the person who volunteered to get me into this prison (because it was a prison to me, it still is a prison to me, I don’t regard it as an experiment or a simulation …) was distant from me, was remote until finally I wasn’t that person, I was 416. I was really my number and 416 was really going to have to decide what to do.
I learned that people can easily forget that others are human.
Debriefing Encounter Sessions
Because of the unexpectedly intense reactions (such as the above) generated by this mock prison experience, we decided to terminate the study at the end of six days rather than continue for the second week. Three separate encounter sessions were held, first for the prisoners, then for the guards, and finally for all participants together. Subjects and staff openly discussed their reactions, and strong feelings were expressed and shared. We analyzed the moral conflicts posed by this experience and used the debriefing sessions to make explicit alternative courses of action that would lead to more moral behavior in future comparable situations.
Follow-ups on each subject over the year following termination of the study revealed that the negative effects of participation had been temporary, while the personal gain to the subjects endured.
Conclusions and Discussion
It should be apparent that the elaborate procedures (and staging) employed by the experimenters to ensure a high degree of “mundane realism” in this mock prison contributed to its effective functional simulation of the psychological dynamics operating in “real” prisons. We observed empirical relationships in the simulated prison environment which were strikingly isomorphic to the internal relations of real prisons, corroborating many of the documented reports of what occurs behind prison walls. Most dramatic and distressing to us were the ease with which sadistic behavior could be elicited from individuals who were not “sadistic types” and the frequency with which acute emotional breakdowns could occur in persons selected precisely for their emotional stability.
Author’s Notes
This research was funded by an ONR grant: N00014-67-A-0112-0041 to Professor Philip G. Zimbardo.
The ideas expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not imply endorsement of ONR or any sponsoring agency. We wish to extend our thanks and appreciation for the contributions to this research by David Jaffe who served as “warden” and pretested some of the variables in the mock prison situation. In addition, Greg White provided invaluable assistance during the data reduction phase of this study. Many others (most notably Carolyn Burkhart, Susie Phillips, and Kathy Rosenfeld) helped at various stages of the experiment, with the construction of the prison, prisoner arrest, interviewing, testing, and data analysis—we extend our sincere thanks to each of these collaborators. Finally, we especially wish to thank Carlo Prescott, our prison consultant, whose personal experience gave us invaluable insights into the nature of imprisonment.
References
Adorno, T. W., E. Frenkel-Brunswik, D. J. Levinson, and R. N. Sanford. 1950. The Authoritarian Personality. New York: Harper.
Christie, R., and F. L. Geis, eds. 1970. Studies in Machiavellianism. New York: Academic Press.
Comrey, A. L. 1970. Comrey Personality Scales. San Diego, CA: Educational and Industrial Testing Service.
Reading 9 Working At Bazooms: The Intersection of Power, Gender, and Sexuality
Meika Loe
Social research is concerned with the definition and assessment of social phenomena. Many social phenomena in day-to-day interaction are taken for granted, such as riding on a city bus, the daily routine inside a beauty salon, and children playing on a playground. Social researchers enable us to get inside these diverse social settings and discover what social forces are at work in creating social life. This selection, written by Meika Loe, an associate professor of sociology, anthropology, and women’s studies at Colgate University, takes us inside the social world of waitressing. The award-winning study excerpted here was written by Loe when she was an undergraduate. It utilizes in-depth interviews and participant observation to reveal how gender and sexuality affect one workplace culture.
This [reading] is an investigation into power, gender, and sexuality in the workplace. This research is based on six months of participant observation and interviews at a restaurant I will call “Bazooms.”1 Bazooms is an establishment that has been described both as “a family restaurant” and as “a titillating sports bar.”2 The name of this restaurant, according to the menu, is a euphemism for “what brings a gleam into men’s eyes everywhere besides beer and chicken wings and an occasional winning football team.” Breasts, then, form the concept behind the name.
The purpose of this [reading] is to examine the dynamics of power, gender, and sexuality as they operate in Bazooms’ workplace. This is a setting in which gender roles, sexuality, and job-based power dynamics are all being constructed and reconstructed through customer, management, and waitress interactions. The first half of the [reading] describes how power, gender, and sexuality shape, and are concurrently shaped by, Bazooms’ management and customers. The second half deals specifically with how Bazooms waitresses attempt to reshape these dynamics and to find strategies for managing the meaning and operation of gender, power, and sexuality. By using Bazooms waitresses as examples, I hope to show that women are not merely “objectified victims” of sexualized workplaces, but are also active architects of gender, power, and sexuality in such settings.
Source: Meika Loe, “Working at Bazooms: The Intersection of Power, Gender, and Sexuality” from Sociological Inquiry 66, No. 4 (November 1996): 399–421. Copyright © John Wiley and Sons. Reprinted with permission.
The Bazooms Workplace Environment
Bazooms is the fastest-growing restaurant chain in the nation….
When I applied for a job at Bazooms in the winter of 1994, the first thing I was told was: The ‘Bazooms girl’ is what this restaurant revolves around; she is a food server, bartender, hostess, table busser, promo girl, and more. At the job interview I was shown a picture of a busty blonde in a tight top and short shorts leaning seductively over a plateful of buffalo wings and was asked if I would be comfortable wearing the Bazooms uniform. Then I was told that the managers try to make the job “fun,” by supplying the “girls” with “toys” like hula hoops to play with in between orders. Finally, I was asked to sign Bazooms’ official sexual harassment policy form, which explicitly states: “In a work atmosphere based upon sex appeal, joking and innuendo are commonplace.”
Sixty “lucky” women were chosen to be “Bazooms girls” out of about eight hundred applications. Most of the “new hires” were local college students, ranging in age from eighteen to twenty-eight years, and as I found out later, more than several were mothers. The hiring process was extremely competitive owing to the fact that Bazooms hired minors and inexperienced waitresses. Also, everyone had been told that working at Bazooms could be quite lucrative. The general “Bazooms girl type” seemed to be white, thin, with blonde or brown hair, although there were several black, Chicana, and Asian American women in the bunch.3 We all went through full-time training together (which included appearance training, menu workshops, song learning, alcohol and food service licensing, and reviewing the employee manual), and eventually were placed in a new location opened in Southern California.
Women
