Alexander Haslam

Who they are

S. Alexander Haslam is a professor of psychology. A University of St Andrews news release of 28 August 2018 describes him as a professor of psychology at the University of Queensland. He should not be confused with Nick Haslam of the University of Melbourne, who works on essentialism and dehumanisation and is a different researcher; this site keeps the two pages separate.

The sources used for this site do not give a current position, so this page does not state one beyond the 2018 description. What is verifiable is the work. With Stephen Reicher he ran the BBC Prison Study in 2001 and reported it in 2006, and with Reicher and Jay Van Bavel he published the 2019 paper on the Stanford tapes.

Key papers

Reicher, S., & Haslam, S. A. (2006). Rethinking the psychology of tyranny: The BBC Prison Study. British Journal of Social Psychology, 45(1), 1-40.

The paper reports an eight-day study in which men were randomly assigned to be guards or prisoners in a purpose-built prison. The guards did not identify with their role, were reluctant to use their authority and were overpowered by the prisoners, who set up an egalitarian system. When that system proved unworkable, a harsher regime was imposed and the prisoners offered only weak resistance. The authors propose that powerlessness and the failure of groups make tyranny seem psychologically acceptable.

Haslam, S. A., Reicher, S. D., & Van Bavel, J. J. (2019). Rethinking the nature of cruelty: The role of identity leadership in the Stanford Prison Experiment. American Psychologist, 74(7), 809-822.

The paper argues that cruelty is more likely when leaders persuade people that their actions serve a noble group cause. Using material from the Stanford archive, the authors argue that the experimenters directly encouraged the guards to adopt tough roles.

Key ideas

The common thread is that identification with a group, and the leadership that shapes it, matter more than the assignment of a role. In the BBC study, the lack of identification with the guard role left the guards unwilling to use their authority. In the reading of the Stanford tapes, the research team's language, on the authors' reading, framed cruelty as a shared mission. In a Scientific American account of the 2019 paper, the authors report that the warden used collective pronouns 57 times in one short conversation, about once every 30 words, against once every 79 words for winning politicians and 136 for losing candidates. The same account notes that some guards resisted the abuse and that the authors want resistance studied as closely as leadership.

The reading is disputed. Robert Sapolsky interprets the BBC study as pointing to dispositions, noting that the participants who ran its final regime had scored high on authoritarianism beforehand, and that "bad apples rather than bad barrels" better describes it (Behave, p. 468). Zimbardo and Haney replied to the 2019 papers in a 2020 comment that was not opened for this page. The statement of 28 August 2018, which all four signed, agrees on one point: new information suggests that traditional accounts understate how much the experimenters intervened, that their leadership helped drive the guards' brutality, and that people may not slip into roles as easily as once thought.

Two things limit the work. The BBC study is a single study of one group of men over eight days, and its authors' reading of it is an interpretation. The identity-leadership paper rests on archive tapes, which show what was said and not what each guard privately made of it.

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