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Philip Zimbardo's Prison Experiment

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Philip Zimbardo created the SPE during the year of 1971 (Zimbardo, 2007). Zimbardo was eager to find out why humans turned considerably evil in the face of power. In order to solve his question, he conceived an experiment to find out exactly why. This experiment was designed to simulate exactly what piqued Zimbardo's interest: prison military guards and prisoners. Zimbardo placed an advertisement in the newspaper asking for college students who were willing to play the role of these guards and prisoners for at most two weeks at the price of fifteen dollars a day (Zimbardo, 2007). 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: …show more content…

Some guards are more forceful than others and place prisoners in the Hole or revoke privileges to demand attention and respect. Some prisoners started to protest these demeaning actions that were unnecessary from the guards. Guards retaliated with their various forms of indirect of abuse. This was when the first signs of distress occurred among the prisoners. The prisoners started to barricade themselves in their cells as a way to protest against the guards and in response, a guard blew a fire extinguisher onto the inmates of Cell 2 (Zimbardo, 2007). The second sign showed when prisoner Doug-8612 starts to go "ballistic" and demands to be released or he will cut himself or hurt other guards and cameras (Zimbardo, 2007). Zimbardo and his group took some time before deciding to release 8612 when they should have let him go sooner to prevent this type of mental stress and confusion. Both of these examples are violations of APA's Codes 3.04 and 8.08(c) (American Psychological Association, 2002). These codes provide that psychologists must go out of their way to prevent their subjects from being harmed (American Psychological Association,

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Kyle Patrick Alvarez's 'The Stanford Prison Experiment'

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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.

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How Does Ronald Nussle Use Excessive Force In Prison

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Prison staff in this facility believed that they had the power to “lay hands on or strike an inmate in order to enforce compliance with a lawful discretion” (Conover, 2000). In reality, this would mean that if an inmate didn’t do what a guard wanted in the manner in which he or she wanted the task to be executed, that guard now had the authority to use physical force on the noncompliant

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In this prison, inmates were subject to psychological abuses and absolute isolation. This “…demonstrated that the state’s power was in fact growing rather than shrinking, at least with regard to punishment” (Berger,

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Stanford Prison Experiment By Philip Zimbardo

669 Words | 3 Pages

Given positions of control, the guards started to use their power in degrading ways. To establish power over the captives, they used a variety of strategies, including physical punishment, psychological blackmail, and verbal abuse. On the other hand, the inmates were stripped of their uniqueness, turned into dehumanized objects, humiliated, treated poorly, and made helpless. Another important point made by Zimbardo's experiment was the effect of deindividuation and responsibility dispersal on the onset of prison violence. The guards' feeling of personal responsibility was diminished by their uniforms and masks, allowing them to act aggressively and abusively in ways they otherwise might not have.

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Effects Of The Stanford Prison Experiment By Philip Zimbardo

689 Words | 3 Pages

Although they weren’t capable of causing physical harm to the inmates, the guards abused their power simply because the inmates had none. Soon, embarrassing and degrading the prisoners turned into serious emotional abuse. Instances in which they were depriving the inmates from sleep, putting bags over their heads to do simple things such as using the bathroom, and even making them repeat their inmate numbers over and over for hours on end are just a few examples of how the guards treated their prisoners. Being a prisoner was a completely different story. Having their bedding removed or even being put in solitary confinement for miniscule instances of insubordination were slowly causing them to lose their sanity.

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Just Mercy Essay

1425 Words | 6 Pages

In the book, it states, "We were getting scores of letters from prisoners who continued to complain about horrible conditions. Prisoners reported that they were still being beaten by correctional staff and subjected to humiliation in stockades and other degrading punishments. An alarming number of cases came to our office involving prisoners who had been found dead in their cells. " They don't take their job way too seriously; they put their feelings first; they should put them aside. Also in the book,it states that "If you 'act out by saying something insubordinate or refusing to comply with an order given to you by a correctional officer, you are forced to sleep on the concrete floor of your cell without a mattress.

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The Stanford Prison And The Milgram Experiment

1010 Words | 5 Pages

In the experiment, Zimbardo converted a basement of the Stanford University psychology building into a mock prison and asked 75 applicants to participate. 24 men were chosen to participate and were paid $15 per day. Prisoners were arrested at their own homes, blindfolded, and driven to Stanford University's psychology department, where the deindividuation process began. Within no time the guards and the prisoners began to change. In the video

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Compare And Contrast Stanford Prison Experiment And Philip Zimbardo

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In 1971, Philip Zimbardo set out to conduct an experiment to observe behavior as well as obedience. In Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison experiment, many dispute whether it was obedience or merely conforming to their predesigned social roles of guards and prisoners that transpired throughout the experiment. Initially, the experiment was meant to test the roles people play in prison environment; Zimbardo was interested in finding out whether the brutality reported among guards in American prisons was due to the sadistic personalities of the guards, disposition, or had more to do with the prison environment. This phenomenon has been arguably known to possibly influencing the catastrophic similarities which occurred at Abu Ghraib prison in 2003.The

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Compare And Contrast The Milgram Experiment And The Stanford Prison Experiment

810 Words | 4 Pages

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.

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Essay On Stanford Prison Experiment

599 Words | 3 Pages

Stanford Prison Experiment Philip Zimbardo questioned, “What happens when you put good people in an evil place? Does humanity win over evil, or does evil triumph?” (Zimbardo, 1971) In 1971 a psychologist named Philip Zimbardo conducted an experiment on the effects prison has on young males with the help of his colleague Stanley Milgram. They wanted to find out if the reports of brutality from guards was due to the way guards treated prisoners or the prison environment.

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How Did Philip Zimbardo Conform

1676 Words | 7 Pages

These series of events seemed to bring out the worst in both prisoners and guards. Prisoners were losing all sense of personal identity after being referred to as numbers and not personal names this made them feel less important and they successfully believed it to be true. After six intense days of Phillip Zimbardo’s conforming to social roles experiment a graduate student who was only there to take notes and interview was so shocked by what she saw she demanded the experiment end straight away as it was degrading to watch and degrading for all who took part as Phillip Zimbardo and his team watched the situation descend into chaos she was only the voice that spoke up about how bad the experiment truly

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Study Of Stanford County Jail By Philip Zimbardo

1092 Words | 5 Pages

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.

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In the movie, there are 24 students chosen to participate in the experiment. The researchers conducted series of interviews to eliminate applicants that have psychological

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Stanford Prison Experiment Literature Review

1129 Words | 5 Pages

The second aspect that should be highlighted from the author’s hypothesis is that guards themselves, the authority was in a specific mind-set which comes with the role, and most significantly the uniform which played a major role. This enabled them, psychology to commit the negative acts against the prisoners in the experiment. What reinforces this idea the uniforms enabled this is the experiment encouraged negative as well as positive engagement with the prisoners. However most of those involved in the guard roles engaged almost entirely in negative behavior.

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The Stanford Prison Experiment: Can Normal People Behaving Evil?

858 Words | 4 Pages

Normal People Behaving Evil The Stanford Prison Experiment was an experiment to see if normal people would change their behavior in a role-play as a prisoner or a prison guard. The experiment was conducted by Dr.Philip Zimbardo in 1973 at Stanford University that caused numerous amount of trauma to prisoners by prison guards in their role-playing position which forced Dr. Zimbardo to officially terminate the experiment six days after it was introduced. Due to the cruel aggressive behaviors from the guards, the experiment led to a question, "Do "normal" people have the capability of behaving badly?" The answer to that question is that most likely an individual who behave normally will have the capability of expressing evil behavior due to the environment that they are surrounded.

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