The Zimbardo Experiment Summary

“The Stanford Prison Experiment” by Philip G. Zimbardo was written to explain the results of the Stanford prison experiment. Zimbardo while trying to gain support for his conclusions of the experiment, demonstrated many errors in his writing, and in his own experiment. The errors that Zimbardo commits call into question the validity of his argument, and the experiment. The goal explained by Zimbardo was “to understand more about the process by such people called “prisoners” lose their liberty, civil rights, independence, and privacy, while those called “guards” gain social power by accepting the responsibility for controlling and managing the lives of their dependent charges” (Zimbardo 733).

The article on the Stanford Prison Experiment titled, A Study of Prisoners and Guards in a Simulated Prison and written by the Office of Naval Research, provides us with the overall information that deals with this controversial psychological study. The study was conducted by

What the researchers found during this study was that both the behaviors and mentalities of guards and prisoners changed. Guards became more aggressive and prisoners became passive. A group of five prisoners had to actually be released from the study because of physical and emotional changes they were experiencing. Those prisoners remaining actually began acting as if they were truly incarcerated. By the behaviors they exhibited they had all but forgotten that they were free to leave at any time and not forfeit the money they had already earned. Guards, on the other hand, actually stayed at the prison longer than they were scheduled and were actually disappointed when the study came to a close while prisoners were very happy and expressed their luck at getting released early. These results clearly demonstrate that it is the environment that contributes to the behaviors observed. Those who were given the role of guard expressed the power and control they had over the prisoners. The prisoners began to become hopeless and bend to the power of the guards.

In 1973, in an attempt to understand the conformity to roles of guards and prisoners, Zimbardo launched a role-playing experiment that modeled prison life and reflected the environment of an American prison. The experiment was to see if prison guards are brutal and cruel because that’s their sadistic personality types that cause conflicts with the prisoners or if its due to the prison setting itself. In other words, there is a dispositional hypothesis that states that prison guards act the way they do because their personalities cause

The aim of this experiment was to investigate how readily people would conform to the roles of a guard and a prisoner. In this role playing simulation, individual would experience prison life. Zimbardo was interested in finding out whether the brutality reported among guards in American prisons was dispositional: due to the sadistic personalities of the guards, or Situational: having more to do with the prison environment. For example, prisoner and guards may have personalities which make conflict inevitable, with prisoners lacking respect for law, order, and any authoritative figure and guards having domineering and aggressive personalities. Alternatively, prisoners and guards may behave in a hostile manner due to the rigid power structure of the social environment in prisons. If the prisoners and guards were not aggressive towards one another this would support the dispositional hypothesis, or if their behavior was similar to those in real prisons this would support the situational explanation.

A rumor of an escape plot surfaced, the inmate that had been released earlier was supposedly planning on coming back on the day of family visits, and bringing friends in order to break all of the inmates out. Zimbardo and his cronies would not allow this. As the family showed up for their visitation, Zimbardo, being an expert in manipulating people’s minds, made the families think that it was a safe, happy and healthy environment for their children; but as the families left the supposed prison, Zimbardo had the guards clean out a storage closet on the fifth floor and kept the inmates in the room until the next day. Zimbardo himself sat in the now empty prison and waited for the imitation ex-con to return with his friends in an attempt to free the others. It never happened. The only person that showed up that night was a co-worker of Zimbardo’s who asked him only how his experiment was going.

Philip Zimbardo is an emeritus professor at the Stanford University and has spent the past 50 years studying and teaching psychology. With a Ph.D. from Yale University, Zimbardo specializes and focuses on several areas such as terrorism, madness and evil. Zimbardo is most well known for the infamous Stanford Prison Study that was carried out in 1971. The experiment tested college students and their tendency to attribute the causes of their behavior to personal factors and the chances of underestimating the influence of situational conditions.

The two experiments were a tested at different time periods and for different purposes. For instance, the Milgram experiment was originally tested to study obedience to authority, in response to Adolf Eichmann trial, a Nazi war criminal, that stated he,” was just stating orders under the Reich.” The experiment proved to be that under authority rule, actions, even if morally wrong and unethical can be still taken forward with due to a strict authority presence.

