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Philip Zimbardo 's Father Of The Stanford Prison Experiment

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Philip Zimbardo: Father of the Stanford Prison Experiment
Philip Zimbardo is known for his famous prison experiment that revealed some important facts about human nature. This type of experiment had never been done before. The Stanford prison experiment was designed to find out “whether the brutality reported among guards in American prisons was due to the sadistic personalities of the guards or had more to do with the prison environment” (McLeod 1). Zimbardo was influenced by the Milgram experiment, which was a study of the power of the situation. He says that the Milgram experiment was focused on one-on-one social power. Zimbardo’s experiment was focused on institutional power over the individual in groups due to the change of the …show more content…

Zimbardo want to find out “whether the brutality reported among guards in American prisons was due to the sadistic personalities of the guards or had more to do with the prison environment” (McLeod 1).
The prisoners were powerless The Stanford prison experiment was done in 1973. Twenty-four college students who took part in the experiment were randomly assigned their role as guards or prisoners. Zimbardo choose his participants to be normal, intelligent, bright, and college students in order to make his experiment. Zimbardo chose those certain college students to reflect the common or average individuals in the current society. Zimbardo also spent a great deal of time with the details such as the appearance of the prison and the cells, the uniforms of the guards, and the entry process for the prisoners on the first day. All of these components were planned by Zimbardo to create the most realistic prison environment. “He consulted the “guards” in such a way: “You can create in the prisoner’s boredom, a sense of fear to some degree, you can create a notion of arbitrariness that their life is totally controlled by us, by the system, you, me, and they’ll have no privacy…We’re going to take away their individuality in various way”. He wanted to take away their privacy, their individuality and make them feel powerless. Basically, he wanted to do these things to the prisoners to get the most out of them, abuse

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