Dr. Zimbardo's Stanford Experiment

So In The Stanford Prison Experiment They tested how the guards and prisoners acted over a span of a couple days. The guards started being really rude while making mean comments about the prisoners so much so they had to end the experiment early. Mcleod stated that “The “prison” environment was an important factor in creating the guards’ brutal behavior (none of the participants who acted as guards showed sadistic tendencies before the

1). The guards themselves did not feel any guilt while enacting their behavior against the prisoners until after the experiment ended. The behavior of the guards may be related to the term of demand characteristics, which means that they acted the way they did just because they knew they were a part of a study. Zimbardo had told them how he wanted them to behave and they gave him just that. In a way the social desirability bias applies here because they were trying to conform to the “normal” idea of a prison guard.

This experiment was put through to show how prisoners act within a prison environment while being isolated within the cell and being forbidden from contact with people outside the jail. The prisoners were arrested in their homes and taken to the police station. The normal procedures for a convicted criminal were given, and the prisoners were then transferred to the basement of the psychology department. The basement was designed to replicate an average prison. Standard rules such as forbidden prisoner to guard eye contact were given. Guards were not allowed to address the prisoners by anything besides their uniform number. Although just an experiment, the subjects were quickly adapting to their roles. Prison guards began to harass the inmates, and the inmates began to verbally abuse each other to extreme levels. Guards also started using major brutality. Due to the drastic escalation of the physical and verbal abuse, the experiment was terminated early (McLeod). This suggests that when isolated, people can start to act more cruel than they would in

In the Zimbardo’s The Stanford Prison Experiment; however, the ‘guards’ and ‘prisoners’ were placed in the same facility and were face to face on a daily basis unlike the Milgram experiment. The ‘guards’ would tell the ‘prisoners’ jokingly to do something, however the ‘prisoners’ would do what they were commanded to do to try to hang on to their identity. (Zimbardo 393) By the end of the experiment most ‘prisoners’ showed increased stress levels in the ‘prisoners’ within days, some ‘prisoners’ could not handle the stress induced and had to be released early. The ‘guards’ were equally changed do to the scenario they were put in. One journal of the ‘guards’ showed how a passive person became a person shoving food down another person’s mouth and locking them up in solitary confinement (Zimbardo 389-399).

Philip (2009) to try and see what was being said about prison treatment was true, this was called the Stanford prison experiment. This experiment only lasted 6 days due to the circumstances versus 6 weeks. Zimbardo had to find out whether the prisons were brutal due to the guards or due to the environment. It was clear that the role of the guards was the issue and not the environment. This was discovered when a sample was chosen from the population. Each induvial was set up to be a guard or a prisoner at random. In this study researchers got see the unfortunate power of social situations. Once prisoner and guard roles were assigned each group were told that they were being watched by the researcher and his colleagues, the guards were to not hit the prisoners, and debriefed about the experiment. Although all this was told the guards took situations into their own hands and the power took over. The guards began simply viewing them as prisoners and the prisoners began to fear the guards. It is important to note the researcher did not intervene but continued to observe when the hitting was taking place. This is particularly important because not only are the guards fitting the rod but the researcher is at fault for the fundamental attribution error but viewing the situation for what it

In 1973, in an attempt to understand the conformity to roles of guards and prisoners, Zimbardo launched a role-playing experiment that modeled prison life and reflected the environment of an American prison. The experiment was to see if prison guards are brutal and cruel because that’s their sadistic personality types that cause conflicts with the prisoners or if its due to the prison setting itself. In other words, there is a dispositional hypothesis that states that prison guards act the way they do because their personalities cause

In 1971, psychologist Philip Zimbardo and his colleagues created the experiment known as the Stanford Prison Experiment. Zimbardo wanted to investigate further into human behavior, so he created this experiment that looked at the impact of taking the role of a prisoner or prison guard. These researchers examined how the participants would react when placed in an institutionalized prison environment. They set up a mock prison in the basement of Stanford University’s psychology building. Twenty four undergraduate students were selected to play the roles of both prisoners and guards. These students were chosen because they were emotional, physically, and mentally stable. Though the experiment was expected to last two weeks, it only lasted six days after the researchers and participants became aware of the harm that was being done.

The experimentors proposed that these reactions were caused by a loss of personal identity, dependency, emasculation and acceptance sadistic treatment from the guards and the unpredictable and arbitrary control of the prison system.

