If you’ve been following our “Deep Dive” series so far, you know that these blogs take a look at notable departments within larger colleges, whether they be top-tier programs within likewise elite universities or hidden gems that produce excellent results within schools that are otherwise average. You might say that we’re doing a thorough investigation of schools that are “famous” for one thing or another — business at Wharton (Penn), computer science at Dartmouth, agricultural science at Texas A&M, public health at UNC — but it’s not everyday that we get to take a closer look at academic tracks that are infamous.
Believe it or not, we did not choose the topic of today’s post as an excuse to watch more documentaries about the Stanford Prison Experiment (at least, not entirely). For those who aren’t aware, the SPE was a 1971 psychological study that simulated, you guessed it, prison conditions, using 22 test subjects and assigning them roles as either “prisoner” or “guard.” Though it lasted less than a week, and though participants knew they were taking part in temporary roleplay for the sake of research, the study quickly became psychologically and physically torturous as the subjects almost immediately began identifying with the roles they’d been given: “For six days, half the study's participants endured cruel and dehumanizing abuse at the hands of their peers. At various times, they were taunted, stripped naked, deprived of sleep and forced to use plastic buckets as toilets. Some of them rebelled violently; others became hysterical or withdrew into despair.”
Okayyyyy, but... how does this nightmare fuel factor into our Deep Dive series? Well, it’s a perfect example of Stanford’s prominence in the field of psychology — I mean we’re still talking about it 50 years later for what it revealed about human behavior and the ethics of experimentation. So let’s get into it — the history of Stanford’s school of psychology, its standing today, and its plans for future generations of psychologists.
The History of Psychology at Stanford
The psychology department was “among the first departments established at Stanford University” and has been going strong since 1892. If we’re thinking of the history of psychological studies in American academia as a day-long timeline, Stanford got there at the crack of dawn.
We don’t have to get too in the weeds here, but suffice it to say Stanford’s Department of Psychology had an impressive pedigree from the start. Frank Angell became the first department head, recruited from Cornell after receiving his PhD under Wilhelm Wundt at the University of Leipzig (Wundt and Leipzig are known, respectively, as the “Father of Psychology” and the first lab for psychology research). Angell’s successor, Lewis M. Terman, got his doctorate studying under the man who was not only the first PhD in Psychology from Harvard but also the founder of the American Psychological Association (APA). Basically? These nerds brought receipts!
Now, you might be wondering why SPE isn’t considered a stain on Stanford’s legacy. The answer is complex, owing in part to the fact that psychology as a discipline has been riddled with ethically ambiguous (and sometimes unambiguously unethical) practices. To say past research was accomplished by dubious methods, to put it delicately, could be like announcing that you found a fork in the kitchen.
Beyond that, SPE produced a watershed moment — not only were its findings truly astonishing, but they sparked conversations that led to increased protections for human subjects participating in psychological research. The professor who led the SPE, Phillip Zambardo, summarized the public’s shock “that these ordinary college students could do such terrible things when caught in that situation” and, reflecting on the fact that Stanford's Human Subjects Research Committee had greenlit the study, said neither the committee members nor the research team “could have imagined” what the participants would do to one another. The APA subsequently changed its standards for human-subject simulations, and, Zambardo assures, "No behavioral research that puts people in that kind of setting can ever be done again in America.” That settles that, I guess!
The State of Psychology at Stanford Today
It probably won’t surprise you to learn that those slackers at Stanford (sarcasm!) are still leading the field in psychology these days. Yes, Stanford is ranked #1 amongst psychology programs by the U.S. News & World Report; yes, they have more or less held a top spot in such rankings for decades; and yes, the APA itself reported on this streak in 2004, when the Smithsonian honored the Stanford Psychology Department for 30 consecutive years of reigning as #1. Since it’s been another 20 years since that evening, you can see that the U.S. News & World Report has been giving Stanford Psychology its flowers for half a century now.
And, from where we stand, it seems fairly well-deserved! There’s no shortage of honors, accolades, and research breakthroughs to be found in recent news — in April, professor of psychology Ian Gotlib was elected to the the American Academy of Arts & Sciences; in March, Emily Kubota, psychology graduate student, published research she led on the relationship between innate brain structure and experience-driven development in Nature Human Behaviour; and in February, brought droves of leading interdisciplinary scholars together for the third convention of the AI+Education Summit facilitated by the Stanford Accelerator for Learning and the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.
If you’re seeking a world-class psychology degree, it looks like you’ll be in good hands at Stanford. As long as you don’t take advantage of their labs to build a time machine to 1971 so you can experience the Stanford Prison Experiment firsthand, you’ll be just fine.
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