The Stanford Prison Experiment : Research On Situational Power Essay

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 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.

Philip Zimbardo, who categorizes himself as “good” fell victim to the situation of the “Stanford Prisons Experiment” (SPE). Even though it was a mock prison environment, Zimbardo fell heavily invested in his role as superintendent and lead investigator of the SPE, whose main concern is to make sure the SPE continues running, led him to accept that his actions were normal. Which in turn allowed him to ignore his moral conscience; allowing for the suffering from the participants surrounding the SPE. When Zimbardo came to the decision to end the program, disconnecting from his both his roles he was able to realize that he was not in control, that the situation had controlled his logic affecting his actions. Zimbardo states, “The negative

Throughout both Marquez’s “One of These Days” and the Stanford Prison Experiment, there were a couple of similarities, as well as differences. In both stories, there was the theme of reality. In the Stanford Prison Experiment, were the prison guards taking the role too seriously as actors, or realistically doing so? Is there a really big difference between the middle/lower class, and government officials? These questions and others are ones to compare between the theme of reality in both of these stories.

In The Stanford Prison Experiment, Zimbardo establishes power and authority not only for him, but as well as the guards by the use of props and costume, as well as the use of the setting. He converted the basement of Stanford University into a prison like hall, converting office spaces into the cells, adding prison doors and only having 3 beds in each room. The rooms were considerably small, and Zimbardo used a storage closet as solitary confinement, or the hole, that was used to punish the inmate into a small area so that when the door was closed, it was completely dark. Each of the guards had military uniforms and silver reflecting glasses, so that nobody could see the eyes of the guards, which loses the contact or confirmation of humanity.

Having power corrupts people by letting them think they have full control and that they can do anything they want like ‘The Man in the Well’ the kids act like they are going to get help but they are actually going to leave him in the well because Aaron said all of their names, they can’t let him out because he knows their names and the man in the well could go to the police or the kids parents and say they left him in there to die. Power corrupts people in a big way because they think they can do whatever they want to and they can make choices faster than you can snap.

Social psychology explains individual behavior as prejudiced by other people and the social context. Social psychologists thus deal with the factors that lead us to behave in an assumed way in the presence of others. It examines the circumstances and situations under which certain actions and feelings follow. (University of Southern California) This paper discusses the ethical dilemma on Stanford prison experiment by Professor Zimbardo. How his social psychology experiment was unethical and what led it to be. His experiment is extending to the Milgram obedience studies.

During the summer of 1973 an experiment of the psychology of imprisonment was conducted by psychologist Philip K. Zimbardo. Zimbardo created his own jail in the basement in the Stanford University psychology building. Every participant had to be mentally and physically fit in order to participate in this experiment. Participants were randomly split into two groups’, guards and prisoners. Participants who were selected to be prisoners were arrested, blindfolded and sent the Stanford prison. The prisoners had to strip down and put on a prisoner uniform. The guards had to have a uniform also. Their uniform was composed of silver reflective sunglasses, handcuffs, whistles, billy clubs, and keys to all the cells and main gate. Prisoners had no freedom, rights, independence and privacy. Guards had social power and the responsibility of managing the prisoner’s lives. The day of the experiment everyone fell into their roles of guards and prisoners. The next day the prisoners started to rebel which motivated the guards to take affirmative action against the prisoners and maintain law and order. By the last days of the experiment the guards became sadistically aggressive and the prisoners became and passive. To explain the behavior of the guards and prisoners of this experiment we must look at, “Obedience to Authority,” “The Roles of Guard and Prisoner,” and “Prison

Dr. Pilip Zimbardo is not an unknown name in the world of psychology. He graduated at Brooklyn College in 1954 with majors in sociology, anthropology, and of course psychology. Zimbardo has spent most of his career researching how and why people are transformed into certain situations so that they behave in unexpected ways, such as when a good person commits an atrocious act, or an intelligent person does something irrational. The Stanford Prison Experiment is Dr. Zimbardo’s ‘attempt to understand the process of transformation at work when good or ordinary people do bad or evil things.’

On the quiet Sunday morning of August 17th, 1917, in the Silicon Valley, North California, police officers arrested nine polite, upstanding young men of the community, as their neighbors watched in disbelief. They were put in handcuffs, directed into police cars and arrested on charges of armed robbery and burglary, for which they were not guilty. They were in fact not criminals, but paid participants in a study about the abuse of power in a prison context, orchestrated by the Stanford University psychology department. The prisoners and guards were assigned their roles and given little to no guidance on how to act. The guards felt privileged with their newfound power and entitled to use it as they saw fit. The situation rapidly deteriorated as the guards began to abuse their power. Naturally, the prisoners rioted against the abuse they were faced with and the guards resorted to excessive use of force to try and assert their authority and reestablish order. Consequently, some prisoners were released early due to their traumatic experience and as a result, the experiment was ended 8 days premature. The guards were infuriated and frustrated by the disobedience of the prisoners and so resorted to violence. The study may have left us more questions than it answered. Are we all capable of abandoning our morals as the guards did? How do we protect ourselves from the corrupting effects of power? To what extent does this made-up world reflect our own?

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 Stanford experiment was an experiment conducted in 1971 by Philip Zimbardo a professor at Stanford University whom selected a group of 24 male college students “that were considered healthy both physically and psychologically, (Meredith Danko, 2013)”.

Dr. Philip Zimbardo’s works in the field of Social Psychology cracked open many formidable theories that has resonated for many generations. His Stanford Prison experiment showcased a hidden value which is yet to be fully realized. Power corrupts but it does not corrupt everyone equally. The human personality variations are not succinctly represented in some of his experiments but there are safe points that can be deduced. Young males have a higher tendency for social dominance, narcissism, authoritarianism, aggressiveness and lower on measures of altruism and empathy. The experiment may have various critics but it opened the world to another dynamic of human behavior.