Mandela effect/Stanford prison experiment

[TibetanTerrah]

This is a weird one, and I'm hoping knowledgeable MNers can help solve it

20ish years ago I studied AS Psychology, including the Stanford prison experiment. I'm 100% sure we were told that halfway through the experiment, the guards and prisoners swapped roles! There was a big focus in class about how really, the prisoners, having been through it, could have shown empathy when they became guards, but instead they exerted their power with revenge...

None of this happened, I read about it again yesterday and was confused that the study was pulled on Day 6 with no role reversal. I do remember it was stopped early because of the awful non existent ethics.

It's possible that the discussion in class led onto a different, similar study that did have role reversal? Or at a push, maybe we talked about a 'what if' scenario with the guards and prisoners swapping over, but I really don't think so.

I got an A in Psychology so must have understood it, and any Mandela Effect must have happened in the last 20 years please help me work out if/why my brain is lying to me!

I remember hearing about the experiment and that the prisoners did swap and were vicious/revengeful. I absolutely have no idea where I heard it though.

I also did AS psychology and I don't remember role reversal ever being mentioned.
Maybe it was a "what if" hypothetical discussion you had in class?

Wasn't it a project with school kids in America with the teacher praising kids with blue eyes and putting down any kid with other colours. The kids then picked up on this and were saying that they were better than the other colours....then the teacher reversed it.
My favourite Mandela effect story is of the film Shazam which was "made" in the 1980s people even agreed on the plot, the actors and even what the video cover looked like. One guy even worked in a video shop and swears he watched the film over and over

It was the school eye colour one where they swapped I think

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Elliott

I did AS psychology and it wasn’t mentioned to me about the role swap. It’s a fascinating study

I was having a conversation 2 days ago with someone who told me that prisoners say they'd make good probation officers.

20+ years ago our psychology degree covered the Stanley Milgram experiment that had deception involved, might that've been part of it?

Once they've been released, obviously!

Maybe you're mixing up that experiment with others where roles were swapped, such as this? Or maybe your teacher was confused when they taught you.

On the Mandela Effect idea I'm not sure that the OP's case is an example of this.

The Mandela Effect is remembering things that didn't happen.

If the OP was taught (incorrectly) that the roles were swapped, it's not the Mandela Effect, it's a case of correctly remembering what was taught incorrectly.

If the OP was taught about the Stanford experiment and other experiments where roles were swapped it could just be a case of forgetting/merging information over the last couple of decades. The Stanford case is the most famous one and it's easy to overlay facts from another case onto the most memorable one. It's not the Mandela Effect, it's just misremembering. People forget, people confuse information.

It's also possible that people have lied or made up facts. Either by previously claiming roles were reversed when they weren't, or now claiming they were not reversed when actually they were. This could be deliberate deceit or just carelessness when publicizing information. This isn't the Mandela Effect though, it's people hearing or reading incorrect information.

As a parallel, during WWII lies were told to the British people by the government. Misinformation was spread to help morale and the war effort, and to confuse the enemy. Someone who correctly remembers being told their donation of saucepans helped build Spitfires isn't suffering from the Mandela Effect when they later learn it was just a PR stunt to get people feeling like they as individuals were crucial to the war effort and saucepans were completely unsuitable as a source of material for aircraft.

The Mandela Effect is a vivid remembering of something that didn't happen. Not a misremembering or a correct remembering of something learnt inaccurately.

I just have to ask.... what did they do with the millions of saucepans...and why bother to cut down the railings from out side my house?

Yes you're right. I only suggested the Mandela Effect as there's no reference to role reversal whatsoever, and related studies seemed to bring up either a prison simulation study or studies on the effects of power and role reversal, not both. None of those studies (even those referenced by PPs) are familiar to me either.

It's more likely a merging of my memory of different studies. The brain is strange and I was so utterly convinced there had been a role reversal, I'd have gambled everything on a gameshow to answer it and would've lost

I have no idea if I was incorrectly taught. Being honest, it wouldn't surprise me. Just weeks away from our IT GCSE it was discovered we'd been taught completely the wrong syllabus (or stuff not even on the syllabus, it was never fully admitted) and it was a mad rush with crash courses at lunchtime, and we were told very clearly we'd never be taught enough to get an A in that time. So maybe!

