Preview

The Stanford Prison Experiment: Social Psychological Experiments

Satisfactory Essays
Open Document
Open Document
206 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
The Stanford Prison Experiment: Social Psychological Experiments
In the Stanford Prison Experiment
Social psychology experiment shows us how our mind and behavior can change within hours. In the Stanford Prison Experiment the participant were expected to behave in a certain way in whatever situations given. However, did they imagine that the prisoners were going to lose their self by believing that they were real prisoners and start behaving as such and the guards started to act and believe that they were actual guards? That in itself shows how powerful the mind is.
The part that was the most surprising to me was to see how a person behavior can change within seconds in either a positive or negative way the prisoners do as they were told and even though this was an experiment they were influenced in believing

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Satisfactory Essays

    Some examples of dysfunction during the stanford prison experiment are one of the guys went into the prison experiment. He thought it was going to be an easy way to get money for a summer job and then when he got there he got the role of being a prisoner. He just lost it he started to say that he was going crazy and that something was eating him inside out. He felt like he was going to explode and so the guards reacted by putting him in the hole. Then the guy would still yell and say he wanted out and they wouldn't let him out until he got the chance to go and talk to the guy that was running this whole thing and they let him out.…

    • 389 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    When people are given little to no direction or training, and are faced with dealing with people they may perceive as a threat to their own safety and the well-being of others, they have a propensity to overstep what most would consider reasonable behavior. The “guards” in the experiment were put into a position of authority and took the steps they deemed necessary to maintain order. In spite of the fact that they knew it was an experiment, they were immersed in the situation and played the role given them. The “prisoners” played their part and were so wholly immersed in the role and the environment that their entire perspective of reality was altered. They began to believe they were helpless and unable to help themselves out of the situation they found themselves. They had become powerless to change the situation, in spite of the fact that it was just an…

    • 1846 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Can good, moral, and virtuous people be pushed to do bad things? This article seeks to compare an experiment done in 1971 to a real life military situation during wartime. The article also tries to link the experiment to another horrible act done by someone suffering from various mental illnesses with extremely mixed results. Is there a correlation between these three events as far as the mental states of the participants?…

    • 688 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    The articles “The Stanford Prison Experiment” written by Philip G. Zimbardo and “The My Lai Massacre: A Military Crime of Obedience” composed by Herbert C. Kelman and V. Lee Hamilton both focus on the effects of power. In which the subjects have been ordered to follow something by superiors. In the experiment the original group of subjects are divided into the role of guards, and inmates. The massacre, however, was not an experiment but was the result of an order issued by a higher ranking official. In comparison the movie A Few Good Men was used. This movie contained the same main underlying concepts as the articles which makes it a good comparison. Involved were two marine who were charged with murder of a fellow marine and the conspiracy…

    • 1333 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    1) What police procedures are used during arrests, and how do these procedures lead people to feel confused, fearful, and dehumanized?…

    • 1083 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Have you ever noticed that certain people act and behave differently when they are with crowds versus when they are alone? Being in a large crowd can really impact individual to act in a certain way that they seem to fit in with the group and sometimes do things more anonymous as it is in a large crowd. Both Zimbardo and Le Bon believe that bystanders are less responsible and more likely to commit violence than when people are alone. Philip Zimbardo is a psychologist and a professor at Stanford University; he researches the cause of evil in people by doing a Stanford prison experiment. Zimbardo states about how evil can cause good people easily by the peers that they are surrounded by and the culture and traditional way changes can affect people…

    • 1535 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The idea of government has been around for centuries. It has changed and expanded so much over the years that certain governments have morphed into a more violent institution, in some cases. Because governments have changed so much over the years, certain governments have slowly evolved to become extreme, and may be considered seriously dangerous in the future.…

    • 474 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    In the book, A place to Stand, by Jimmy Santiago Baca, Baca writes about prison and how being incarcerated can have impact on a person and their family. With the most beautiful, strong and poetic language, Baca tells us the story of all the people who faces difficult times in order to find their place in the world. Baca always felt like he had no place to stand in society because, all of his life he was put down by his family and friends. From the age of five Baca experienced his dad and uncles going in and out of jail from being addicted to alcohol. Baca knew he would eventually end up in jail sooner or later because that’s what he had experienced all of his life. Baca writes, “Whether I was approaching it or seeking escape from it, jail always defined in some way the measure of my life” (3). Baca felt that his life would always head in the wrong direction because of his family issues. Baca shows being in prison can cause a lot of emotional impact on a person’s life, as well as affect the community.…

    • 1505 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Zimbardo Prison Eperiment

    • 694 Words
    • 3 Pages

    In the field of psychology, experiments are an essential part of the study. Guidelines have been fenced around the experiments to protect the subjects being tested. Unethical experiments had to take place in order for these guidelines to be placed. In 1971, Psychologist Philip Zimbardo conducted an experiment that changed the future of psychology and how it is practiced today, The Stanford Experiment. According to Kendra Cherry, author of an article The Stanford Experiment, researchers asked how subjects would react when placed in a prison environment.…

