Zimbardo Prison Internship Study

I was told throughout my childhood that I was inquisitive, as I would seek beyond face value and the simplistic explanations often given to children my age. My mother relates an anecdote when I was merely four years old, which illustrates this curiosity; she recalls a specific episode from the television show Animal Planet that left a profound effect on me. It documented the cheetah’s evolving maternity of her newborn cubs, and her eventual need to separate from them when they reached the tender age of two in order to mate once again. Startled by my empathetic reaction and unprecedented question, “Mommy, will you ever leave me too?”, my mother marked this moment as the first instance where I drew universal and social parallels between my own …show more content…
Since the school’s flexible curriculum offered a variety of challenging courses, I enrolled in classes such as psychology, which enabled me to apply my previous internship experience to the academic theory taught in the classroom. This complementary approach enabled me to extract tangible and personal meaning from what may otherwise seem purely abstract. In particular, one historical case study comes to mind—The Zimbardo Prison Experiment, which confirmed and elaborated on the findings of my previous internship study. It documented a fabricated prison environment, and the horrifying and unfathomable extent to which its participants, acting out the roles of prison-guards and inmates, would inevitably reenact the violent and suppressive behaviors found in actual penitentiaries. Though the study was intended to last two weeks, it was put to an end after only six days, as the “prison-guards” and “inmates” increasingly indulged in their roles with sadism and agony. Disturbed by how even a mock setting can engender such deviant behavior, I distinctly remember asking myself: Are we all nothing more than helpless puppets manipulated by our environment, or can individual willpower prevail? Moreover, I wondered: Under certain situations, to what lengths would I go in submitting to societal