Present Study

These recent criticisms have raised additional doubts about the wisdom of covering the SPE but have many contemporary introductory psychology authors followed in Gray’s footsteps and omitted such coverage or, more importantly, included a discussion of these criticisms in their SPE coverage? Gray made his decision over two decades ago based only on his evaluation of the original SPE article and Banuazizi and Movahedi’s (1975) methodological critique, whereas authors of contemporary introductory textbooks have a far more substantial literature on the SPE on which to base their decisions. The purpose of the present study is to discover what these authors have done with respect to the coverage of the SPE.

Griggs and Jackson (2013) provided objective analyses, including length measures, of the most current editions of 13 full-length introductory texts published initially in the 2000s. The latest copyright dates for these texts were all in the 2010s, ranging from 2011 to 2013, thereby making this set of texts a good sample of contemporary introductory textbooks. In addition, most of the critiques of the SPE and the articles on the BBC prison study were published before those copyright dates. Hence, the text authors would have had sufficient time to consider them in making their decisions about how to treat the SPE. All of these textbooks will be checked for inclusion of SPE coverage and, if included, the nature and completeness of the coverage, especially with respect to the inclusion of the BBC Prison Study and critiques of the SPE.

In his classic book on teaching, McKeachie (2002) pointed out that “research on teaching suggests that the major influence on what students learn is not the teaching method but the textbook” (p. 14). Hence, because textbooks play a central role in our students’ education and because introductory psychology is the most popular course in psychology with an estimated annual enrollment in the United States of 1.2 to 1.6 million students (Steuer & Ham, 2008) and may be the only psychology course taken by most of these students, we want our introductory textbooks to be as accurate as possible. Introductory textbook authors have made their share of mistakes in the past (Steuer & Ham, 2008).¹ For example, Harris (1979), Samuelson (1980), and Paul and Blumenthal (1989) criticized introductory textbook authors for misrepresenting Watson and Rayner’s study of Little Albert (cf. Harris, 2011). Given that the SPE is one of the most famous studies in psychology with far-reaching impact outside of psychology, it is especially important that coverage of it in our texts be accurate. The present study was designed to determine the nature of this coverage.

Method

Copies of the 13 full-length introductory textbooks in the same editions examined in Griggs and Jackson (2013) were collected. Reference information for all 13 texts is included in the references, and each reference is preceded by an asterisk.

To determine whether the coverage of the SPE was included in a text, the name index was checked for Zimbardo and the subject index was checked for Stanford Prison Experiment or any possible variants, such as prison study. In addition, I conducted a page-by-page check for any coverage that might not have been indexed in the two chapters in which coverage might be expected, the social psychology and research methods chapters. If coverage was identified, the location of the coverage was recorded and the extent of the coverage was measured in terms of the number of paragraphs devoted to it. This measure of length was used because the actual amount of text on a page varies greatly among introductory texts. This variance is caused by the number of columns of text, how extensive the art program is, the font size employed, and so on. The number of photographs of the SPE and their content were also recorded for each text.

The nature of the coverage of the SPE was determined by the subheading of the location in the text and the topic thread of the coverage, and the completeness of coverage was determined by identifying what other SPE-related studies or critiques were cited and how they were presented. The cited references were recorded for the purpose of determining which SPE references were cited most often and whether references for SPE critiques and the BBC Prison Study were included. In addition, the conclusions drawn about the SPE’s outcome were noted. For example, was the usual situationist explanation given or was it tempered by the various critiques? Finally, whether or not the SPE was related to the Iraqi prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib was noted.

Results

First, only 2 of the 13 texts did not include any discussion of the SPE. It should be noted that one of these texts included one sentence in a paragraph on the fundamental attribution error that cited Haney and Zimbardo (2009) as support for the possibility that situational factors, such as orders from their superiors, may have influenced the abusive guards at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. However, I decided that this one sentence, comprising at best a tangential reference to the SPE, did not constitute the coverage of the SPE. Coverage in the other 11 textbooks varied from 1 to 7 paragraphs, with mean and median coverage of 3.6 and 4 paragraphs, respectively. Mean and median coverage for the entire sample of 13 textbooks were 3.1 and 3 paragraphs, respectively, with a range of 0 to 7.²

