The Standford Prison Experiment: Socialization Of The Prison Environment

The Stanford Prison Experiment was a clear example of how humans can adapt to specific social roles and behave differently under the pressure of control. The experiment illustrated the concepts of deviance and social control through participants behavior. Although the prisoners were not really prisoners, they believed that they were. The behavior of the prisoners began to morph along with the experiment. By day two, the prisoners were showing deviance by barricading themselves inside their cells. The environment and treatment of the prisoners were likely causes of the disobedience. Similarly, the guards showed signs of social control throughout the experiment. Guards were able to show control over the prisoners through various actions, such

Ethics in psychological research and testing is one of the most important issues today. The Stanford Prison Experiment, conducted over 40 years ago, brought these ethical issues into the limelight and remains one of the most controversial studies in the history of studying human behavior. This paper aims to define ethics, describe risk/benefit ratio, provide a brief background on the Stanford Prison Experiment, and evaluate the impact it has had on psychological research.

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.

1.What are the effects of living in an environment with no clocks, no view of the outside world, and minimal sensory stimulation?

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).

Prison culture or the “values, norms and attitudes that inmates form in terms of institutional survival” (Bartollas, 2013), can be described in one of three models. The Deprivation Model describes the inmate’s behavior as the product of the environment, more specifically the attempt to adapt to that which he is deprived of as a result of incarceration (Bartollas, 2013). An example of such would be the pseudo family unit or physical relationships that inmates form as a result of the absence of such relationships while incarcerated.

The Stanford Prison Experiment was very strange. When one of the prisoners said “they were out of control,” I thought about an authoritarian leader- someone that controls every aspect of a person’s life. I think Zimbardo, creator of the Stanford Prison Experiment, and the guards were being an authoritarian leader. I thought it was disturbing that some of the people that were given the guards position only said “yes” to participate in the experiment because they needed a job and thought that the Prison Experiment would be more entertaining. I think it was weird that being in this experiment changed the “prisoners” physically and mentally. In the Stanford Prison Experiment video, it mentioned the electric shock experiment that was done to people

Prisonization is a concept first introduced in 1940 by Clemmer. He defined it as the process of assimilation in prisons, where new inmates take on a less or greater degree of the customs, folkways, and the general culture in a penitentiary. Prisonization can be described in similar terms to those used by sociologists in capturing the processes of assimilation and socialization of communities at large. In the same manner people are assimilated to the customs and norms of a society, inmates must also assimilate themselves into the self-contained community they find in prison. They need to re-adjust from their normal lives and learn the new norms and rules, as well as the implied expected patterns of behavior since they are discordant from the societal values of a free world. Also referred to as the “inmate code”, this is the kind of behavior that is considered to be unacceptable in the free world but is encouraged, and rewarded within the prison walls.

Prisons in the United States have been labeled as places where cruel and unusual punishments occur and are rightfully labeled as such; not because of the demeanor of certain group of people, but because of the specific situation and scenarios these people are in. The Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) was set up to help understand the development and growth of the norms based on certain roles, labels and expectations in a simulated prison environment. This paper is going to explain and describe the experiment Philip Zimbardo set up and how it relates to the real world in non-experimental situations in regards with the controversy of prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib, Iraq.

"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.

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

The reality of the experiment determined the human condition to seek power and assert that power when it is challenged. The major implications of this study in the real world would show that in a real prison setting there are also administrative routines and rules they must follow but enforcement of all the rules could lead to loss of control and intern lead to physical danger for the inmates as well as the guards themselves. The experiment had restrictions on physical violence and the reality is that physical violence in the prison systems are hard to control and are some what deemed to be normal or even inevitable due to the different criminal backgrounds coming together in one tight living space.

Society is the totality of people who are regarded as forming a community of interdependent individuals (Free Dictionary). Individual is the basic unit of a society. An individual becomes part of the society when he gets transformed from a human being into a social being. This transformation into social actors includes the learning of knowledge, skills, motivations and identities that make our genetic potentials interact with our social settings. This transformation occurs through the process of socialization.

During the Stanford prison experiment video I did notice a few similarities of a particular experience I had when I was in the Marines, that experience was just how putting on a certain uniform can alter the way a person. A uniform of authority can shift the way a person acts or even behaves oppose to not wearing a uniform of authority. when you’re not covering your identity with some article of clothing you hold an image that you want to try and protect and an image that is relatively consistent to your normal behavior, however when you shield that self-image and put let’s say a mask over which conceals your identity that can completely change everything about you including the way you conduct yourself.