STANFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT
Stanford Prisoner Experiment Dr. Paul Zimbardo was a physiologist at a Stanford University Professor. He took interest in the nature of prisoners and prison guards. He was interested in finding out if the brutality among prison guards was because of their personalities, or if it was a result of the prison environment. He hypothesized that it wasn 't the nature of the guards that made them brutal, it was the roles that they were expected to play that lead to their brutal and violent nature. To test his hypothesis Dr. Paul Zimbardo set up an experiment. He converted the basement of the psychology section in Stanford University into a replica of a jail. Then he found twenty-four young middle aged men to be a part …show more content…
If the prison system has the ability to turn good people into bad, then what hope can we expect from prisoners to go from bad to good? This is why despite many years in jail, offenders often continue to do their crimes. Further is was also evident that the prisoners were facing mental breakdown and going in stress and depression in only six days. If a criminal is jailed for twenty years, what will be his or her mental state when they leave? Once again they are likely to do crimes because not only have many of them lost everything they had before going to jail, but their mental state is so broken that they will do anything they can to rejoin society and often times that is accomplished by joining gangs. Since the highest crime rates are in the poverty parts of the cities, we should work on fixing the problem before it beings. Creating a nice environment with perhaps police watched regularly in a high crime rate area of a city will make it more difficult for criminals to arise. It would also create safer environments for criminals coming back from jail to return to (if they choosing to go …show more content…
When given power, only a few people can actually control it and not be blinded by it. That was seen when the guards used their power gained from their position to rule the prisoners to their own pleasurment. It shows that humans can not only reach achievements like creating satellites or surgery machines, but they also are capable of sadistic acts done for pleasure and a sense of superiority. Even if the experiment was a role play, it is real elsewhere and people begin to become the roles that society expects, such as the guards in this experiment. It is important to remember our moral and be strong-minded when put in situations that may ask us to go against it. As Kurt Vonnegut once wrote, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to
Stanford Prisoner Experiment Dr. Paul Zimbardo was a physiologist at a Stanford University Professor. He took interest in the nature of prisoners and prison guards. He was interested in finding out if the brutality among prison guards was because of their personalities, or if it was a result of the prison environment. He hypothesized that it wasn 't the nature of the guards that made them brutal, it was the roles that they were expected to play that lead to their brutal and violent nature. To test his hypothesis Dr. Paul Zimbardo set up an experiment. He converted the basement of the psychology section in Stanford University into a replica of a jail. Then he found twenty-four young middle aged men to be a part …show more content…
If the prison system has the ability to turn good people into bad, then what hope can we expect from prisoners to go from bad to good? This is why despite many years in jail, offenders often continue to do their crimes. Further is was also evident that the prisoners were facing mental breakdown and going in stress and depression in only six days. If a criminal is jailed for twenty years, what will be his or her mental state when they leave? Once again they are likely to do crimes because not only have many of them lost everything they had before going to jail, but their mental state is so broken that they will do anything they can to rejoin society and often times that is accomplished by joining gangs. Since the highest crime rates are in the poverty parts of the cities, we should work on fixing the problem before it beings. Creating a nice environment with perhaps police watched regularly in a high crime rate area of a city will make it more difficult for criminals to arise. It would also create safer environments for criminals coming back from jail to return to (if they choosing to go …show more content…
When given power, only a few people can actually control it and not be blinded by it. That was seen when the guards used their power gained from their position to rule the prisoners to their own pleasurment. It shows that humans can not only reach achievements like creating satellites or surgery machines, but they also are capable of sadistic acts done for pleasure and a sense of superiority. Even if the experiment was a role play, it is real elsewhere and people begin to become the roles that society expects, such as the guards in this experiment. It is important to remember our moral and be strong-minded when put in situations that may ask us to go against it. As Kurt Vonnegut once wrote, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to