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Study Of Stanford County Jail By Philip Zimbardo

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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. …show more content…

By providing the officers with almost unlimited authority to establish their own rules and do what they desired, except for being physically aggressive with the prisoners, the guards felt entitled to their power and believed that none of the participants, especially the prisoners, could intervene with their new status. Not only did the uniform and rules allow the officers to genuinely believe the high authority and influence they had, but the prisoners as well. By providing the guards with a similar uniform as an officer including a whistle, a club, and sunglasses, it allowed both groups to match their descriptions of their representative heuristics, or the idea of categorizing an individual based on our mental representations of that group, permitting both groups of participants to fulfill their roles more correspondingly. If the officers had not been provided with this drastic change of mannerism, it would have been harder for both groups to take the experiment as seriously. Additionally, cohesiveness allowed the officers to come together and form a larger force compared to working independently. In union, the officers were able to achieve their goal: demand obedience from the prisoners and further the power they had over them. This effect even caused a misperception of numerous officer’s height as many of the prisoners perceived them as being taller than them even though they were very similar in height. This mistaken perspective showed the prisoners illusory correlation, the idea that a relationship between two variables exist when in reality there is none, as the prisoners correlated two items that cannot be associated accurately: height and personality. In other words, the prisoners believed because the officers were more aggressive and a had a

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