The book Lord of The Flies, by William Golding, was about a group of young schoolboys stranded on an uninhabited island after their plane was shot down. At first, they enjoyed the fact that they weren’t being supervised. However, this led eventually them to act like savages and to murder some of their own (“Lord of The Flies”). Were these violent actions that they took apart of their nature? Psychologists had been wondering the same thing for a long time. In fact, they just believed that these children had some hidden trait that made them barbarous by nature. In reality, it could’ve been the stress that they were put through.
Philip Zimbardo is a very popular social psychologist for his groundbreaking work with the effects certain situations …show more content…
The real examples have been compared to The Stanford Prison Experiment. There are so many similarities. He relates the results of his study to Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison investigations. American soldiers in the prison had committed horrible sexual acts against the prisoners. These acts of of “nakedness, bagged heads, and sexual humiliation”, as Zimbardo explains it, were photographed and exposed (Zimbardo “Revisiting The Stanford Prison Experiment” 3). However, he still didn’t believe it was the cruel nature of the soldiers that caused them to commit these brutal acts. Instead, the stress from the place they were put in directed their actions. “In contrasting the relatively benign environment of the Stanford prison experiment, the report makes evident that ‘in military detention operations, soldiers work under stressful combat conditions that are far from benign.’ The implication is that those combat conditions might be expected to generate even more extreme abuses of power than were observed in our mock prison experiment” (Zimbardo “Revisiting The Stanford Prison Experiment” 3). He interprets the report of the incident as blaming the stress the soldiers were in for their actions. This belief corresponds with his own research results. Relatively good people turning bad due to the power of the situation. The Stanford Prison Experiment may be his most infamous work, however his work on shyness in humans is just as
Philip Zimbardo is a very popular social psychologist for his groundbreaking work with the effects certain situations …show more content…
The real examples have been compared to The Stanford Prison Experiment. There are so many similarities. He relates the results of his study to Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison investigations. American soldiers in the prison had committed horrible sexual acts against the prisoners. These acts of of “nakedness, bagged heads, and sexual humiliation”, as Zimbardo explains it, were photographed and exposed (Zimbardo “Revisiting The Stanford Prison Experiment” 3). However, he still didn’t believe it was the cruel nature of the soldiers that caused them to commit these brutal acts. Instead, the stress from the place they were put in directed their actions. “In contrasting the relatively benign environment of the Stanford prison experiment, the report makes evident that ‘in military detention operations, soldiers work under stressful combat conditions that are far from benign.’ The implication is that those combat conditions might be expected to generate even more extreme abuses of power than were observed in our mock prison experiment” (Zimbardo “Revisiting The Stanford Prison Experiment” 3). He interprets the report of the incident as blaming the stress the soldiers were in for their actions. This belief corresponds with his own research results. Relatively good people turning bad due to the power of the situation. The Stanford Prison Experiment may be his most infamous work, however his work on shyness in humans is just as