    • 694 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Experiments have been done for many more years than humans can count on the two hands in which they possess. Two experiments, in particular, were written, “The Stanford Prison Experiment” by Philip G. Zimbardo and “The Perils of Obedience” by Stanley Milgram. These experiments can be controversial for many different reasons, but neither of these experiments were completed under conditions of normality. The information collected in these experiments isn’t exactly based off of real life situations, it becomes difficult not to question the relevance of these experiments.…

    • 743 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In 1971 Phillip Zimbardo conducted a controversial study know as the Stanford prison experiment. The experiment was a psychological study of human reactions to being imprisoned and how the effects would interfere with the normal behaviors of both authorities and the inmates in prison. Zimbardo and his team hypothesized “that prison guards and convicts were self selecting of a certain disposition that would naturally lead to poor conditions.” Zimbardo used undergraduate volunteers to play the roles of the guards and the prisoners in a mock prison he created in the basement of the Stanford psychology building. He then recorded how both the prisoners and guards quickly adapted to their roles, and soon this lead to one-third of the authorities taking place in sadistic acts towards the prisoners, which was argued to have lead to psychologically harmful situations. Due to the appalling conditions of the prison, both sanitarily and psychologically the experiment ended on August 30, 1971 just six days after it began, which was eight days short of the foresighted fourteen days it was supposed to have lasted. Many similarities in the ethical concerns of the Stanford experiment were found in the Milgram experiment which was conducted in 1961 by Stanley Milgram one of Zimbardo’s high school friends.…

    • 704 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The years 1965 & 1966, Dr. Albert Kligman gave 75 prisoners a dosage of dioxin, a chemical used in Agent Orange, 468 times greater than protocol. Agent orange was an herbicide used by the US during the Vietnam War to clear its dense vegetation. Those who came in contact with this herbicide had horrible side effects such as birth defects, cysts, swollen body parts & etc. According to Keramet Reiter, a UC Irvine graduate in the department of criminology, the prisoners faced such consequences as those who were affected by the war and also had additional scars, blisters, & continuos rashes. These 75 prisoners were not the only humans taken advantage of during an experiment, but also there have been cases where non-prisoners were abused of which is why I stand on the negation of the bill,” The United States federal government should legalize medical and pharmaceutical testing on prisoners that have committed murder. This includes prisoners in public, federal, or state prisons and private prisons.”…

    • 814 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    One of the most impressionable events was on the second day of the experiment. On this particular day, Jane Elliot called the children together to discuss what had been happening for the past two days. Once the children were discussing how it made them feel and how wrong it was to treat people that way, I thought that it was amazing that third graders could relate the experiment to real life discrimination. I feel that these children really learned what is was like to discriminate against someone and to be discriminated against.…

    • 779 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Taser

    • 825 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Maxfield and Babbie in their book Basic of Research Methods for Criminal Justice and Criminology explain the purpose of the Stanford Prison Experiment was to test the situational hypothesis of the prison environment itself. Maxfield and Babbie state, “…the prison environment creates dehumanizing conditions independent of the kinds of people who live and work in the institutions (Maxfield and Babbie, p. 43. 2009).” The experiment took on an exploratory design, which indicates the specific problem had not been clearly defined (Maxfield & Babbie, 2009). Zimbardo himself could only compare experiments of this nature to his high school friend, Milgram who conducted research on obedience to authority figures as related to the Holocaust. Exploratory research is begun to explore an issued regarding society to answer of the questions needed to conduct further studies. To this date the Stanford Prison Experiment has not be replicated exactly in any series of further on experiments related to the outcome of the original. The experiment was created by Curtis Haney, Craig Banks, and Philip Zimbardo (1973) in the basement of the Stanford University psychology department building where the “prison” was constructed. The “prison” consisted of cells, a “yard”, and a solitary confinement cell. An ad was placed in a newspaper and 75 volunteers answered the call but only twenty-one were chosen. The subjects with physical or psychological problems were vetted and those left were offered $15.00 a day to participate. The left over subjects were randomly assigned to be either guards or prisoners (Babbie & Maxfield, 2009).…

    • 825 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    The Abu Ghirab prison was the most horrific, brutal and dehumanizing thing I have even come across. The level of suffering the inmates experienced words cannot express how terrifying it is. There were male as well as female and even worst, children was in that dreadful place. They were treated worse than animals in my opinion, I cannot see in no one lives they should have to encounter such gruesome experience. The Stanford prison experiment was conducted on August 14th to 20th, 1971.The team of researchers were led by professor Phillip Zimbardo.This experiment was conducted with college students. This experiment was also dehumanizing although the prisoners were forced to engage in many events, such as defecating in buckets and used their hands…

    • 395 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays