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Prison Experiment Philip Zimbardo

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In the end there were less than half of the original inmates left, and one of the stand-by inmates had gone on a full blown food strike, and was severely reprimanded for it. The guards posed the other inmates against him and made him look as if he was the bad guy. Guards started to make his cell mates force and mock him in order to get him to eat. This tactic was to no avail, so they ended up putting him “in the hole” for three hours, even though the established limit was only one hour. It is completely understandable why the men that played the inmates were so enraged, there were established rules that were by no means followed throughout the experiment. At the same time, it was also an excellent way of seeing how people would really react …show more content…

On the evening of August 19th 1971, he invited her and a few other of their colleagues to the “prison” to see what their opinion of the environment was. Christina was also a psychologist who felt that she was overreacting, yet her first response was disgust. As Christina described the experiment, “I was sick to my stomach.” (O’Toole). She was at first mocked by the fellow researchers, but as she went home with Philip and explained to him the ways that he had lost touch with reality, that he was not truly a warden of a prison, and that the men in those cells had truly done nothing wrong, Zimbardo listened to her. She was the reasoning that brought him back to reality. He called the experiment off the next day. It was initially supposed to be a two week experiment, but ended up only being six days long. This is such an amazing fact, that within such a minute amount of time, things can become so manipulated, and people can become so destructive or demolished depending on which end of the punishment they were …show more content…

Some of the guards that were interviewed later, straight up told the interviewer that they wished that they had never participated in the experiment, and if they could go back they would change what they had done. This does not matter in the end though does it? It happened and is it not a lesson that should have been taught to cope with the wrongs that you have done, and move on and try to better yourself. It is interesting that in most cases, the guards were more like the true inmates in actual prisons than they ever believed themselves to

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