Zimbardo's Prison Experiments

Another issue in Zimbardo’s experiment was in the treatment of the prisoners. The guards would curse at the prisoners and force them to ridiculous and arbitrary tasks such as forcing them to pick thorns out of their blankets which the guards had dragged through the bushes (737). Even the prisoners would make detrimental remarks about their fellow prisoners (737). The extreme actions taken by the guards resulted in some prisoners developing anxiety symptoms, one symptom even exhibiting itself in a psychosomatic rash when one prisoner’s parole was rejected by the parole board (738). The American Psychological Association makes it very clear on this type of behavior in their code of ethics they state that “any direct or indirect participation in any act of torture or other forms of cruel, degrading or inhuman treatment or punishment by psychologists is strictly prohibited. There are no exceptions.”

In the Zimbardo’s The Stanford Prison Experiment; however, the ‘guards’ and ‘prisoners’ were placed in the same facility and were face to face on a daily basis unlike the Milgram experiment. The ‘guards’ would tell the ‘prisoners’ jokingly to do something, however the ‘prisoners’ would do what they were commanded to do to try to hang on to their identity. (Zimbardo 393) By the end of the experiment most ‘prisoners’ showed increased stress levels in the ‘prisoners’ within days, some ‘prisoners’ could not handle the stress induced and had to be released early. The ‘guards’ were equally changed do to the scenario they were put in. One journal of the ‘guards’ showed how a passive person became a person shoving food down another person’s mouth and locking them up in solitary confinement (Zimbardo 389-399).

Philip Zimbardo ended the experiment on the grounds that the behavior of the guards was escalating to a point where it was ethically wrong to treat a person this way, as well as the way the guards broke so many of the initial rules (Zimbardo). The guards misused their power by using it to humiliate and abuse the prisoners. Because of the way this experiment was cut short, data was limited, but this does not mean that what was collected is not useful or helpful. The audio, video, and rating scales of the individuals’ moods were all collected and compiled as the experiment progressed. The data recorded showed that guards and prisoners adjusted easily to their given roles, treating the situation very seriously and realistically. One of the men, Dave Eshelman, who was placed as a guard was interviewed about his time in the prison. In this quote he talks about taking up the role of a guard, and how it affected his mind and the experiment personally:

Zimbardo was an active participant in the experiment he was basically the warden instead of being an observer, he was shaping the experiment in a way. In the documentary that was viewed in class, it was noticeable that the participants were all men. The sample is relatively narrowed down it is rather small in comparison a bit biased in a way. If there were women in the study the way things would have been different. The men would have behaved differently the result maybe would have been different. The result of the experiment is very astonishing as it surpasses what Zimbardo intended to. Particularly about the participant's behaviour before and during the experiment, the prisoners began behaving like one and associated themselves with the numbers they were given (Zimbardo, p. 130). It was amazing how quick their behaviour and thinking change in a matter of time. It was not even a whole week. The other surprise was when one of the guards who was using the shades started acting more violently when he started using them. The “prisoners” was treated unfairly and abused they forgot that they were just people volunteering for the study, they could have just said something to Zimbardo and they could have left without putting themselves in a difficult situation. Though the people that suffered depression was let

In the documentary Quiet Rage, the story of Zimbardo’s prison experiment is retold. In the documentary, Zimbardo develops a hypothesis that the abusive behaviors in prison is either caused by pre-existing personality traits of the inmates and guards, or the prison environment itself is the cause. He tested his hypothesis by carefully selecting 24 physically healthy, and mentally stable, male college students to participate in a “mock prison” experiment. The basement of Stanford’s psychology department was used to recreate a prison environment, complete with cells, a prison yard, Warden and Superintendent’s offices, and solitary confinement. Half of the test subjects were randomly selected to be prisoner, and the other half to be guards. They were to be placed in the environment, and their roles, for two weeks, and to be carefully observed by Zimbardo who also acted as the prison superintendent. Zimbardo planned to observe the affects the prison environment had the subjects. Due to the extremely abusive characteristics guards developed, and the swift decline of

The psychology professor, Philip Zimbardo, from Stanford University began to test how imprisonment affects different people in August 1971. He chose twenty four out of seventy five male students. These students were the most psychologically and physically stable. Zimbardo built a mock prison in the basement of the university. Within the twenty four chosen students some were randomly selected to be guards. The guards only had to pretend for eight hours a day, and then got to return to their normal lives. The prisoners had to stay in the prison all day for seven to fourteen days.

The participants in the “Zimbardo Prison study” had several negative effects. The prisoners suffered mental breakdowns in which they began crying, yelling, and screaming. The guards were consumed in their power and had no compassion for the prisoners in which they stripped, beat, and dehumanized them. The experiment was supposed to last for 14 days but only lasted for six because of the severe effects the prisoners were experiencing. Zimbardo became too involved in the experiment and was not making appropriate decisions to protect those involved in the experiment. The guards were too immersed in their power roles to realize they were hurting the prisoners. Zimbardo’s honesty was compromised and was not of an appropriate experiment conductor. The mental effects of

The Zimbardo prison experiment was a study of human responses to captivity, dehumanization and its effects on the behavior on authority figures and inmates in prison situations. Conducted in 1971 the experiment was led by Phlilip Zimbardo. Volunteer College students played the roles of both guards and prisoners living in a simulated prison setting in the basement of the Stanford psychology building.

Society has an influence in most of our daily activities, especially when these activities involve other people. During the Zimbardo Prison Experiment two groups of students were asked to play one of two roles, a prisoner and a guard. The good people that played the guards were completely caught up in their role as prison guard and created a new identity to match their situation. Their normal behavior would not have worked in an environment where they must be strict to keep "criminals" in check, therefore they had to change their behavior into a more ruthless and aggressive manner to fit their new role. During the reign of Nazi Germany most of the soldiers were not apparently capable of doing the acts that were committed, but because of the

Two very important and significant psychological experiments were Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment and Milgram’s Shock Experiment. Both experiments were conducted to test subjects’ obedience to authority. Although each experiment achieved their goal and had enticing results, they both proposed many ethical issues and violations. Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment aimed to test how well subjects would conform to roles of guard and prisoner in a role-playing exercise (McLeod).

The Zimbardo experiment attempted to re-create a prison scenario where volunteers would play the role of either a prisoner or a guard. He was attempting to see if the participants would conform to the stereotype social role provided to them. He found that the individuals conformed and based their conduct on perceptions of prison life based in popular cultures. The guards became abusive and manipulative why the inmates became more submissive. However, many question the liability of his research due to the fact that he was not an independent observer and instead acted as the warden of the prison.

The Asch’s experiment is very closely related to Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment and Milgrams experiment of obedience, in which the researcher tries to explain and demonstrate how easily human beings can be persuaded into unusual behaviour by higher figures in authority, or by the opinions of the group of people around them.

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 experiment consisted of twenty-four college students ranging from U.S. and Canada, those twenty-four individuals were selected from the original seventy plus applicants that applied to be a volunteer after reading the article in the paper about the experiment. The experiment was held in the basement of the psychology department of Stanford University (6. Grievances. n.d.). The prison was built around the existing walls and rooms in the basement, the rooms acted as cells for the prisoners where they would be spending there next fourteen days, there was also a guard’s room and a waiting room for visiting parents of the prisoners. Philip Zimbardo wanted the experiment to be as realistic as possible, so Zimbardo consulted the help of many other psychologists, psychiatrists, preacher and an ex-con in the construction of the prison.

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