In 1971, Stanford professor and psychologist Philip Zimbardo, arranged and conducted an experiment with the intention of gaining a better understanding of the development of norms and the effects of roles, labels, and social expectations in a simulated prison environment. However, what professor Zimbardo was not expecting, was just how much insight this study would provide into the psychology of individuals and social groups, as well as, the aggressiveness of human nature. Participants in the study had responded to newspaper advertisements in the Palo Alto Times and the Stanford Daily, which offered $15/day to male college students for a study on the psychology of imprisonment. It is important to note that all volunteers in the experiment were

This paper serves to summarize The Zimbardo Prison Experiment, better known as The Stanford Prison Experiment which was conducted by Phillip Zimbardo in 1971 at Stanford University. The purpose of the study was to conduct research in order to better understand the psychological components of human aggression and submission to include conformity and obedience in a prison environment with a select group of subjects playing roles as either prison guards or inmates, however, I should note, according to McLeod, S. (2016), The Navy’s intent or purpose for the experiment was to better understand how to train members of the armed forces on how to cope with stress associated with captivity as opposed to making American Prison systems more humane. Another interesting point of note is that Zimbardo conducted this experiment shortly after World War II, and the Vietnam War where concern was raised as to some of the atrocities carried out in those wars where “ordinary” people conducted heinous acts per instruction from so-called authoritative figures. Experiments with similar objectives were carried out by Stanley Milgram and others. (Jones, A. D., & Milgram, S. 1974)

The Stanford Prison Study was conducted by a psychology professor Philip Zimbardo, at Stanford University. The experiment was conducting by selecting college students to be assigned into roles of guards and prisoners; the students which were assigned as guards were given roles and guard’s uniform, and the students which were assigned as prisoners were given roles, and prisoner’s cap.

A study of prisoners and guards in a simulated prison was conducted by the United States Department of the Navy. The study took place in 1971 at Stanford University. The study examined the effects of the guard and prisoner roles on men who each had similar characteristics. They were an “average group of healthy, intelligent, middle-class college males.” (Haney, Banks, Zimbardo, & Jaffe, 1971) They single hypotheses of the author was “That the assignment to the treatment of guard or prisoner would result in significant different reactions on behavioral measures of interaction, emotional measures of mood state and pathology, attitudes towards self, as well as other indices of coping and adaptation to this novel situation.”(Haney, Banks, & Zimbardo, 1973)

The Stanford Prison Experiment was designed to allow 24 participants (college students) to be arrested in a mock police state scenario without any charges being brought against them. The participants were hooded and put into a prison cellblock with other mock prisoners. The purpose of the experiment was to see how non-criminals would be affected by the prison culture and the oversight of prison guards. Philip G. Zimbardo (2004)

The study took place in the basement of the Stanford University Psychology which was turned into a mock prison and the study was compromised of 24 male college students who were paid to take part in the experiment. Participants were randomly assigned to be a guard or prisoners and the prison simulation was kept as real as possible with prisoners being treated as they would be treated if they were in an actual prison and the guards were able to give out punishment of those prisoners who they deemed non-compliant. The prisoners faced harassment, physical and psychological punishment from the guards and in some cases, were put in solitary confinement.

In 1971 Philip Zimbardo conducted the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) in the basement of Stanford University as a mock prison. Zimbardo’s aim was to examine the effect of roles, to see what happens when you put good people in an evil place and to see how this effects tyranny. He needed participants to be either ‘prisoners’ or ‘guards’ and recruited them through an advertisement, 75 male college students responded and 24 healthy males were chosen and were randomly allocated roles. Zimbardo wanted to encourage deindividuation by giving participants different uniforms and different living conditions (the guards had luxuries and the prisoners were living as real prisoners). The guards quickly began acting authoritarian, being aggressive towards the prisoners and giving them punishments causing physical and emotional breakdowns. Zimbardo’s intention was for his study to last for 2 weeks, however, it