The Stanford Prison Experiment By Dr. Philip G Zimbardo

In the Stanford Prison Experiment, psychologist Dr. Philip G. Zimbardo acquired a group of volunteers to participate in a prison simulation. This group of college-age boys would go on to become prisoners and guards for two weeks with a payment of $15 a day. However, the experiment quickly became out of control. The prisoners started to break down rapidly due to their lack of sense of time and sudden loss of freedom. Initially, they lashed out at the guards saying how the guards had no real control over them. However, as hours passed, it became clear that the guards retained much mental power over the ‘inmates’. Whether it was threatening to put them in the hole or take away their beds, the guards began to obtain more and more control. Also, …show more content…
Ideally, if I participated in the experiment as a guard I would have stood my ground with a level head and avoided the abuse of power. On the other hand, experiments like the Stanford Prison Experiment and Milgram’s Experiment displays an underlying evil in the human race. Dr. Zimbardo expressed how “the line between good and evil is permeable and almost anyone can be induced to cross it when pressured by situational forces” forming an unsettling feeling. Humans prefer to be in control, so the idea that the current and immediate situation is the most influential on a person’s behavior is unnerving. This concept is called Situationism. Behaviors change in different scenarios, therefore, this theory focuses on how environmental factors affect a person’s actions. In this experiment, the role of the participants was randomly selected - by a coin flip. The psychologists in the experiment concluded that the first prisoner to leave, 8612, only broke down when he had no control over the others. He wanted the power and when he had others following his lead, he functioned more sensibly. However, when the environmental factors changed to him being isolated in the hole, he completely broke down - within 2