To put these coverage statistics into perspective, Griggs and Jackson (2013) found that this set of textbooks averaged about 674 pages of text (with front and back matter excluded). Thus, 3 or 4 paragraphs (less than one page) would not seem to be extensive coverage, especially given the “classic” status of the SPE. An additional way to put these coverage statistics into perspective would be to compare them to the coverage statistics of the other renowned social psychology classic study, Milgram’s obedience experiments (Milgram, 1974). Accordingly, I computed these statistics for the Milgram study. All 13 texts covered Milgram’s obedience experiments, and the coverage was much more extensive than that of the SPE. Instead of paragraphs, it was more appropriate to use pages to measure coverage. Mean and median coverage were 2.7 and 2.5 pages, respectively, with a range of 1 to 5 pages. Thus, on average, Milgram’s study was given almost as many pages of coverage as the SPE was given paragraphs of coverage. However, it is important to realize that this comparison has to be qualified by the fact that Milgram’s study was far more extensive than the SPE (24 experimental variations with 780 participants lasting an academic year vs. one experiment with 24 participants lasting 6 days) and thus would require more space for adequate coverage.

Coverage of the SPE was located in the social psychology chapter in nine texts and in the research methods chapter in the other two texts. In addition, one of the texts that included coverage in the social psychology chapter also included a one-sentence reference to the SPE in the chapter on consciousness in a discussion of the social–cognitive theory of hypnosis. The coverage in the two chapters on research methods revolved mainly around research ethics, whereas the coverage in the social psychology chapters revolved mainly around deindividuation and the influence of social roles and, to a lesser extent, conformity. A description of the SPE comprised the chapter opener once in a research methods chapter and once in a social psychology chapter. Providing evidence of the SPE’s compelling iconography, 9 of the 11 texts included at least one photo from the SPE. The mean and median numbers of photos were 1.4 and 1.0, respectively, with a range of 0 to 4. All of the photos were of the guards or prisoners or both, except in one case in which it was of the newspaper advertisement used to recruit participants for the SPE.

Of the 11 texts, 5 did not include any criticism of the SPE, and the other 6 provided very minimal discussions of such criticism. One text included a sentence questioning the ecological validity of the SPE results but did not provide a reference. Three texts briefly discussed ethical questions created by the SPE, such as the question of whether the ethical costs of the SPE outweighed its scientific gains but did not provide references. One of these texts also stated that many researchers have challenged the legitimacy of the SPE, which would seem to be referring to the recent criticisms of the SPE, but no references were provided. Another one of these texts stated that “most” psychologists believe that the SPE did not violate ethical principles but did not provide a reference for this statement. This same text also mentioned a 1983 replication of the SPE by a high school teacher who used volunteer students but again did not provide a reference. Possibly this author was referring to “The Third Wave” recreation of Nazi Party dynamics by high school teacher Ron Jones in Palo Alto, California, but this occurred prior to the SPE in 1967 (see Zimbardo, 2007, pp. 281–283).

Of the 11 texts, 2 mentioned the BBC Prison Study, but only 1 provided a reference for it. One of these texts devoted two lines of text and a photo with a caption to the BBC Prison Study and succinctly pointed out its differences from the SPE: (a) less direction provided to the participants from the investigators and (b) the observation of much less “conformity” to guard and prisoner roles. The difference in interpretations of the SPE findings by Zimbardo (the roles of guard and prisoner overwhelmed individuality) and by Reicher and Haslam (participants were merely responding to Zimbardo’s instructions) was also pointed out in the photo caption. However, no reference for the BBC Prison Study was cited. The other text included a paragraph discussion of some of the SPE’s shortcomings, including its lack of control, that it was more of a demonstration than an experiment, the possibility of demand characteristics, and the unsuccessful attempt to replicate its findings in the BBC Prison Study. In this case, the Reicher and Haslam (2006) reference was provided, and this citation is the only critique of the SPE formally cited in any of the 11 texts.

