Stanford Prison Experiment

Reading Kindred reminds me a little of the Stanford Prison Experiment. For anyone who doesn't know about the experiment, check out this website, http://www.prisonexp.org/ , for a detailed description. Basically, psychologists at Stanford wanted to study the psychological effects of a prison environment on both prisoners and guards, so they recruited college students to volunteer to live in a simulated prison for two weeks. However, all parties, including the researchers, became so involved in their simulated roles that they lost sight of the reality that it was only an experiment, and the experiment was stopped after just six days.

For the men involved in the experiment, the simulation became their reality, their truth. Instead of identifying themselves by name, they used the numbers issued to them. The guards completely took on the power roles that had been (randomly) assigned to them, and the prisoners began to think that there was no way out, when in actuality they could have quit they experiment just by asking. The line between simulation and reality became so blurred that even the researchers began to think of their work more as prison management and less as academic research. The study proved that people have strong psychological reactions when thrown into situations of power, readily accepting their new station and following perceived expectations.

In Kindred, Dana is similar to the men who were assigned the role of prisoner, in that she suddenly finds herself in a situation where she has far less power and fewer rights than she is used to having in her normal life. She has to accept drastically decreased living conditions, and questioning those conditions endangers her safety. Her primary concern is to avoid punishment, because she knows that the Weylins, and really all white men, have complete control over her and are free to treat her with as much cruelty as they please. Dana feels disturbed by "how easily [she] seemed to acclimatize" (97), and over the course of her several month long stay she ceases to behave as though she is an "observer watching a show" (98) and actually takes on the role of slave while she waits for Kevin to contact her. Her reality of 1976 gets interrupted by a new reality of the antebellum South, and she must learn to adapt and survive in both, because each is as real as the other.

The biggest difference between Dana and the participants in the SPE is that Dana did not volunteer to enter her new reality, nor does she have a simple way to escape it. Her danger is far more real than the danger that the prisoners felt, yet the perceptions of danger and hopelessness are similar because the prisoners really did feel that they're lives were completely controlled by the guards and those who ran the prison. It's interesting, then, that in the situation of far greater "real" physical danger, Dana maintains her grip on her previous reality much better than the prisoners did when their imprisonment was only simulated.