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Stanford Prison Experiment Essay

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A well known study on the impact of group membership on individual behaviour was a study by Dr Zimbardo, the Stanford Prison Experiment
(SPE). This study revealed how groups can affect behaviour negatively.
The aim of the study was to discover how people responded in harsh situations within groups and why . The SPE (1971) involved placing teenage students in a prison setting (in the basement of Stanford University).. They were divided into two groups; guards and prisoners. Over time some guards treated the prisoners brutally. They sought to 'humiliate the prisoners and deprive them of their rights' (Haslam and Reicher 2006a). As a result, the 14 day experiment was cut short to 6 days. Zimbardo gave instructions to the guards; don't let the …show more content…

They intervened to stimulate objection to the tyranny of the guards. As a result they found that the prisoners grouped together in opposition to the guards and the guards didn't embrace the situation of their unquestioned power or their authority (Mandela,
1994, cited in Turner 2006). According to Haslam and Reicher (2006a; 2012) group bonding led to coordination and unified purpose whereas the guards were uncoordinated and without purpose. The prisoners broke out of their cells and created a new regime without the prisoner-guard situation i.e. no group had more power over the other. However, when the regime began to fail there was a proposal to create a new prisoner-guard system even more tyrannical than the original.
Haslam and Reicher (2006a) proposed that power is created from the shared identity of the group and that when the prisoners were unable to shape their situation, they become more susceptible to supporting other more extreme belief systems. They feel groups are good for our health as they provide choice, therefore they conclude groups can impact behaviour positively as tyranny was overcome.
Evidently two polar sets of results were obtained from these studies. In

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