Unlike these two texts that mentioned the BBC Prison Study (in which an alternative social-identity explanation of the SPE results is given), seven of the other nine texts gave situationist interpretations for the SPE outcome, and the other two did not really provide explicit explanations. Surprisingly, given the strong evidence for the presence of demand characteristics in the SPE, the two texts that mentioned the BBC Prison Study were the only ones to mention or allude to this criticism. Finally, 7 of the 11 textbooks discussed the prisoner abuse in Iraq and related it to the SPE.

The mean and median numbers of SPE citations per text were 1.9 and 2, respectively, with a range of 1 to 3. The specific SPE references cited varied considerably across the 11 texts. There were 11 different references cited and a total of 21 citations provided for the SPE in the 11 texts that included SPE coverage. Of these 12 references, 6 were cited only once, 3 twice, and 1 thrice. One (Haney et al., 1973b) was cited 6 times. This citation variance is likely at least partially due to the shotgun publication approach used to initially report the SPE results. It is worth noting that the 1973 article on the SPE in Naval Research Reviews (Haney et al., 1973a) was not cited in any of the textbooks. This is possibly due to limited access, but this article is available at http://zimbardo.com/downloads. It is also worth noting that although one text cited Zimbardo (2006)—a article in which he responds to, and critiques, an article on the BBC Prison Study (Reicher & Haslam, 2006), the Reicher and Haslam source article itself was not cited nor was Haslam and Reicher’s response to Zimbardo’s article that appeared in the same issue (Haslam & Reicher, 2006). This is likely due to the fact that this article was cited as a basic reference for the SPE and not as a response to the Reicher and Haslem article. Similarly, the article by Haney and Zimbardo (2009) was cited as a basic reference for the SPE, and it is actually a response to the Carnahan and McFarlane’s (2007) article on the possibility of participant self-selection in the SPE.

Discussion

The current findings indicate that most contemporary introductory text authors have not omitted the coverage of the SPE. Of the 13 contemporary texts, 11 examined provided coverage of the SPE. In addition, 5 of the 11 texts did not include any criticism of the SPE, and the other 6 provided rather minimal critical discussions.³ Given the abundance of criticism available, why might introductory text authors provide such limited coverage of it? One possibility would be lack of knowledge of the criticism.⁴ This lack of knowledge, however, would not seem very likely, given the sheer amount of criticism that has been published and the prominence of the journals in which it has appeared. Nevertheless, it may be the case that the text authors are not aware of the extent of the criticism, and if they were, they would likely revise their coverage of the SPE or possibly even omit it. Introductory textbooks cover hundreds of topics and cite thousands of references so their authors may not be conversant with all relevant studies on the hundreds of topics, especially given that introductory psychology texts are revised on a short cycle, typically 3 years. If this is the case and introductory text authors are not aware of the entirety of the criticism of the SPE, then this article should help to rectify that situation.⁵

It is also possible, however, that some of the authors are aware of the extensive criticism but decided not to include it for their own individual reasons. One such reason would be that they think that Zimbardo and his colleagues’ responses to the criticisms sufficiently defused them. Even so, it seems remiss not to at least mention the criticisms, which can be minimally summarized in a paragraph or so. A debate literature about each of the major criticisms exists, and, if they have not already done so, introductory text authors and teachers should familiarize themselves with the arguments on both sides of these debates. Most of the references for the debates about demand characteristics, participant self-selection, and the BBC Prison Study are listed at http://www.prisonexp.org/controversies.htm, and PDFs of some of these articles are available at http://www.bbcprisonstudy.org/resources.php? p=86. Additional critical articles for these debates and others are cited in this article. Careful reading of all of these articles will allow introductory textbook authors and teachers to make a more informed decision about the nature and the extent of their coverage of the SPE.

Another possibility for the lack of coverage of the SPE critiques stems from the continuing criticism that introductory psychology textbooks are far too long, bordering on encyclopedic (e.g., Johnson & Carton, 2006; Landrum, 2000). Thus, there is pressure on introductory text authors to make each new edition shorter than the last one, but there is also pressure to be up to date and include coverage of important new studies and topics (Blumenthal, 1990–1991). In order to accommodate these conflicting demands, expansions of coverage for all of the existing topics required by new developments for those topics obviously cannot make it into the new edition. Sometimes older classic studies are even deleted from texts (Griggs & Jackson, 2007). But, given the notoriety of the SPE, it would seem too important not to update its coverage. Again though, individual authors may have decided not to do so for their own individual reasons.

