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Personality and Social Psychology
Bulletin
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Persistent Dispositionalism in Interactionist Clothing: Fundamental Attribution Error in Explaining Prison
Abuse
Craig Haney and Philip G. Zimbardo
Pers Soc Psychol Bull
2009 35: 807 originally published online 27 April 2009
DOI: 10.1177/0146167208322864
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Persistent Dispositionalism in Interactionist
Clothing: Fundamental Attribution Error in
Explaining Prison Abuse
Craig Haney
University of California, Santa Cruz
Philip G. Zimbardo
Stanford University
The Stanford Prison Experiment demonstrated some
important lessons about the power of social situations,
settings, and structures to shape and transform behavior.
At the time the study was done, the authors scrupulously
addressed the issue of whether and how the dispositions
or personality traits of the participants might have affected
the results. Here the authors renew and reaffirm their orig-
inal interpretation of the results and apply this perspective
to some recent socially and politically significant events.
Keywords:
Stanford Prison Experiment; dispositionalism;
fundamental attribution error; prison abuse
M
ore than 35 years after it was conducted, the
Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) still reminds
us of some inconvenient truths. It serves as a warning
about the way that certain very powerful social situa-
tions, settings, and structures can shape and transform
the behavior of the persons who enter them, suppress
individual differences, and compromise deeply held val-
ues. The study’s dramatic results represent a cautionary
tale about the potential of total institutions (e.g., pris-
ons) to elicit or compel highly problematic behavior
from people that is truly “uncharacteristic” of them—
extreme acts that they had never performed before and
are unlikely to repeat, under different circumstances, in
the future. But the SPE also underscores another kind
of inconvenient truth: the persistent dispositionalism
that continues to influence much psychological think-
ing. Thus, there are still many in the field who insist on
explaining context-driven socially problematic behav-
ior in largely individualistic, trait-based terms, no
matter how much evidence has been amassed to the
contrary.
Of course, the latter truth has been widely studied
and is well understood within social psychology.
Extensive research on the “fundamental attribution
error” demonstrates that the more troublesome or
threatening the behavior that observers attempt to
explain, and the more extreme the actions with which
they are concerned, the more tempting it is to attribute
primary responsibility to disagreeable or damaged
“others” whose bad acts are thought to be the products
of their flawed characters and ill-advised choices. This
can occur no matter how powerful the situations, set-
tings, and structures to which the actors have been
exposed and in which they have acted. The motives
that underlie this particular form of attributional bias
are many and varied.
For one, recognizing the causal role of broad,
destructive social forces in the genesis of socially prob-
lematic behavior implicates us all at a more direct and
unsettling level than the dispositionalism with which it
competes. It casts whatever tacit assent we may have
extended to the social contextual status quo (e.g., pris-
ons, poverty, or wars) in a very different light. Thus, our
implicit support for the policies and practices that may
have given rise to the damaging social contexts in ques-
tion can be seen as part of the problem—a problem we
may be expected to help solve. Conversely, blaming
other people for the bad acts in which they have engaged
seems to absolve the rest of us of any responsibility for
Authors’ Note:
Please address correspondence to Professor Craig
Haney, Department of Psychology, University of California, Santa
Cruz, CA 95064; e-mail: psylaw@ucsc.edu.
PSPB,
Vol. 35 No. 6, June 2009 807-814
DOI: 10.1177/0146167208322864
© 2009 by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.
807
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808
PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY BULLETIN
social context of prison or even citing the work of others
who do). Indeed, there is a seemingly irresistible ten-
dency to fall back on dispositional stereotypes when
talking about behavior in unfamiliar situations by rely-
ing on the putative existence of some set of underlying
traits that supposedly produces it (e.g., making untested
assertions about “common” guard and prisoner behav-
ior that allegedly “abounds” in prison without citing a
single empirical study to corroborate this fact or estab-
lish any relationship with the traits that they claim pro-
duce the behavior).
Dispositional thinking also often relies on problem-
atic trait labels that are not very precisely defined (e.g.,
psychopathy).
