A REVIEW OF THE STANFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT 2
This article addresses the problems within prisons: namely, how these institutions fail to rehabilitate prisoners, and instead become hotpots of discontent and misery. The pitiful conditions inside prisons, especially those caused by overzealous and aggressive authority figures, as well as unhappy and mistreated prisoners, are also addressed. The purpose of this research was to discover and isolate processes that cause aggressive (for those with authority) and submissive (for those without authority) behaviour in “total institutions” – institutions with such an authoritarian/submissive dynamic (in this case, a prison). The authors’ hypothesis is the “dispositional hypothesis” – how the nature …show more content…
Not every interaction between prisoners and guards could be constantly monitored by the experimenters, even excluding areas that the recording devices could not reach – experimenters could not possibly track every subject in real time with the technology they had in 1973 (video and audio recording was simply not as high of quality as it is today). Furthermore, since guards and prisoners knew that they were being recorded, they may have acted differently than if they knew that they were not being recorded. It was impossible to know the personalities of every subject in the study (although they were screened and considered to be “normal”, they may have had some underlying psychological issues that the experimenters were unaware of). The strengths of this experiment were that there could be no physical interactions between prisoners and guards – meaning that neither group could physically be hurt. From the results collected by the experimenters, the so-called “prison dynamic” was exposed to the world, so I suppose that it would have created some reform in the way that prisons are run. Another strength is that this experiment became almost a landmark for future psychological research – many people, even those that are not knowledgeable in the field of psychology, have heard of the Stanford Prison Experiment (this also ties into the exposure of “prison dynamic”). If I were to modify anything in this experiment, I would tell the subjects that they were being viewed only in certain places, but secretly view them in places where they thought that they were not being watched. I would also have run a parallel experiment with women to see if the same effects were observed. One tip that I would give the experimenters would be to remove themselves completely from participating in the experiment (the chief researcher, Doctor Philip Zimbardo, took part in the experiment as the role of “superintendent”) in order to not bias any of the prisoners or guards into
This article addresses the problems within prisons: namely, how these institutions fail to rehabilitate prisoners, and instead become hotpots of discontent and misery. The pitiful conditions inside prisons, especially those caused by overzealous and aggressive authority figures, as well as unhappy and mistreated prisoners, are also addressed. The purpose of this research was to discover and isolate processes that cause aggressive (for those with authority) and submissive (for those without authority) behaviour in “total institutions” – institutions with such an authoritarian/submissive dynamic (in this case, a prison). The authors’ hypothesis is the “dispositional hypothesis” – how the nature …show more content…
Not every interaction between prisoners and guards could be constantly monitored by the experimenters, even excluding areas that the recording devices could not reach – experimenters could not possibly track every subject in real time with the technology they had in 1973 (video and audio recording was simply not as high of quality as it is today). Furthermore, since guards and prisoners knew that they were being recorded, they may have acted differently than if they knew that they were not being recorded. It was impossible to know the personalities of every subject in the study (although they were screened and considered to be “normal”, they may have had some underlying psychological issues that the experimenters were unaware of). The strengths of this experiment were that there could be no physical interactions between prisoners and guards – meaning that neither group could physically be hurt. From the results collected by the experimenters, the so-called “prison dynamic” was exposed to the world, so I suppose that it would have created some reform in the way that prisons are run. Another strength is that this experiment became almost a landmark for future psychological research – many people, even those that are not knowledgeable in the field of psychology, have heard of the Stanford Prison Experiment (this also ties into the exposure of “prison dynamic”). If I were to modify anything in this experiment, I would tell the subjects that they were being viewed only in certain places, but secretly view them in places where they thought that they were not being watched. I would also have run a parallel experiment with women to see if the same effects were observed. One tip that I would give the experimenters would be to remove themselves completely from participating in the experiment (the chief researcher, Doctor Philip Zimbardo, took part in the experiment as the role of “superintendent”) in order to not bias any of the prisoners or guards into