Stanford Prison Experiment
The Stanford Prison Experiment was a psychology experiment performed by Philip Zimbardo in 1971. He was previously a student of Stanley Milgram who is best known for his experiments involving obedience. In order for Zimbardo to perform his project he needed the assistance of his colleagues. Zimbardo was inspired by his professor and wanted to do more. He knew exactly how to do this and began to execute his plan.
The experiment Zimbardo planned to perform consisted of a simulated prison. He wanted to see the result of placing kids with perfect health, attitudes, and psychological problems in a prison- like environment. He would chart any phycology changes in the students. The students would also have no criminal record
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 experiment escalated when the prisoners were forced to endure cruel and dehumanizing abuse at the hands of their peers.” (Stanford Library 2024). The behavior of the guards that went unhindered by Zimbardo was a result of fallacies during the experiment due to unrealistic punishments. Later in this article it was said that “Guards were allowed to abuse their power to humiliate the inmates”. They had prisoners count off and do pushups arbitrarily, restricted access to bathrooms, and forced them to relieve themselves in buckets in their cells.”
However, the experiment flowed in such a way that it had to be canceled within six days only. The experiment tried to recreate the situation of the behavior inside American prisons. Zimbardo's hypothesis was to demonstrate
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.
The Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment has to be one of the cruelest and disturbing experiments I have witnessed since the Milgram experiment. This experiment was pushed far beyond its means and went extremely too far. I know experiments in 1971 weren’t as thorough and strategic as today's but I know today's rules and regulations never allow cruel and unusual punish just to test out one’s theory’s. I don’t believe criminologists should be permitted to conduct replications of Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment. I also know that the ACJS and other organizations who set the rules and guidelines for experiments would not promote or condone an experiment that is dangerous and is unethical such as Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment. There were no boundaries or a level
Dr Philip Zimbardo created the Stanford prison experiment in 1971, the aim of this experiment was to find out the psychological effects of prison life, and to what extent can moral people be seduced to act immorally. The study consisted of 24 students selected out of 75, the roles of these 24 men were randomly assigned, 12 to play prison guards and 12 to play prisoners. The prison set up was built inside the Stanford’s psychological department, doors where taken of laboratory rooms and replaced with steel bars in order to create cells. At the end of the corridor was the small opening which became the solitary confinement for the ‘bad prisoners’. Throughout the prison there were no windows or clocks to judge the passage in time, which resulted in time distorting experiences. After only a few hours, the participants adapted to their roles well beyond expectations, the officers starting
The Stanford Prison Experiment was a physiological study made to understand what affected the police brutality in prison environments. Zimbardo conducted this experiment in 1973. The goal was “To investigate how readily people would confirm to the roles of guard and prisoner in a role-playing exercise that stimulated prison life. 24 male college students were tested for their psychological normality. The chosen ones were paid $15 a day to take part in the experiment.
In 1971, psychologist Philip Zimbardo and his colleagues created the experiment known as the Stanford Prison Experiment. Zimbardo wanted to investigate further into human behavior, so he created this experiment that looked at the impact of taking the role of a prisoner or prison guard. These researchers examined how the participants would react when placed in an institutionalized prison environment. They set up a mock prison in the basement of Stanford University’s psychology building. Twenty four undergraduate students were selected to play the roles of both prisoners and guards. These students were chosen because they were emotional, physically, and mentally stable. Though the experiment was expected to last two weeks, it only lasted six days after the researchers and participants became aware of the harm that was being done.
The Stanford Prison Experiment was created by Philip G. Zimbardo, a psychologist, and professor who taught at Stanford. The experiment's goal was to study how easily one will adapt to roles that are assigned to them. The study began with volunteers who were randomly assigned to become either prisoners or guards. It didn’t take long for the guards to harass the prisoners. On the second day of the experiment, the prisoners started to rebel and test the guard’s boundaries. In an attempt to keep the prisoners in line, the guards started to use physical violence; which was against the rules. The guards became more and more violent every day, the amount of abuse the guards displayed was totally unexpected.
The Stanford Prison Experiment was a psychological experiment conducted by Philip Zimbardo. Initially expected to last two weeks, it instead lasted a mere six days before coming to an end. The experiment successfully shows that all people, despicable or kind, are capable of truly terrifying things, and also reinforces an already well-known theory, the power of the situation. Originally, the Stanford Prison Experiment was going to be a full two week experiment in order to fully solidify the concepts they were trying to prove. Despite this, the experiment only lasted six days due to the admittedly surprising result: the violent psychological state that both the guards and prisoners had come to, though in completely different ways, and thus
The Stanford prison experiment was unique because they wanted to watch and learn the behaviors of a prisoner and a prison guard, observing the effects they found some pretty disturbing things among the students. Dr. Philip Zimbardo and his colleagues at Stanford University stayed true to what they believed, and they did what they felt they needed to do to find a set of results for their simulation. Unfortunately they where swallowed into the experiment, when they became the roles, just as the students where. So from their point of view I want to say that what they where doing was ethical, and being that the prison experiment was stopped before its half way mark showed that they realized that it was time to call it quits. Dr. Zimbardo noticed
To ensure to have satisfactory results in his study, Zimbardo required some preconditions. One of which was the period of time for the experiment to be conducted. He believed that one-to-two weeks would be essential in “providing our research participants with sufficient time for them to become fully engaged in their experimentally assigned roles of either guards or prisoners. Having [our] participants live in that setting day and night, if prisoners, or work for long eight-hour shifts, if guards, would also allow sufficient time for situational norms to develop and patters of social interaction to emerge, change and become crystallized” (Zimbardo, 2013). Other preconditions he had were the mentalities of his volunteers; are they “normal,” healthy mentally and physically, are they without any prior history of conviction or drug usage?
The Zimbardo prison experiment was set up to investigate the problem of what the psychological effects for normal people result from being a guard or inmate, and in a broader sense are normal people capable of being ‘evil.’ The research question being asked was, “How would normal people react to being in a simulated prison environment? In Zimbardo’s own words, "Suppose you had only kids who were normally healthy, psychologically and physically, and they knew they would be going into a prison-like environment and that some of their civil rights would be sacrificed. Would those good people, (when) put in that bad, evil place (have) their goodness triumph?"
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
The Zimbardo Prison Study was a physiological experiment to observe the behavioral and psychological behavior of becoming a prisoner or prison guard. This study took place in the basement of the psychology building at Stanford University in 1971. The basement was rearranged to have three cells, a guard’s room, closet, and warden’s office. Philip Zimbardo was the psychologist in charge of the study and had help from Carlo Prescott, an ex-convict. There are many violations of the APA Ethical Principles of Psychologist present in this experiment that can be seen throughout the video. Due to these ethical violations and all of the aspects that came with it, for the safety of the prisoners and prison guards, this experiment which was supposed to last two weeks, lasted only six days.