Revisiting the Stanford prison experiment: could participant self-selection have led to the cruelty?
Carnahan and McFarland asked whether students who volunteer for a study advertised in the Stanford Prison Experiment's wording differ in dispositions linked to abusive behaviour. They recruited with a newspaper advertisement almost identical to the one used for the Stanford Prison Experiment, or the same advertisement without the words about prison life. Volunteers for the original-wording version scored higher on aggressiveness, authoritarianism, Machiavellianism, narcissism and social dominance and lower on empathy and altruism. The authors say implications for the Stanford Prison Experiment remain conjecture, and that the findings indicate a person-situation interaction account rather than a strictly situationist one.
Carnahan and McFarland asked whether students who volunteer for a study advertised in the Stanford Prison Experiment's wording differ in dispositions linked to abusive behaviour. They recruited with a newspaper advertisement almost identical to the one used for the Stanford Prison Experiment, or the same advertisement without the words about prison life. Volunteers for the original-wording version scored higher on aggressiveness, authoritarianism, Machiavellianism, narcissism and social dominance and lower on empathy and altruism. The authors say implications for the Stanford Prison Experiment remain conjecture, and that the findings indicate a person-situation interaction account rather than a strictly situationist one.
Written from the abstract read 2026-10-25 via OpenAlex.
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Carnahan, T., & McFarland, S. (2007). Revisiting the Stanford Prison Experiment: Could participant self-selection have led to the cruelty? Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 33(5), 603-614. doi:10.1177/0146167206292689