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 novel NewJack:Guarding Sing Sing takes place in a NewYork maximum-security facility. The author Ted Conover takes the role as the main character. His idea was to shadow a recruit at the New York State Corrections Officer Academy so he knew what it would be like to be a corrections officer. This was thought to bridge the gap between corrections and the population. When Conover’s request to shadow a recruit was denied, he decided to apply for a job as a prison officer.
Even though there are people willing to risk it all to go back to the life they had, there are some that become submissive and stop fighting. In Stanford Prison Experiment conducted by Stanford phycology department. They recruited college students to run a mock prison so they could study the effect of becoming a prisoner and a prison guard. In this experiment that was supposed to run for two weeks ended up being stopped by the researchers on the six day because it was getting out of control. This is stated by the heads of the experiment Philip Zimbardo, Craig Haney, W. Curtis Banks, and David Jaffe in their report of the experiment.
If one thinks jails in modern-day U.S. society are bad, then he /she should consider exploring the detention facilities of other societies. Societies such as the one in Anthem (written by Ayn Rand) had a detention facility called the Palace of Corrective Detention which had horrible conditions compared to modern American jails. In the modern-day U.S. society people have more freedoms and liberties compared to Anthem 's society. After a close examination of Anthem, it is noticeably clear that the U.S. society is more progressive than the society in Anthem, which is glaringly obvious by contrasting modern-day U.S. jail with the Palace of Corrective Detention in Anthem.
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
Since the beginning of the human existence, man has always dominated and ruled over one another be it empires, corporations, or small groups. Authority and obedience has always been a factor of who we are. This natural occurrence can be seen clearly through the psychological experiments known as The Milgram Experiment and the Stanford Prison Experiment. Both of these studies are based on how human beings react to authority figures and what their obedience is when faced with conflict.
On day six Zimbardo and Milgram decided to conclude the experiment. Zimbardo originally intended to explore how prisoners adapt to powerlessness, but he has contended that the experiment demonstrates how swiftly arbitrary assignment of power can lead to abuse. (Maher, The anatomy of obedience. P. 408) Once the experiment was completed Zimbardo and Milgram concluded that generally people will conform to the roles they are told to play.
Authority gives a person the chance to feel superior, and as seen throughout this film, those within the position of authority will only then abuse this opportunity. Given the chance for people to gain authority or rather the sense of authority is enough to awaken the evil within. Within the movie, The Stanford Prison Experiment the guards were enabled to set a line of difference between the prisoners and themselves. They were able to make the prisoners feel weak or emasculated, forcing the students to strip and wear the assigned prison clothes that barely covered their genitals (Alvarez). Forcing the prisoners to wear these feminine articles of clothing and assigning them a number, gives the opportunity to strip away their personality and
In the article of “The Perils of Obedience”, written by Stanley Milgram, the experimenter explains that the experiment is to see how far a person could hurt a victim in a situation where he is ordered to do so. Also, in the article “The Stanford Prison
However, the ethical decisions they made during the experiment were directly related to the roles they were assigned – the guards believed it was ‘right’ to punish and humiliate the prisoners because the prisoners were ‘bad’. As for the ethics of the experiment, Zimbardo said he believed the experiment was ethical before it began but unethical in hindsight because he and the others involved had no idea the experiment would spiral to the point of abuse that it did. The Stanford Prison Experiment reveals the powerful role that the situation can play in human behavior.
During the Stanford prison experiment the actual boys who agreed to do the experiment had no idea what it was, they thought it would be a fun idea to help out with an experiment. The only reason why the experiment stopped after only a week was because a women who was one of the people behind it saw the prisoners walking to the bathroom and they had bags on their heads and they were in single file and she got upset. She was upset because they lost the purpose of the experiment and actually turned these boys into
The thorough analysis of text leaves no doubt that a prison is a model of a whole society, containing its own relations of subjugation and leadership. As well as in real life, the leadership can be either formal or informal. Prison guards and wardens represent the first one. They have formal legal appointment and
Stanford Experiment: Unethical or Not Stanford Prison Experiment is a popular experiment among social science researchers. In 1973, a psychologist named Dr. Philip Zimbardo wants to find out what are the factors that cause reported brutalities among guards in American prisons. His aim was to know whether those reported brutalities were because of the personalities of the guards or the prison environment. However, during the experiment, things get muddled unexpectedly. The experiment became controversial since it violates some ethical standards while doing the research.
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.
This connects to the idea of guards having the capability of turning evil through an atmosphere of the prison environment where they can turn evil and have no remorse feelings towards the prisoners. From the article, "Stanford Prison Experiment," by Saul McLeod, he explained that the evil tactics that were made by the guards were from the atmosphere of the prison environment because the norm for a prison guard is to act tough and have no remorse feelings towards the prisoners when assigning punishments. He also added that guards acted this way because they lost their sense of personal identity when they dressed up as a guard, which can show they may have believed that they were actual guards and the experiment was real, which might’ve triggered their dark side with harsh punishments. Therefore, losing their personal identity in a prison environment may have been the factor where they triggered their evil side during the prison