These labels are frequently so vague and
elastic that they can be made to encompass traits and
behaviors that are not remotely equivalent (e.g., sug-
gesting that Machiavellianism is more or less the same
thing as psychopathy, describing even the rule-bound
and hierarchical behavior of prison guards as “success-
ful psychopathy,” or assuming that aggressiveness
would lead people to volunteer to be in a place like
prison where they are likely to be aggressed against;
Carnahan & McFarland, 2007, p. 606). In fact, this
kind of thinking allows analysts to stretch these elastic
trait labels around behaviors that are not only funda-
mentally different from one another but even diametri-
cally opposed (e.g., accounting for the opposite,
antagonistic, role-driven behavior of actual prisoners
and
guards in terms of identical traits that they claim—
but again do not demonstrate—both groups share).
Finally, it often leads them to focus on very small and
select differences in measured amounts of certain traits,
using them to account for significant (even extreme) dif-
ferences in the way people act, while systematically
ignoring the more obvious situational explanations for
change and divergence in behavior (e.g., suggesting that
abusive guard behavior can be explained by
F
scale
scores that are only slightly elevated above baseline
norms—by as little as 0.58 (4.36 vs. 3.78) on a 9-point
scale—despite the guards’ having scored within the nor-
mal range on a battery of other personality measures
and notwithstanding the very powerful role demands to
which they were subjected).
Suffice it to say that we believe it is impossible to
draw any conclusions from the Carnahan and
McFarland (2007) study that pertain directly to the
SPE. We will focus at length on only one methodologi-
cal problem to illustrate why. The problem is not only
absolutely central to the logic of Carnahan and
McFarland’s study but also applies more generally to
other research that would adopt the novel approach
that they have taken here—attempting to recreate
experimental conditions and participant responses from
a very different historical period.
ignoring these pernicious and destructive environments,
or failing to take steps to ameliorate them.
Moreover, it is often difficult for us to acknowledge
that the harmful situational forces to which these “bad
actors” have fallen prey are ones to which we ourselves
might have succumbed. Among other things, to do so
would frustrate the seemingly natural desire to maintain
a stance of moral superiority over persons whose behav-
ior offends us. Of course, it also blunts any impetus for
broad-based social change or political reform. And it
helps to sustain what are, in essence, exclusively medical
and legal models of individual treatment and blame,
when a public health model of containment and pre-
vention is often more appropriate.
In recent years, unfortunately, we have witnessed the
reemergence of selected but strong pockets of this kind
of dispositionalism—relying largely (if not exclusively)
on individualistic ways of understanding socially prob-
lematic, troubling, and threatening behavior. It is cer-
tainly not limited to the discipline of psychology. Thus,
the American public increasingly has been told that ter-
rorism is the product of “evil” people, that insurgencies
are incited by nothing more than a handful of “thugs”
or “dead enders,” and that when some members of our
own armies of predominately “good” people commit
atrocities, it is because they represent the few “rotten
apples” in an otherwise properly designed and well run
“barrel.” Carnahan and McFarland (2007) appear to us
to espouse a version of this kind of dispositional think-
ing, both in their critique of the SPE and, more impor-
tantly, in their suggestion that recent seemingly parallel
real-world events (especially at the Abu Ghraib prison
in Iraq and the scandals involving members of the
American military) can be explained in terms of the
pathology of those involved rather than the pathologi-
cal circumstances to which they were exposed.
In our experience, the subtle commitment to disposi-
tionalism in psychology runs very deep, even among
self-described “interactionists.” It leads many otherwise
thoughtful analysts to simply assert (without demon-
strating) that there are certain stereotypic traits that
explain problematic behavior (e.g., that there are “traits
associated with abusiveness” in prison settings;
Carnahan & McFarland, 2007, pp. 604, 605) but then
fail to identify any research to convincingly document
this assertion. It accounts for the tendency to invariably
emphasize the causal significance of dispositions and
correspondingly deemphasize the role of the situation,
even when that situation is as unique and powerful as
prison. This is what allows commentators who claim to
advance an interactionist perspective to nonetheless
leave any careful examination of the situation or envi-
ronment largely out of their equations (e.g., discussing
“prison behavior” without bothering to analyze the
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Haney, Zimbardo / EXPLAINING PRISON ABUSE
Dispositional (as opposed to interactional) analyses of
complex social behavior are characteristically acontex-
tual
and
ahistorical in nature. Yet those characteristics
can greatly limit the kind of conclusions that researchers
are justified in reaching—especially when there is good
reason to believe that context and history play a signifi-
cant role in shaping the behavior under study. Thus, any
genuinely interactionist attempt to faithfully replicate
and meaningfully reinterpret the results of a classic study
done decades ago would require researchers to give very
careful attention to potentially important changes in
context as well as to the passage of time (i.e., to history).
Such careful attention appears to us to be lacking in
Carnahan and McFarland’s (2007) study and we believe
that their oversight in this regard is both problematic
and instructive.
To be more specific, as we see it, any relevance that
Carnahan and McFarland’s (2007) study has to the SPE
is premised entirely on an extraordinary (and, we
believe, implausible) two-part assumption, one that
appears to reflect the dispositionalism on which their
study is based. That is, in order to apply the results of
this study to the SPE, one would have to assume, first,
that there are no regional (i.e., contextual) differences
with respect to attitudes about punishment and prison
in the United States and second, that prison-related atti-
tudes have not changed significantly over the three-
decade period that separated their study from the SPE.
Put somewhat differently, connecting the results of
Carnahan and McFarland’s study to those of the SPE
requires us to assume that the act of volunteering to
participate in a study of “prison life” meant the same
thing for college students in Kentucky and Tennessee in
2003 as it did for college students in the Bay Area of
California in 1971.
This assumption is implausible on its face.
Moreover, we are not at all reassured by the way the
authors have attempted to defend it. Indeed, they pro-
vided little more than a subjective and unsystematic
review of a few prison movies from the two different
time periods in question—movies they selected them-
selves and compared along an unspecified set of dimen-
sions. Such a casual and unsystematic approach to
context and history hardly reflects a serious interac-
tionist analysis of these potentially important factors.
Nonetheless, once Carnahan and McFarland (2007)
decided that the “themes” that they personally identi-
fied in the movies that they selected to watch reflected
what they termed a
constancy,
they then asserted that
the act of “volunteering for a study of prison life” by
members of these two very different samples, separated
in time by more than three decades, “would be influ-
enced by similar personal dispositions” (p. 611). We
remain unconvinced. In fact, we believe that the
809
changes in context and history that Carnahan and
McFarland have overlooked or assumed away likely
account for the very findings they report.
We have written about the significant changes in
prison practices, policies, and attitudes that have
occurred over the historical period in question (Haney
& Zimbardo, 1998). Moreover, one of us has published
an entire book about the widespread punitiveness that
is now manifested in our nation’s prisons, the policy-
related changes that have given rise to this phenome-
non, and the important ways in which public attitudes
and beliefs were shaped and implicated every step of the
way (Haney, 2006). Arguably, there has never been a
comparable period in our nation’s history during which
prison policy, prison conditions, and public attitudes
about crime and punishment deteriorated further or
faster than in these recent past decades.
The unprecedented emphasis on “law and order” that
emerged over this period is widely acknowledged by vir-
tually everyone who lived through it or studied it. Indeed,
the public’s willingness to tolerate and even to actively
embrace extremely harsh and increasingly punitive poli-
cies has led many criminologists and penologists to char-
acterize it as “the mean season of corrections” in which
a nationwide “penal harm” movement came into being
(e.g., Cullen, 1995), one in which citizens and politicians
alike indulged a “rage to punish” (e.g., Forer, 1994).
Addressing these important policy changes and historical
events merely by reference to a few prison movies trivial-
izes their implications.
Thus, even setting aside the vast regional differences
that exist with respect to attitudes about crime and pun-
ishment, a college student volunteering to participate in
a study of prison life in 2003 would have grown up in
an era that never knew rehabilitation, that never heard
prisons criticized openly by politicians or media
spokespersons because they were too harsh (only
because they were too “soft”), and that saw candidates
for elected office regularly compete with one another
over ways to make the most prisoners suffer for the
longest periods of time. The infliction of pain in prison
was normalized over this period and undoubtedly, the
expectations of persons about the nature of imprison-
ment (including, surely, among those volunteering to be
in a study of prison life) changed accordingly.
Indeed, it is not necessary to accept all parts of
Gergen’s (1973) argument about the relationship of
social psychology to history to appreciate the importance
of historical contingency, including the obvious fact that
people’s expectations are shaped by the historical epoch
in which they live. Personality theorists who are gen-
uinely interactionist in their approach to these issues rou-
tinely acknowledge this (e.g., Elder, 1979). Researchers
who would draw conclusions from contemporary data
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PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY BULLETIN
has been demonstrated repeatedly in the past (as
Carnahan and McFarland, 2007, themselves acknowl-
edge). It is relevant to the SPE
only
if it can be shown
that the selection bias was present
and
that it was likely
to have accounted for the behavior of our actual
partic-
ipants
(not just the mean personality characteristics of
all of those who volunteered).
