The Stanford Prison Experiment Character Analysis

In our society, we often tend to act and adapt into a situation that we are not familiar with such as getting into a character for a role in a story or a gimmick that provides a different persona that we are not supposed to be but we still do it in order for the sake of the role or gimmick we want to transform in. We often want to bring life to a character that we don’t; for example, actors get ready for a role for a show and movie in order to get into a character to have a deeper connection to the character they are portraying. Although, getting into character can actually do more harm to the person own psychological behavior that the persona they wish to become has consumed their own mental identity. For instance, Heath Ledger portraying …show more content…
Zimbardo took twenty-four male students and half of them to act prisoner inmates and prison guards. He asked them to personate the prisoners and the guards as much as they can before the experiment started. Zimbardo states, “You can create in the prisoners’ feelings of boredom, a sense of fear to some degree, you can create a notion of arbitrariness that their life is totally controlled by us, by the systems, you, me and they’ll have no privacy…. We’re going to take away their individuality in various way. In general what all this to is a sense of powerlessness. That is, in this situation well have all the power and they have none” (Haslam & Reicher 2003). Zimbardo made some strong and powerful suggestions to the guards in order to take the part as the guard but they did it to break them emotionally. Therefore, Zimbardo was challenging the students to adapt to the situation of the prison in order for the experiment to be successful. Consequently, the students took it to a whole new level that Zimbardo and his colleagues never thought that would come across that would the prisoner student to an emotional distressed. Being thrown into a situation like that people need to be mentally prepared for any hazing or the person own self-awareness of what they were getting themselves into. In similarity, they are going in of not knowing the outcome of the experiment such as when college students getting ready to take a mid-term or final exam they think they know how the test will consist of and they studying for numerous hours but when it came down to test day all the material that they studied for the test did not conceive the same material when they were