The Pros And Cons Of The Stanford Prison Experiment

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.

The guard attempted to hide this situation from the people running the experiment because of them “being too soft on the prisoners.” Another guard, not aware he was being observed, paced around the “yard” while the prisoners slept, watching his “captives” and aggressively hitting them with his nightstick. A majority of the prisoners still involved in the experiment started to accept the loss of their identities and the abusive treatment they received, because of the belief that they “deserved it.” The guards formed a corrupt but unified team that used their power to inspire fear and complete control over the prisoners. The prisoners, in response, became mentally compromised and developed depression, feelings of helplessness, and feelings of psychosis.

Less than two days into the experiment, one of the prisoners began to experience rage, emotional disturbance, uncontrollable crying, began acting crazy, and screaming. The experiment leaders realized he was really suffering and they had to release him. The next day was visiting day for the parents and friends of the prisoners. In order to stop parents from taking their children home, the experimenters cleaned the prison and the prisoners to make them seem pleasant. After the parents visited, there were rumors going around that the prisoners were going to attempt to escape. After the rumor was proved to be untrue, guards acted harshly towards the prisoners and added punishments. A priest who visited the prison, talked with prisoners and offered to contact some of their families for legal help. By day five, there were three types of guards; tough but fair guards, good guards, and hostile guards.

“That line between good and evil is permeable,” a psychologist from Stanford University by the name of Zimbardo once said. “Any of us can move across it… I argue that we all have the capacity for love and evil — to be Mother Theresa, to be Hitler or Saddam Hussein” (qtd. In Dittmann). Social psychologist Zimbardo implies that we can easily swap from side to side. What factors elicit darkness? What draws out the darkness, making us jump from good to bad? There are many views in the society that attempt to tackle this question. For instance, social psychology and philosophy. Social psychology tends to side with situation and or authority. On the other hand, philosopher John Locke is certain that the accumulation of experiences is the cause. What is the ultimate answer?

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).

In Maria Konnikova’s “The Real Lesson of the Stanford Prison Experiment” she reveals what she believes to be the reality of sociologist Philip Zimbardo’s controversial study: its participants were not “regular” people.

Imagine waking up, reading the local Sunday newspaper, and coming across an advertisement that offered fifteen dollars a day to any male college student that was willing to participate in a study at Stanford University for three weeks (Dunning). Close to seventy broke college boys hustled their way to Stanford for an interview with the professor who was leading the experiment, Philip Zimbardo. An interview was conducted to determine whether the boys were healthy, mentally and physically. Only twenty-four of the seventy men were chosen though, only to be test subjects in a study that would look further into the psychological effects of prison life. Making the ones who weren't fit for the study, essentially lucky (Zimbardo).

This case study will be assessing and defining the methods and effects that came out of the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment. This experiment was designed to shed light on the different psychosocial roles which influence the power has on ordinary people in a prisonlike setting. This psychosocial experiment concluded in several unexpended outcomes compared to the original though behind the initial planning and had to be terminated before the experiment was scheduled to end.

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 experiment began with 9 guards and 9 prisoners with the remaining volunteers on call in case they were needed. The volunteers who were selected to be prisoners were arrested by the city police, read their rights, and taken to the real station for finger printing and processing. After they were processed and the simulation was created, the prisoners were blindfolded and transported to the mock jail. The guards in the study were not allowed to physically harm the prisoners, but they could use other kinds of abuse. They wore identical khaki uniforms, had a whistle around their neck, and carried a club.

The Stanford Prison Experiment was conducted by a research group led by Dr. Philip Zimbardo using Stanford students during August 14 through the 20th of 1971. Dr. Zimbardo wanted to see how people reacted when they are either put in captivity or in charge of others. The study was funded by the US Office of Naval Research and grew interest to both the US Navy and the Marine Corps for an investigation to the purpose of conflict among military guards and prisoners. In the study, 24 male students were selected out of 75 applicants to take on randomly assigned roles. One of the surprises of the study was how participants quickly adapted to roles well beyond expectations. After the first eight hours, the experiment turned to be a joke and nobody was taking it seriously but then prisoners

Throughout the experiment, the guards ended up brutally treating the prisoners even though it was just an experiment. Zimbardo explains at the end of the video that the guards did this because they had no higher authority figure monitoring their actions. Eventually they become so carried away in their roles that they became too power

Zimbardo had hoped to manifest the dehumanisation and the disconnection of social as well as moral efficacy once applied to guards in submerging circumstances, which resulted to more than slight complications, causing difficulty in proceeding with the experiment. Studies have uncovered that people had obeyed authority figures whether it meant acting in opposition of their own moral certitude. The Stanford Prison has changed the perspective of those who occupy knowledge of the scenario, better classified as a psychological experimentation. Investigating the purity of human beings registered to roles out of the ordinary as opposed to the typical environmental situation, it had inferred that even the good were capable of being in possession of a character and settle in with the duty allocated to them even if it required malicious acts.

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

This report on the Stanford Prison Experiment will define the ethical issues related to prisoner treatment and prison culture in a mock scenario created 1971. The findings of this study define the inclination towards corruption and riotous behavior within the overarching relationship between guard and the prisoners. In a short period of time,. The prisoners became hostile and sought to start a riot in order to free themselves from abuses of the prison guards. In some instances, the issue of role-playing limited to reality of the event, but the ethical issues related to issue of prison corruption became evident in the study. The Stanford Prison Experiment provided some important aspects on how good people can became violent lawbreakers within the orison system. In essence, the ethical and experimental conditions of the Stanford Prison experiment define the corrupting culture of prisons in American society during the early 1970s.