bridgingthegap

Zimbardo concluded the experiment early when Christina Maslach, a graduate student
he was then dating (and later married), objected to the appalling conditions of the prison
after she was introduced to the experiment to conduct interviews. Zimbardo noted that
of more than fifty outside persons who had seen the prison, Maslach was the only one
who questioned its morality. 12
The other interesting aspect of this experiment is that prisoners soon learnt to identify with the
numbers that they had been given. The experiment at the time was used to help better understand the
psychological changes that prisoners and their jailers go through. Later it was used to help explain the
abuses that occurred at the Abu Ghraib prison camp.
The Strip Search Prank Call
Though this was not conducted in a lab, it was a type of live experiment that served to demonstrate,
just how willing the average person would be to obey an authority figure. Even if it was an authority
figure over the phone who was a complete stranger to them. In this case the authority figure was a
crank caller, who was able to on several occasion get people to perform degrading actions on other
unwitting individuals.
The strip search prank call scam was a series of incidents occurring for roughly a
decade before 2004. These incidents involved a man calling a restaurant, claiming to be
a police detective, and convincing managers to conduct strip-searches of female
employees. Reports of over 70 such occurrences in 30 U.S. states finally led to the
arrest and charging of David R. Stewart, a 37-year-old Florida corrections officer.
These are a few of the incidents that occurred in the wake of these phone calls.
A call to a McDonald's restaurant in Hinesville, Georgia resulted in a janitor performing
a body cavity search on a 19-year old cashier.[5]
A 17-year-old customer at a Taco Bell in Phoenix, Arizona was strip-searched by a
manager receiving this kind of prank call.[6]
On Nov. 30, 2000, the caller persuaded the manager at a McDonald's in Leitchfield,
Kentucky, to remove her own clothes in front of a customer whom the caller said was
suspected of sex offenses. The caller promised that undercover officers would burst in
and arrest the customer the moment he attempted to molest her, said Detective Lt. Gary
Troutman of the Leitchfield Police Department.[7]
On May 29, 2002, a girl celebrating her 18th birthday - in her first hour of her first day
on the job at the McDonald's in Roosevelt, Iowa - was forced to strip, jog naked and
assume a series of embarrassing poses, all at the direction of a caller on the phone,
according to court and news accounts.[8]
On Jan. 26, 2003, according a police report in Davenport, Iowa, an assistant manager at
an Applebee's Neighborhood Grill & Bar conducted a degrading 90-minute search of a
waitress at the behest of a caller who said he was a regional manager - even though the
man had called collect, and despite the fact the assistant manager had read a company
memo warning about hoax calls just a month earlier. He later told police he'd forgotten
about the memo.[9] 13.
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