Stanford Prison Study: The Stanford prison study was created by Philip Zimbardo who wanted to know what happens if you put good people into bad situations. He created an experiment in which individuals were given a role as a prisoner or a guard. They were then placed in a mock prison and instructed to play their roles for two weeks. As the individuals accepted the roles more and more they started to lose reality. Prisoners started going crazy because they were being treated so terribly by the guards. They were humiliated, forced to do physical work, and placed into solitary confinement. By the fifth day many prisoners had tried to quit the experiment or had already quit. The leader of the experiment, Philip Zimbardo, was also playing a role
In Kyle Patrick Alvarez’s The Stanford Prison Experiment, 20 college aged boys are selected to play different roles in a simulated prison located within Stanford. This experiment was thought of and carried out by Philip Zimbardo, a professor of psychology. The boys, who were also students at Stanford, were randomly selected to be a guard or a prisoner. The prisoners were taken by real police officers to the Stanford jail. When the experiment started, most of the prisoners thought of the situation as it was intended to be, an experiment.
The experiment took place at Stanford University in August of 1971 in the basement of the psychology department. The Stanford prison experiment wanted to explore the adverse effects that oppression from prison guards would have on
Zimbardo would then go out of his way to have kind,intelligent, and compassionate individuals try out for his experiment, when all participants were accounted for, he appointed half the participants as prisoners and half as guards, appointing himself as the warden (The Stanford Prison Experiment). He then allowed these guards to do whatever they pleased, except for physically abuse the participants. To his shock he found that all his once kind, compassionate participants were becoming into ravenous monsters that had no idea of the true damage they were causing to the other participants, Zimbardo himself began to feel these effects. Zimbardo ended the experiment early due to these effects and the mental well being of the participants being in jeopardy . When interviewing the participants he found, that these guards did truly feel remorse, but knew they had to please the higher officials in order to feel accomplished (The Stanford Prison Experiment).
I found the Stanford Prison experiment to be very disturbing, especially in the context of the recent events involving police misconduct and brutality. I think the Stanford experiment demonstrates that people in positions of power that abuse that power are not necessarily predestined to abuse the power, but the position that they are in can encourage it. For example, nearly all police officers are required to go through an intense background and psychological exams to becomes police officers. However, as recent and past events have shown, police misconduct is a major issue. I think that this evidence demonstrates the need for more continuing education and monitoring to ensure that those who experience high stress situations (without proper
In the six days that the experiment ran they saw the personalities that the prisoner and prison guards took.
The experiment was designed to understand why and how people will do anything a person says because of their level of authority or the amount of influence they hold. The test was monitored to see how many times, and how long an individual will intentionally put a stranger in agonizing pain. Surprisingly, many people did, one of the reasons being because they believed they would not be held responsible for any harm done to the other person. Since the proctor wore a lab coat it is important to note that perhaps the volunteers truly believed they could not stop. The Zimbardo Prison Experiment tested influence in a different way in that, participants were given certain “roles” in the prisons.
In summary, the purpose of the Stanford Prison Experiment was supposed to demonstrate that powerful situational forces, much like Abu Ghraib, could over-ride individual dispositions and choices, leading good people to do bad things simply because of the role they found themselves
The Stanford Prison Study Analysis One of the most well known classic psychology experiments of all time is the Stanford Prison Study. The study was chiefly conducted by Philip Zimbardo. The study is very well known because do to the outcome of the behaviors of people, the experiment was never able to be completed. The experiment began on a early August morning when a mass number of people were arrested for Armed Robbery and Burglary in Palo Alto, California (Zimbardo, 2015).
This experiment was conducted in Stanford University by Dr. Zimbardo. During this two week long session, Dr. Zimbardo had several volunteers agree to act as prisoners and as prison guards. The prisoners were told to wait in their houses while the guards were to set up the mock prison, a tactic used by Dr. Zimbardo to make them fit into their roles more. The official police apprehended the students assigned to the role of prisoner from their homes, took mug shots, fingerprinted them, and gave them dirty prison uniforms. The guards were given clean guard uniforms, sunglasses, and billy clubs borrowed from the police.
They also concluded that the environment of the prison played a vital role in the way the guards treated the prisoners. It is believed that this experiment changed the way some U.S. prisons are
After Zimbardo sifted through plenty of applicants, he found a group of students that were mentally able to take part in the experiment. He divided them into two groups:
After the experiment, the students who played the guards were interviewed and found to still be shocked by their behavior within the fake prison environment, unrecognising that side of them or that they were even capable of doing such evil and abusive
During the fall of 1973, Phillip Zimbardo conducted his famous Stanford Prison Study where he recruited 24 undergraduate students to either become prisoners or guards in his experimental prison: the “Stanford County Jail". The recreation of this prison was conducted to study how an individual’s status and/or label changed depending on the social role they had to fulfill. The participants included 12 guards and 12 prisoners, each given proper uniform to wear, such as providing the prisoners with a smock that contained ID numbers on both sides and a chain with a heavy ball around their ankle. Both groups were also given detailed instructions on the requirements they had to complete in order for the individual to assimilate to their character.
He is a selfish psychologist who just wanted to get a result. He did not realize that he is starting to act like a prison superintendent than a researcher. He only realizes it when Christina Maslach, objected the experiment after she saw that the prisoners were being harassed by the guards. Even if the study has received a lot of ethical criticism, the result still helps Zimbardo to make a conclusion that is helpful for his future endeavor in research.
After The Stanford Prison Experiment was over they interviewed some people. The author states what one guard says about the interview “One guard said, ‘I was surprised