Personal Narrative: My Experience In A Real Prison

4.) If you were a prisoner, would you have been able to endure the experience? What would you have done differently than those subjects did? If you were imprisoned in a “real” prison for five years or more, could you take it?
If I was a prisoner, I do not think I could deal with experiencing the prison life. I have always liked my own personal space and I do not allow people to get that close to me. In prison, people are everywhere and you could not have a free second for yourself. There are no 4 walls to go to, where you could be completely alone. If you are in prison, you also have to be a team player because if you stayed alone, you would not last long in there. My personality does not let other people control me. I like to be a leader, …show more content…
The study was stopped after only six days because Christina Maslach complained about the conditions of the prison after she was introduced to the experiment. After this realization, Zimbardo stopped the experiment. Now, knowing that the guards would psychologically torture the prisoners, I would not try to conduct this study. Every human being likes to have power, some people like it more than other depending on the personality. Even though this was only an experiment, the guards had the power to control the prisoners by creating feeling of boredom and sense of fear. After a few days, the guards actually believed that they were the higher power and nothing was wrong with what they were doing to other participants who happened to be picked as a prisoner. The experiment went wrong when Zimbardo himself became a participant in his own study and did not see that the experiment became unethical towards the prisoners. The guards and the prisoners were grossly absorbed in their specific roles. So, I feel like that should have been the point when I would have stopped the experiment. However, if I was in Zimbardo’s position, I would have needed help from somebody outside of the experiment to recognize that the whole study was unethical. The study was highly unethical …show more content…
The participants were not fully informed about the study because Zimbardo would not have known what to expect from this study. This kind of experiment was never done before so the results were unexpected. For example, the prisoners were ‘arrested’ at home which was not in the consent because the experimenter wanted it to come as a surprise. The typical role of a guard consists of being aggressive and having more power which helps them handle the inmates. This is the role what the participants, who were chosen to be guards took. Even though the study was approved by different institutions. he prisoners were not protected from humiliation, distress, and psychological harm; for instance, one of the prisoners had to be released due to uncontrollable anger, screaming, yelling, and crying. I think this study helped experimenters realize that a formal ethical guideline is needed to prevent this kind of incidents. There are boards created to review researches and look at the benefits of the research and the potential risk of psychological or physical harm that might be caused during the experiment. These boards have the power to make the researchers make a change in their experiment. So, if there is one good thing came from the prison experiment was that such situations will not happen again due to the better ethical guidelines and review system. In my