We were cognizant of this in 1971, when we con-
ducted our study, and we addressed it carefully, in ways
that made it clear that to the extent any selection bias
might have operated in terms of the larger group that
volunteered, it did
not
affect the makeup of the smaller
group of actual participants (who were carefully
screened and determined to be average and normal). We
stated, “The standardized tests employed indicated that
a perfectly normal emotionally stable sample of subjects
had been selected” (Haney, Banks, & Zimbardo, 1973,
p. 81). We supported that statement with data collected
in the SPE itself: among other things, noting that in no
case did the group means for either guards or prisoners
“fall outside of the 40 to 60 centile range of the norma-
tive male population” on any of the dimensions of the
personality inventory we used to assess them (Haney et al.,
1973, p. 82).
1
Furthermore, there were no significant personality dif-
ferences between the guards and the prisoners that could
possibly explain their very different behavior in the study
itself. Thus, we reported, “No differences between pris-
oner and guard mean scores on any scale even approach
statistical significance” (Haney et al., 1973, p. 82).
Finally, the personality measures were of little or no use
in explaining within-group differences in behavior. Of
course, we reported that also “differential reactions to
the experience of imprisonment were not suggested by or
predictable from the self-report measures of personality
and attitude or the interviews taken before the experi-
ment began” (Haney et al., 1973, p. 81).
Thus, a careful reading of our original study shows
that there were no significant personality differences
between our participants and the normal population, no
personality differences between the guards and prison-
ers that could explain their very different behavior in
the study, and no personality differences within either
group that reliably predicted variations in their in-
prison behavior. At the time we analyzed the results of
our study in 1971, we thought that these precautions,
controls, and outcomes laid to rest any trait-based
explanation of our findings. We feel the same way now.
Nonetheless, Carnahan and McFarland (2007) go on
to directly connect their “self selection” interpretation of
behavior in extreme settings not only to the SPE but also
to a set of current and critically important issues and
events—the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandals and, by
implication, other seemingly related ones (e.g., possible
about what research participants decades earlier were
thinking, intending, or expecting ignore the operation of
such major contextual and historical forces at their peril.
The act of extrapolating personality test scores (or the
meaning of mean differences in test scores between
groups) to radically different times, places, and student
populations is a risky undertaking that is fraught with
pitfalls; we do not think that these pitfalls have been
acknowledged, addressed, or corrected for here.
However, beyond failing to seriously consider the sig-
nificant changes that have taken place with respect to
prison-related public policy over the past several
decades, Carnahan and McFarland (2007) overlooked
several key facts that we reported about the SPE that
clearly indicate that “a study of prison life” meant some-
thing very different to our participants than it did to
theirs. For one, Carnahan and McFarland continuously
make the implicit assumption that their participants vol-
unteered to be in a study of prison life expecting to serve
as guards. This is a reasonable assumption in the era of
harsh punishment in which their study was done; who,
after all, would volunteer to be a prisoner in a Southern
prison during this particularly punitive, recent period in
our nation’s history? However, virtually all of
our
respondents volunteered with an expressed preference to
be prisoners, not guards. This too is a reflection of the
time and place in which our study was done—one when
and where questions about whether prisons could be
made more humane were being posed in the media and
in which prison rehabilitation and reform were very
much under active public debate and consideration.
These issues were especially relevant to the college
student populations of that era, one characterized by
student involvement and activism that challenged the
institutional status quo. In fact, several of our student-
guards reported wanting to “switch sides” in the course
of the study, including one who had deep-seated reli-
gious and pacifist beliefs “against mistreating another
human being,” as he put it. Given the preferences of our
participants to be prisoners, and their doubts about their
ability to act as they thought guards did, the fact that
those randomly assigned to be guards assumed their
roles so convincingly is all the more significant and is at
odds with the thesis Carnahan and McFarland (2007)
advance.
Of course, we too are “interactionists.” Thus, we
readily concede that there may be some differences in
the backgrounds or characteristics of persons who vol-
unteer to be in one or another kind of psychological
study (even one like ours that explained or described the
study in vague or general terms, so that participants
could not really know exactly what they were going to
be asked to do or be exposed to in the study itself). With
all due respect, however, this is a modest point, and it
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