Perils Of Obedience And Stanford Prison Experiment Analysis

Social psychology is an empirical science that studies how people think about, influence, and relate to one another. This field focuses on how individuals view and affect one another. Social psychology also produces the idea of construals which represent how a person perceives, comprehends or interprets the environment. Construals introduce the idea that people want to make themselves look good to others and they want to be seen as right. It is also said that the social setting in which people interact impacts behavior, which brings up the idea of behaviorism. Behaviorism is the idea that behavior is a function of the person and the environment.

When put into the position of complete authority over others people will show their true colors. I think that most people would like to think that they would be fair, ethical superiors. I know I would, but learning about the Stanford Prison Experiment has made me question what would really happen if I was there. Would I be the submissive prisoner, the sadistic guard, or would I stay true to myself? As Phillip Zimbardo gave the guards their whistles and billy clubs they drastically changed without even realizing it. In order to further understand the Stanford Prison experiment I learned how the experiment was conducted, thought about the ethical quality of this experiment, and why I think it panned out how it did.

The Milgram experiment was conducted in 1963 by Stanley Milgram in order to focus on the conflict between obedience to authority and to personal conscience. The experiment consisted of 40 males, aged between 20 and 50, and who’s jobs ranged from unskilled to professional. The roles of this experiment included a learner, teacher, and researcher. The participant was deemed the teacher and was in the same room as the researcher. The learner, who was also a paid actor, was put into the next room and strapped into an electric chair. The teacher administered a test to the learner, and for each question that was incorrect, the learner was to receive an electric shock by the teacher, increasing the level of shock each time. The shock generator ranged from

In the experiment, people were picked randomly and one as a teacher and one as the student. They were told to take a quiz and give electric shocks of increasing intensity as punishment if the student can’t answer. During the experiment, many people were concerned as someone can be heard shouting but only a few people who decided to stop and stick to their morals. But the others kept on going because they were just following orders from a superior (Milgram 77). "The Stanford Prison Experiment” by Philip Zimbardo, is about an experiment that was made to understand the roles people play in prison situations. For the experiment, Zimbardo converted a basement of the Stanford University psychology building into a mock prison. The participants were told to act as prisoners and guards. It was planned to be a two-week experiment but was forced to shut down in 6 days, all because of people quickly getting into their roles and started acting like the real prisoners and guards (Zimbardo 104). To compare both experiments, although they differed vastly in design and methodology, the point of both experiments was to observe how far an individual would go in inflicting increasing pain on a victim. Also how people obey under authoritative circumstances, when given power or different roles, however the writers differ in the seriousness of the fight for individuality and the use of reality.

The Stanford prison experiment (SPE) was study organized by Philip George Zimbardo who was a professor at Stanford University. Basically, SPE was a study of psychological effect. He studied about how personality and environment of a person effect his behaviour. Experiment he performed was based on prison and life of guards. He wants to find out whether personality get innovated in person according to given environment (situational) or due to their vicious personalities that is violent behaviour (dispositional). The place where the whole experiment was set up Philip Zimbardo and his team was Stanford University on August 14Th to August 20th in the year 1971 (Wikipedia).

Humanity will always question the idea of obedience. Two prestigious psychologists, Stanley Milgram and Philip G. Zimbardo, conducted practical obedience experiments with astonishing results. Shocked by the amount of immoral obedience, both doctors wrote articles exploring the reasoning for the test subjects ' unorthodox manners. In "The Perils of Obedience" by Milgram and "The Stanford Prison Experiment" by Zimbardo, the professionals reflect their thoughts in a logical manner. Milgram 's experiment consisted of a teacher, learner, and experimenter: the teacher was the test subject and was commanded to administer a shock by the experimenter. Upon switching the generator on, the learner-who was actually an actor-would jerk, cry, and occasionally seem unconscious. Expecting most subjects to stall the experiment, Milgram witnessed the exact opposite. Zimbardo, on the other hand, staged a mock prison, whereas half the subjects were guards and the other half were prisoners. Every test subject knew they were in an experiment and complied with the two week trial. However, the majority of the test subjects-particularly the guards-found themselves fitting into the mock prison all too well: abusing, insulting, and yelling obscenities at prisoners was commonplace, compelling many prisoners to appear insane. The driving force for immoral obedience is contributed to several factors: As seen in the film A Few Good Men by director Rob Reiner, when obedience causing harm undergoes

She begins recounting the notorious details, how innocent college students labeled prisoners and guards displayed psychological abuse after only six days of confinement, and makes reference to Stanley Milgram’s obedience study and Abu Ghraib, where similar maltreatment, perceived or real, was conducted on civilians by civilians. She addresses and refutes the accepted belief that the Stanford Prison Experiment proved that anyone could become a tyrant when given or instructed by a source of authority. Instead, she suggests that Zimbardo’s inquiry points toward but does not land on one exact conclusion. She explains the influence of the setting, the presentation of the roles, Zimbardo’s participation, and perhaps a sense of expectation felt, all of which can be reflected in the shocking behavior of a few guards. She argues that it should not have been so shocking. Konnikova discredits the neutrality of Zimbardo’s experiment by insisting that people who would respond to an ad for a psychological study of prison life were not “normal” people. However, with her diction and choice of evidence she displaces the study's culpability in a way that ultimately blurs and undermines her claim.

