In the summer of 1971, Dr. Zimbardo designed and conducted an experiment that would forever change the way that sociologists and psychologists viewed human nature and how environmental circumstances can change a person’s psyche. While the experiment was designed to last two weeks, it had to be terminated after the sixth day due to the rapid increase of abuse against the prisoners by the guards. Though it is now considered extremely unethical by society’s standards today, The Stanford Prison Experiment gave scientists invaluable data on how total authority dominates over a person’s ability to reason and empathize with others. The experiment itself was designed to test if the conflicts within the prison system were caused by individual psychological
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The evidence recorded by the experiment suggests that without guidelines or supervision from higher authority, prison guards are more likely to overstep their authority and promotes the abuse and mistreatment of the prisoners. On a grand scale, these behaviors are largely exhibited in high security prisons such as Guantanamo Bay, where suspected terrorists are often subjected to unethical and illegal methods of torture and interrogation. In these types of prisons, detainees are often objectified and stripped of their humanity. The torture methods used by interrogators have been shown to cause permanent damage both physically and mentally for the prisoners and include methods like waterboarding, public humiliation and degradation, mock executions, forcing others to watch fellow inmates be tortured, sensory deprivation, and sensory bombardment. Needless to say, many human rights experts have raised concerns about the treatment of inmates at Guantanamo …show more content…
For obvious reasons, the conflict theory is one of the most applicable because it highlights the struggle between the guards and the prisoners for control of the institution. On that same note, the social interactionism theory is able to take the results of The Stanford Prison Experiment and use it to explain the mistreatment of prisoners in under supervised prison environments. Sociologists were able to take the experiment’s results and apply them to communities as a whole, showing that the world should be weary of giving people who are unprepared for power too much control over a short period of time. It also raised a large number of questions in the field of psychology, forcing people to ask themselves if the institution and limitless power is what corrupted the guards, or if rather the institution only brought out the buried animalistic tendencies held deep within even the most “normal” of human
The evidence recorded by the experiment suggests that without guidelines or supervision from higher authority, prison guards are more likely to overstep their authority and promotes the abuse and mistreatment of the prisoners. On a grand scale, these behaviors are largely exhibited in high security prisons such as Guantanamo Bay, where suspected terrorists are often subjected to unethical and illegal methods of torture and interrogation. In these types of prisons, detainees are often objectified and stripped of their humanity. The torture methods used by interrogators have been shown to cause permanent damage both physically and mentally for the prisoners and include methods like waterboarding, public humiliation and degradation, mock executions, forcing others to watch fellow inmates be tortured, sensory deprivation, and sensory bombardment. Needless to say, many human rights experts have raised concerns about the treatment of inmates at Guantanamo …show more content…
For obvious reasons, the conflict theory is one of the most applicable because it highlights the struggle between the guards and the prisoners for control of the institution. On that same note, the social interactionism theory is able to take the results of The Stanford Prison Experiment and use it to explain the mistreatment of prisoners in under supervised prison environments. Sociologists were able to take the experiment’s results and apply them to communities as a whole, showing that the world should be weary of giving people who are unprepared for power too much control over a short period of time. It also raised a large number of questions in the field of psychology, forcing people to ask themselves if the institution and limitless power is what corrupted the guards, or if rather the institution only brought out the buried animalistic tendencies held deep within even the most “normal” of human