The Stanford Prison Experiment Essay

The Stanford prison experiment was led by Philip Zimbardo with the purpose of studying the psychological effects of being a prisoner and a prison guard. The participants of the research study were male college students. Once selected, a coin toss determined which males would be prisoners and prison guards. The experiment took place at Stanford University, where a mock prison was crafted. Zimbardo acted as the warden or superintendent of the mock prison.

Lord of the Flies by William Golding has various similarities with the Stanford Prison Experiment. The british boys from LOTF were stranded on this island alone, secluded from the rest of society. The prisoners in this experiment were also secluded from civilization due to them being in this facility. Professor Zimbardo constructed this experiment not knowing how this could make serious mental damage to the volunteers. In LOTF, the boys were having an assembly and Ralph said “ We’ve got to have rules and obey them.

Given positions of control, the guards started to use their power in degrading ways. To establish power over the captives, they used a variety of strategies, including physical punishment, psychological blackmail, and verbal abuse. On the other hand, the inmates were stripped of their uniqueness, turned into dehumanized objects, humiliated, treated poorly, and made helpless. Another important point made by Zimbardo's experiment was the effect of deindividuation and responsibility dispersal on the onset of prison violence. The guards' feeling of personal responsibility was diminished by their uniforms and masks, allowing them to act aggressively and abusively in ways they otherwise might not have.

The guards and soldiers got so carried away with their position of power that they lost sight of what their job really were.   The students involved in the experiment started behaving in the same way because they thought that they were really in prison and that they were not informed that it was still an experiment.   The isolation caused the groups to develop an us against the world mentality which led them to believe that no one would understand what they were going through except for the other members of the communities. A while after the experiment, a prisoner was asked about his experience during the experiment and was asked to discuss on his time in solitary confinement.   He talks about how he lost his identity and how he became just another prisoner at the time.

Stanford Prison Argumentative Essay Have you ever felt like you have another side to you that is evil? There was an experiment done by psychologist Philip Zimbardo. The experiment's main goal was to find out if humans are really evil by nature, and the results show that everyone can be evil, but something has to cause a reaction in your brain where you have to use this "hidden evil" to survive. The Stanford prison experiment was a very beneficial and cruel experiment, but it was a necessary one at that; it opened our eyes to human nature and to how we adapt in our environment to survive. This experiment had a crucial influence on many people's beliefs that humans are evil by nature.

Even though there are people willing to risk it all to go back to the life they had, there are some that become submissive and stop fighting. In Stanford Prison Experiment conducted by Stanford phycology department. They recruited college students to run a mock prison so they could study the effect of becoming a prisoner and a prison guard. In this experiment that was supposed to run for two weeks ended up being stopped by the researchers on the six day because it was getting out of control. This is stated by the heads of the experiment Philip Zimbardo, Craig Haney, W. Curtis Banks, and David Jaffe in their report of the experiment.

In this essay I will be analyzing many components of the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram Obedience Experiment. The main findings of the Stanford Prison Experiment revealed that due to the power of their situational roles, participants had truly become the guards and prisoners that they impersonated. Moreover, the experiment showed how people will readily and innately conform to a social role that they are expected to play, even if it is unethical(Musen, 1988). However, there were concerns about the validity and generalizability of the experiment.

In 1971, Philip Zimbardo set out to conduct an experiment to observe behavior as well as obedience. In Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison experiment, many dispute whether it was obedience or merely conforming to their predesigned social roles of guards and prisoners that transpired throughout the experiment. Initially, the experiment was meant to test the roles people play in prison environment; Zimbardo was interested in finding out whether the brutality reported among guards in American prisons was due to the sadistic personalities of the guards, disposition, or had more to do with the prison environment. This phenomenon has been arguably known to possibly influencing the catastrophic similarities which occurred at Abu Ghraib prison in 2003.The

Private Prisons Many people in America have no idea that there are different types of prison systems. The two different types of prisons include state-ran and private. State-ran prisons are prisons owned and operated by the local, state, or federal government; however, private prisons are prisons in which individuals are incarcerated by a third-party organization that is under contract with a government agency. Private prisons are funded by the government and have the unique ability to do whatever they want.

The ¨Stanford Prison Experiment¨ was a breakdown of the morals and rules on how people would act toward one another due to their environment, rather than how they should. The study had created more questions than answers, specifically about the darkness and lack of moral standards that inhabits the human soul. It showed that methodical abuse and denial of human rights is nothing new in prison facilities. The novel Lord of the Flies shows how easily people become dangerous depending on their situation, and how easily humans become savages when there are no definite rules. Lord of the Flies and ¨The Stanford Prison Experiment¨ have many similarities in the way they both show the effects that occur when you lose all moral standards, and lack of rules.

Since the beginning of the human existence, man has always dominated and ruled over one another be it empires, corporations, or small groups. Authority and obedience has always been a factor of who we are. This natural occurrence can be seen clearly through the psychological experiments known as The Milgram Experiment and the Stanford Prison Experiment. Both of these studies are based on how human beings react to authority figures and what their obedience is when faced with conflict.

Stanford Experiment: Unethical or Not Stanford Prison Experiment is a popular experiment among social science researchers. In 1973, a psychologist named Dr. Philip Zimbardo wants to find out what are the factors that cause reported brutalities among guards in American prisons. His aim was to know whether those reported brutalities were because of the personalities of the guards or the prison environment. However, during the experiment, things get muddled unexpectedly. The experiment became controversial since it violates some ethical standards while doing the research.

Unit 1 Written Assignment Literature Review of article on Standard Prison Experiment Introduction This article concerns the Stanford Prison experiment carried out in 1971 at Stanford University. The experiment commenced on August 14, and was stopped after only six days. It is one of the most noted psychological experiments on authority versus subordinates. The studies which emerged from this have been of interest to those in prison and military fields due to its focus on the psychology associated with authority.

This connects to the idea of guards having the capability of turning evil through an atmosphere of the prison environment where they can turn evil and have no remorse feelings towards the prisoners. From the article, "Stanford Prison Experiment," by Saul McLeod, he explained that the evil tactics that were made by the guards were from the atmosphere of the prison environment because the norm for a prison guard is to act tough and have no remorse feelings towards the prisoners when assigning punishments. He also added that guards acted this way because they lost their sense of personal identity when they dressed up as a guard, which can show they may have believed that they were actual guards and the experiment was real, which might’ve triggered their dark side with harsh punishments. Therefore, losing their personal identity in a prison environment may have been the factor where they triggered their evil side during the prison

The Stanford Prison Experiment conducted by psychologist Philip Zimbardo in 1971 illustrated the direct relationship between power of situations and circumstances to shape an individual’s behavior. During this study 24 undergraduates were grouped into roles of either a Prisoner or a Guard, the study was located in a mock correctional facility in the basement of Stanford University. Researchers then observed the prisoners and guards using hidden cameras. The study was meant to last two weeks. However, the brutality of the Guards and the suffering of the Prisoners was so intense that it had to be terminated after only six days.