Captology Notebook

One journalist, Nastassia Lopez, has found an angle to the prison abuse story that brings a focus on Stanford research from 1971.

http://www.mtv.com/chooseorlose/headlines/news.jhtml?id=1487984

Dr. Phil Zimbardo, a long-time supporter of captology and my work (he wrote the foreword in my book), compares the recent prison behavior to what happened years ago in his "Stanford Prison Experiment."

The journalist writes:

"Two days into the good doctor's experiment, the normal, adjusted students were playing their prison roles with frightening reality. The "prisoners," fed up with having roll calls in the middle of the night, rebelled by pushing their beds against their cell bars and refusing to come out. The "guards" called in reinforcements, pulled the prisoners from their cells, striped them naked, and proceeded to humiliate and abuse them for hours. To further reinforce their power, the guards took away bathroom privileges and forced prisoners to urinate and defecate in buckets inside their cells, and to later clean the mess out with their bare hands. It got worse — so bad that Zimbardo halted the planned two-week study after only six days."

Still quoting from the article . . .

"Zimbardo went on to explain that the Stanford prison experiment and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal were built on the same foundations with similar (and even predictable) results. Inexperienced guards were given little instruction, extraordinary power and limited oversight. In Abu Ghraib that dynamic was heightened by the stress of war and death and the need for information from Iraqi prisoners."

Can you provide a reference that can be chased down to this material? Title, url, etc. Please.