Leland Stanford

Ethics has always been a contentious topic among scholars. The idea of doing what is right in all situations is not foreign to people, yet humanity still misses the mark. One disciple that it is crucial to consistently be ethical is research. Investigators must use caution and be diligent when conducting research since no harm should be done to the participants. However, research still misses the mark. One example of this is Stanley Milgram’s obedience study (1963). This study is considered so…

Stanford Prison Experiment What prevented "good guards" from objecting or countermanding the orders from tough or bad guards? The good guards were unable to object or countermand the bad guards because of the fear of what it would do to the guards’ authoritative role in the eyes of the prisoners. If they showed disunity as guards the prisoners could take advantage of the unstructured and create chaos within the walls of the prison. By objecting to the bad guards, they take the risk of the…

A standout amongst the most broadly refered to tests in the field of brain science is the Stanford Prison Experiment in which brain research educator Philip Zimbardo set out to examine the suspicion of parts in an imagined circumstance. The point of the test was to research how promptly individuals would adjust to the parts of watch and detainee in a pretending activity that mimicked jail life. Zimbardo (1973) was occupied with seeing if the severity reported among watchmen in American…

Milgram’s (1974) empirical study of obedience is of paramount influence within experimental social psychology. Milgram (1974) was notorious for his fascination with the perils of group behaviour and blind obedience to authority, and aspired to facilitate understanding surrounding human ability to act inhumanely, without boundaries or any apparent conscience, with specific interest surrounding the horrendous acts committed during the Holocaust (Mastrioanni, 2002). Milgram’s (1974) experiment is…

one of the reasons why the roleplaying stopped and the environment became more violent between the police officers and prisoners. The final component that led to the disaster of the Stanford experiment was the situation. In the end of Zimbardo’s experiment “the situation won; humanity lost.” (revisiting the Stanford prison experiment) No matter what your upbringings were it seems that all the volunteers responded to the power they were given. As the prisoners rebelled the guards found…

Throughout the movie, A Few Good Men, there is controversy about obedience to authority when two marines follow an order believed to be unethical. Privates Dawson and Downey, carry out a “code red”, or hazing, of another member of the unit, and were put on trial for the unintentional murder of Private Santiago. Stanley Milgram, Yale psychologist and author of “The Perils of Obedience” claims, “Some system of authority is a requirement of all communal living” (Milgram 78). Along with Milgram,…

In 1963 soon after the Holocaust, Stanley Milgram executed an experiment to document and test human behaviors. The test was to see how far and individual would go to inflict pain on another human when in the company of an authority figure. 40 subjects applied through a newspaper ad and were paired together as a teacher and student. The student however, was an actor stating he had a heart condition and was concerned the test would affect it. Before the test started he was replaced with a…

environment shape our outlook on our behavior. The authority figure will demand and the subordinate will inevitably obey (Milgram,1963). This can be connected to the Stanford Prison experiment conducted by Philip Zimbardo. The myth that Zimbardo originally believed was that generally people are either “good apples” or “bad apples.” Through the Stanford Prison experiment, however; Zimbardo came to the realization that it is not the character of the individual but the environment itself that…

In Ben Harris’ article, “What Happened to Little Albert?”, Harris explains of how John B. Watson’s famous classic conditioning experiment involving the infant Albert B. had different details than what was referenced and recorded and how the misinformation caused mistakes in other future psychologists’ research. After 60 years if Watson and his graduate student, Rosalie Rayner’s publication of the their trials with little Albert, many undergraduate textbooks that pertain to abnormal,…

share a natural response when called to follow power and similarly in their aspiration for it. A human’s desire for power is a characteristic that remains universal. This is evident through The Stanford Prison Experiment, conducted by Phil Zimbardo in the basement of the psychology building at Stanford University in 1971. For the experiment, twelve individuals, in the role of a guard, were instructed…