@TibetanTerrah That definitely didn't happen in the Stanford Prison Experiment. There's a really good book on it, and on situational psychology, called "The Lucifer Effect", which you might find interesting.

Seconding the poster who said it's probably gotten confused with the Jane Elliott blue eyes experiment.
I'm really into these kinds of experiments and I can't think of any other examples where the roles changed part way through, though of course there may be....

Might also have gotten confused in as much as the "prisoners" and "guards" were all just Stanford students, so no differences prior to the start of the experiment.

I think there was a fairly recent, allegedly "more ethical" version run by Channel 4, and in that possibly the prisoners took over the prison and forcibly swapped roles with the guards, but I didn't see it, so it's only a hazy memory of reading an article about it - might be worth googling to see if that has been overlaid with it in your mind?

I remember them swapping over too.
Again studied it at A level.
I wonder if they were SUPPOSED to swap but it was pulled before that happened. That could be why were confused

Did they not use the railings either?! I grew up in Sheffield where pretty much all railings from that time had been cut off.

@WrylyAmused I think you might have cracked it! I think (if my maths is right with what year I studied AS levels) the C4 doc would have been televised the year before, so would have been topical and discussed in class! Going to go and have a proper look now!

Definitely no role reversals in the stanford one!

I'm from Bristol and loads of railings went, but if the other poster is right it was pointless

I would have started Year 12 Sept 2003, the C4 doc The Experiment aired 2002, so it must have been discussed in class.

I'm surprised it was taken 'seriously' enough by my teacher that she deemed it worth discussing though. It was basically reality TV more like Big Brother, rather than a scientific study and you could argue that it had a detrimental effect on my long-term knowledge of the original SPE All my 'takeaways' from the findings of the original study were completely wrong and disrupted by the C4 show!

Who was your teacher?

I think the Stanford Prison Experiment has been replicated by people other than Zimbardo (obviously not recently due to ethics) and it’s possible that the replications changed the design somewhat.

There were other experiments

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

My MSc is in psychology but it was a long time ago. I remember quay you're talking about / the role reversal - but I think it may have been a subsequent study replicating the Stanford one. OR it was that the participants were people whose prior lives mirrored those of the captured rather than captors.

It wasn't just a C4 doc though. It was an actual experiment run by psychologists that was also filmed and televised. Also fwiw it was BBC - website about it here. Obviously knowing they were being filmed would probably have affected the participants' behaviour to some extent but it was conducted properly as an experiment, and the findings written up and published as such.

Scientific knowledge develops by testing theories then amending knowledge and coming up with new questions based on what you find. Theories develop and change over time. Sometimes surprising things are found out that call into question an awful lot of "knowledge" that has come before. Zimbardo's original study is not set is stone as "we know this now, move on" but is questioned and pulled apart as to what it really shows,* as all psych experiments must be as an important part of the process. Your teacher presenting the latest relevant research was actually being a good teacher!

(*An interesting example of this is that Milgram's famous electric shock/obedience experiment has been argued, fairly compellingly, to not actually show obedience after all!)

I'm a bit hazy on this as it's a couple of years since I got my psych degree... but I do remember studying it. There was evidence that the "guards" in the original prison experiment had been encouraged into extreme behaviour to keep control over the "prisoners", rather than it simply being a natural result of the situation - this was one criticism of the study. I remember reading some published correspondence on this and thinking Zimbardo came across very poorly (and argumentative!) and found his arguments less convincing than the other side.

Also the later experiment was run slightly differently in order to test out some other aspects of social identity theory. For example, they began by telling the prisoners that one of them would be promoted to being a guard after a certain amount of time. This means that the group boundaries were not fixed - the prisoners knew that one of them had the chance of joining the "guard" group. Once this had happened, the group boundaries were fixed, no chance of anyone switching groups. The theory behind this is that when group boundaries are fixed, the lower status group may work together to raise their status or overthrow the powerful group. Whereas when group boundaries are less solid, members of the lower status group will try to individually work their way into the higher status group. (You could apply this to the social structure in the UK - as long as there is some possibility of social mobility, the working classes won't have a revolution - to put it dramatically!)

Apologies for essay, I find this stuff really interesting!

Fwiw, I had also misremembered the original experiment as having the guards and prisoners swop roles, from studying AS psychology. I think it was as a PP suggested, that I got mixed up with the blue eyes/brown eyes experiment.