As Christians, we tend to believe that everyone has the same worldview as us. We believe that everyone thinks the way we do leading him or her to do the right thing. We assume the best and forget the worst. However, it becomes painstakingly real that is not the case in our world today. We are constantly faced with ethical issues in our profession and everyday life. Although we would like to believe that people always do the right thing that is not the case. This reality hits us in cases like the Tuskegee study, the obedience to authority study, and the Stanford prison experiment.

What forms a person’s predisposition to act in a certain way in any given situation? Is our personality something that we are born with or does it develop over time, and furthermore once it is ‘developed’ can it be significantly influenced by our surroundings? It is something that each of us wonders as we go about our daily lives. We wish that our circumstances were different so that we could be different people. Most of the time this type of thinking, if verbalized, receives responses along the lines of ‘life is what you make it’ putting pressure back on our actions to change who we are. We are raised to believe that our circumstances are a result of our actions and not the other way around. The Stanford prison experiment results are in opposition to this mentality that life is what you make it. Perhaps our circumstances can change our behavior and personality completely, and if so this may mean that disobedience should appear as a virtue instead of a harmful habit of the arrogant. Erich Fromm was a distinguished psychologist and philosopher who wrote an essay entitled Disobedience as a Psychological and Moral Problem ten years before Zimbardo’s experiment in 1973. Fromm writes that disobedience is an integral part of human nature that allows us to progress as a species and as individuals. The authoritarian and humanitarian principle also defines the different personalities that human beings have as depicted Zimbardo’s experiments.

"Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth"~– John F. Kennedy. For many years young adults have been pressured to do things that they might not want to go through, even though the situation might be harmful to them or others. However they go through with it anyway because they feel the need to fit in with their peers. Conformity is defined as the change in behavior that arises from social influences that may be put on one in different situations, in order to fit in with a certain group. Although people may indulge with people who encourage good behaviors, but it usually ends with kids being encouraged to act with inhuman and savage actions.

The Stanford Prison Experiment was to determine how conformity and obedience could result in people behaving in ways that are counter to how they would at on their own. The main goal of the experiment was to see how social norms and social convections might influence the behavior of participants who are playing the roles of prisoners and prison guards. The study really elaborates on the relationship between the abuser and the abused. It is interesting to see how easily the human psyche gives repetitive abuse and is conditioned to receive it and accept it. This paper will discuss the motives, procedures, findings, ethical issues, and informed consent the Stanford Prison Experiment concluded on.

Response to Stanford Experiment          The Stanford Prison Experiment happened because it was a breakdown of their rights,ways of thinking, and physical humiliation.         They sabotaged their way of thinking. The feeling and how the place was set up made it feel like it was real and that they were in a real prison. In the movie the guys really were in into the feel of their location and they were planning to escape it like a real prison ,and in the end when the guy told them that they were able to leave that the experiment and they shocked and just stood there.

To begin, in the article, “The Stanford Prison Experiment,” the theme that the roles that people play can shape their behavior and attitudes is established through real life examples. The real life examples shown were of ordinary people put into a simulation and conformed to their roles in the experiment. This article establishes its theme very effectively. The real life examples give insight to the reader about just how powerful conformity can be. In the report created to inform reader about the events that occurred in the experiment, it states, “I was surprised at myself.

The Stanford prison experiment was unique because they wanted to watch and learn the behaviors of a prisoner and a prison guard, observing the effects they found some pretty disturbing things among the students. Dr. Philip Zimbardo and his colleagues at Stanford University stayed true to what they believed, and they did what they felt they needed to do to find a set of results for their simulation. Unfortunately they where swallowed into the experiment, when they became the roles, just as the students where. So from their point of view I want to say that what they where doing was ethical, and being that the prison experiment was stopped before its half way mark showed that they realized that it was time to call it quits. Dr. Zimbardo noticed

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men”. John Dalberg-Acton has an extremely interesting theory, which is proven to be true many years later during the Stanford Prison Experiment. Occurring in 1971, the Stanford Prison Experiment was lead by Philip Zimbardo, a psychologist and teacher at the university. He wanted to investigate how ‘normal’ people responded to authority when put into a vulnerable position. It was originally designed to focus on the prisoners, but the experiment ended up exploring much more, developing into something that actually revealed more about the guards and Zimbardo, who are in positions of power, than the prisoners. This experiment uncovers how an environment