Stanford Prison Study Philip Zimbardo

1. To this day, the prison simulation administered by Phillip Zombardo and his colleagues Craig Haney, Curtis Banks, and Dave Jaffe at Stanford University remains one of the most well-known psychological studies. The objective was to test whether an individual’s internal behavioral tendencies would be abandoned or altered when influenced by situational variables, involving power and vulnerability. Zimbardo proposed such environments, like prison, have the ability to change behaviors, sometimes for the worst. In order to study this effect, the researchers set up a mock prison in the basement of the Stanford University, where 24 participants would later be placed there as either guards or prisoners. The participants were college-age men who initially …show more content…
Although it was meant to last two weeks, the study was stopped after 6 days due to signs of abuse from the guards and extreme stress from the prisoners. Specific examples of the guards’ behaviors included denying bathroom visits or stepping on a prisoner’s back during a push-up punishment. The prisoners experienced fits of rage and emotional breakdowns; and at one point, an escape plan was designed, although they could have left the experiment at any time. Some prisoners became so distressed that they stopped eating and so were released earlier than others. The line between pretend and reality faded quickly; therefore, the study illustrated how swiftly situational variables (such as being assigned a position of power) can influence human behavior. The study built onto Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiment. In this study, participants were asked by an experimenter to deliver increasing shocks to learners whenever a question was answered wrong (Milgram, 1963). Although there were no real shocks administered, the goal was to see if people would harm others based on the presence and orders of an authority figure. Twenty-six out of forty participants obeyed the experimenter’s orders and increased the shock level to 450 …show more content…
To discover the extent to which the need to conform alters behavior, Solomon Asch studied perceptual conformity in a controlled laboratory experiment (1955). Despite conformity often involving beliefs and attitudes, Asch focused on the conformity of perceptions by creating a visual comparison task. He then studied the behaviors of the participants when they were in a room full of confederates who answered the tasks differently from them. In this simple task, the participant, along with 7 confederates, was asked to pick out a line from a set of cards that matched the standard line the experimenter held up. Each person would provide the same answer for a couple trials. In later sessions, the confederates purposefully provided the same wrong answer, which then confused the participant. The question then was whether the participant would stick with the right answer, or would they conform with the group by also picking the wrong