The Psychological Effects Of The Stanford Prison Experiment

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The Stanford Prison experiment took place in 1971. The entire point of the experiment was to see the psychological effects of being a prison inmate, and being a prison guard. The experiment was led by Philip Zimbardo, which at the time was a psychology professor. He didn’t just use anyone off the streets to take part in the experiment he used male college students. The roles were picked at random, after a psychological test was completed to make sure you did not have any issues prior to starting. The "prisoners" were then picked up from their home and treated just as any other inmate. The setup that Mr. Zimbardo had replicated the prison, along with the food, and uniforms.It truly looked like a real prison, they also had visitation from time …show more content…
For example, the inmate participants were arrested at their home, in front of family and neighbors, instead of going to the location of the experiment themselves. The inmates were also not treated as regular inmates, the guards were having other inmates humiliate themselves and degrade themselves as human beings in front of the other inmates. If any inmate was screaming or unable to control any feelings it seemed like they were left alone, and not helped at all. I don’t feel the guards were given enough information on how to act as a guard at least for the time being, most guards go through training, so for them to act out or have a sense of control would be a given in this situation. While I do agree that most of the criteria was met to determine causality, I don’t believe there was a relationship. Because some were the inmate and others were the guard, and he wanted to see the long term effects, and he did do pre and post test, over several weeks, months, and years, I feel that there may other factors to their behavior besides them being locked up in a facility or working in the facility as a guard. There was definitely no way that the risk benefit ratio can come into play with this experiment, it was truly disturbing to see how they were treated on both sides for that short amount of …show more content…
Both will be ran the same, eat at the same time, everything the same. When there is a riot, an argument, a inmate started yelling or crying, or an guard is treating a prisoner wrong someone higher up should take control of the situation and take the inmate to a room that is set up for segregation, or if the guard have him assigned to another area for the time being, that should be done on one side. While on the other side if anything like that happens just let whatever may happen, happen unless it goes to far then of course step in, because we don’t want to put someone 's life in danger. At least with two different sides of control, with both guards and inmates you can truly see behaviors and the mentalities that inmates and guards

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