It is likely that all of these possibilities as well as other factors play a role in the textbook authors’ decisions about SPE coverage in their texts. Different authors have different criteria as to what studies should or should not be included in their respective texts. With respect to coverage of the SPE, even nonpsychologists have strong feelings about whether such coverage should be included in introductory texts. The responses to Gray’s blog illustrated this nicely. Some of the responders agreed with him that the SPE should not be included in introductory texts, and others disagreed and thought that it should. Some of those who thought that it should be included argued that although the SPE might be bad science, it made more sense to include the SPE and then discuss its shortcomings, leading students to think more critically about research. This seems a reasonable course of action because many, if not most, students have already heard about the SPE so it is important not only to correct possible misconceptions about it but also to discuss its methodological problems.

For introductory text authors who find this solution attractive, the following is a possible path that they might want to take to accomplish it. Instead of positioning SPE coverage in the social psychology chapter, position it in the research methods chapter (or the text section covering methods) because research methods are almost always covered in the first or second chapter of the text. Using a description of the SPE as the chapter (section) opener will not only garner student interest but start students thinking about psychological research. The story of the SPE is compelling and will grab students’ attention. Then the author could periodically return to the SPE throughout the chapter (section) and use it as springboard to illustrate various methodological concepts and concerns by presenting brief discussions of the relevant criticisms of the SPE where appropriate. Importantly too, this will not only provide students with evidence that psychological science moves forward but also a sense of exactly how this is achieved (i.e., through empirical and theoretical debate).

One of the texts examined in the present study took this path but only criticized the SPE for its unethical nature and inadequate debriefing, but there are many other important methodological concerns that can be discussed, such as the presence of strong demand characteristics, possible participant selection bias, the constraints on generalizability, the question of ecological validity, and the disparate findings of the BBC Prison Study. It would also seem beneficial to students to discuss whether the Stanford Prison Experiment is truly an experiment or whether it would be more aptly described as a simulation study, and if so, where does a simulation study fit within the typical taxonomy of research methods covered in introductory textbooks. By the end of the chapter (section), students should be well on their way to thinking more critically about the research process—as well as various threats to both internal and external validity (Campbell & Stanley, 1966)—and should then be able carry this critical attitude forward throughout the rest of the text and introductory course. In sum, the SPE and its criticisms comprise a solid thread to weave numerous research concepts together into a good “story” that would not only enhance student learning but also lead students to engage in critical thinking about the research process and all of the possible pitfalls along the way. Introductory psychology teachers may also want to consider following such a path in their lectures on research methods regardless of the coverage of the SPE in the introductory text used in their class.

For various individual reasons, many text authors and introductory teachers will still prefer to cover the SPE in the social psychology chapter (section of the course) and not within the discussion of research methods. Satisfactory coverage of the SPE criticisms may then become somewhat more problematic for text authors because of space constraints in a chapter on a more substantive topic. Minimally, at least a paragraph or two in which the criticisms are enumerated and the accompanying references provided would seem necessary. By contrast, teachers would seem to have more leeway in deciding how much time to spend on these methodological concerns in course lecture. Given the finding that the coverage of the SPE criticisms in current introductory texts is rather minimal, adding coverage of this supplementary material in lecture should prove to be invaluable to student understanding of not only the SPE but also the general research process. Because the social psychology chapter is typically one of the last chapters in introductory textbooks, coverage in this chapter should help students to integrate what they have learned thus far about methodology and thus serve as a capstone methods experience rather than a cornerstone experience as it would if covered in the research methods chapter (section of the course).

Finally, it is important to realize that authoring an introductory textbook is a very complex, challenging, and arduous task. McConnell (1988) made this point very clear when he noted that introductory textbooks have to satisfy five different audiences:

These five different audiences—students, instructors, peers and colleagues, publishers, and one’s inner feelings and needs—make very different and often conflicting demands on the writer of an introductory text. Satisfying them all is something of an impossibility. (p. 167)

Footnotes

Acknowledgment

I thank Brian Collisson, Peter Gray, and Alex Haslam for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this manuscript.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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