The surrounding environment is significantly influential, as it can alter an individual’ s perspective and behaviors. This concept is well demonstrated in Dr. Zimbardo’s 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, consisting of 24 male college students that were compensated with 15 dollars daily to assume the roles of either a prisoner or a guard. They responded to a local newspaper advertisement for Dr. Zimbardo’s experiment on discovering if the reasons for brutality displayed among American prison guards was a result of their aggressive personalities or a situational factor influenced by the reformatory environment (McLeod, 2008). The study was initially intended to last for two weeks but ended in six days due to the exceptionally aggressive behaviors of the guards treating the inmates inhumanely. Some prisoners became submissive to the authority of the guards, whereas others tested their power by refusing to eat, barricading themselves in their rooms, and one individual displayed a significant amount of psychological distress that allowed him to leave the study

Throughout history, nefarious regimes have come to power because of the transformations between ordinary men to brutal killers. During the Holocaust, many people who committed crimes were ordinary men prior to the Holocaust. Philip Zimbardo wanted to study how this phenomenon could occur, so he created the Stanford Prison Experiment. The Stanford Prison Experiment was conducted in 1971 to study the effect of prisoner and guard roles on human behavior. Twenty-four participants were randomly split into the two groups. Prior to the beginning of the experiment, the men in both groups were essentially the same in terms of behavior. After only a few hours, guards became ruthless towards the prisoners, similar to the way guards during the Holocaust were ordinary men before, but became vicious

First off, Dr. Phillip Zimbardo, who is a psychologist was interested in finding out if being in a certain environment changes a person. In this case Dr. Zimbardo decided to use a prison as the chosen environment. Dr. Zimbardo. In order, to test this out he had to built a jail. Dr. Zimbardo was able to build on in a basement of the University of Stanford. The subjects which he used were all typical college students, all which were males, 24 of them to be exact. Out of these 24 subjects they assigned to either be a prisoner or a guard. Dr. Phillip Zimbardo wanted to to answer “Does prison change prison change people, or were they already different going in?” The the theory which he proposed according to the article is “the environment around you, the situation,

In 1971, psychology professor Philip Zimbardo conducted an experiment led by a team of researchers which involved twenty-four male participants who were predominantly white and of the middle class. The goal of the experiment was to test the hypothesis that the inherited personality traits of prison guards and actual prisoners are the main cause of violent and abusive behaviours in prisons. The selection method involved intentionally excluding anybody who had a criminal background, psychological impairment or any medical conditions. The men were paid $15 a day if they all agreed to participate over a 7- to 14- day period. The experiment took place in Stanford University’s Psychology building and upon arrival, the participants were divided into

Phillip Zimbardo, a psychologist at Stanford University, wanted to test the conformation of people in a simulated environment. Zimbardo preceded to place a group of volunteers into the roles of prisoners and guards to see if they would conform to their given roles (McLeod). The experiment was supposed to be carried out for two weeks but was terminated after only six days. The volunteers began to exhibit mental illnesses by crying hysterically and believing that they were in a prison. In McLeod’s article about the experiment, he speaks about how when the “prisoners” were asked their name, they said their number instead.

There is no doubt that the study conducted by Dr Philip Zimbardo in 1971 at Stanford University was extremely valuable to not only the Psychology profession, but also to all social science fields. He tested and selected participates to recreate a prison environment separating one group into two, guards and prisoners, and the results were truly ground breaking.

Throughout history there have been hundreds upon hundreds of influential figures, although not all of them have devoted their career to understanding the human mind. Of the few who have devoted their time to this hugely important task, Dr. Philip G. Zimbardo’s theories and experiments have made him stand out, and differentiate himself from the rest in his profession. Zimbardo 's area of expertise in the field of psychology is social psychology, the branch that deals with social interactions, including their origins and their effects on the individual. Zimbardo may be most well known for his Stanford Prison experiment, an experiment that seems to address the definition of social psychology perfectly. In this experiment Zimbardo had clinically healthy and sane people volunteer for the position of a prison guard or a prisoner and see how they behaved, for fifteen dollars a day. The prison was actually the basement of the Stanford psychology building, where the experiment would take place for a planned 14 days. As said before, the prisoners and guards were all tested as mentally healthy, and for the sake of the experiment were arrested, and processed on a random morning, August 14th 1971. (Zimbardo, 2007, p. 23). The results of this experiment are outstanding, shocking, and somewhat disturbing, making this one of, if not, the most unethical psychological experiments. Although the experiment is considered wildly immoral, Zimbardo is one of the most influential psychologists