The Stanford Prison Experiment Review. It Is Sunday A

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The Stanford Prison Experiment Review It is Sunday; a college aged man sits at home waiting to start an experiment he is being paid $15 a day to participate in, when minutes later he finds himself in the back of a police car, soon to be incarcerated in the basement of Stanford University. The Stanford Prison Experiment, a study performed in 1971 by Phillip Zimbardo, was created to study the impacts of prison environment on both prisoners and guards (Zimbardo, 1973). Ultimately the goal was to prove that the rolls of guard and prisoner would create behavioral changes in the participants of the study. In 1971, an ad was placed asking for male volunteers to participate in a study being done at Stanford University. While 75 responded,…show more content…
By having real police officers arrest the participants, they begin the experiment by going through the same process that a real prisoner experience. This puts the men more solidly in the role of prisoner, which gives the researcher a more accurate idea of how prison effects real world prisoners. Upon arriving at the simulated prison, the prisoners are stripped of their clothing, washed and then issued oversized gowns and stocking caps to wear over their hair (Zimbardo, 1973). The researchers use this uniform in order to further push the men into the roles of prisoners by emasculating and removing individuality. This was further done by taking away their names and referring to them only by their prisoner number (Zimbardo, 1973). Once clean and uniformed the prisoners were placed in their cells, the Warden appeared, read them the rules, written up by the guards and the Warden. They were to be given meals, toilet visits, activity time and yard time (Zimbardo, 1973). These rules were set up to be humane and to be as similar as they could be to a real prison setting. From here the researchers planned to gather data for two weeks through observation and guard reports and later through interviews and questionnaires (Zimbardo, 1973). This being one of the reasons Phillip Zimbardo chose to do the experiment in a simulated prison, rather than through a more naturalistic approach. By choosing a simulated prison environment, rather than a real-world
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