Philip Markoff

Now, as the book progresses on, Zimbardo launches into his experiment which to me is quite interesting and impressive. In this experiment, Zimbardo is wanting to prove that in certain situations, normal good people can turn into perpetrators of evil who commit such behaviors. He calls this, “The Stanford Prison experiment” in which normal individuals were assigned to prisoners and guards as a test of psychology of imprisonment. After having done this, Zimbardo became witness to an extreme number…

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…

Throughout the movie, The Stanford Prison Experiment, multiple incidents defined the experiment as unethical. I remembered the infamous experiment from high school, but did not remember if the experiment took place before or after the establishment of the institutional review board. Logically, I assumed that this experiment took place before the implementation of the International Review Board. However, I was wrong. I find the committee’s assessment both extremely interesting and troubling that…

The Stanford Prison Experiment Does giving one person more power than another really change the way that they will react in a certain situation? Do certain circumstances cause a different reaction in different people? That was the question for the Stanford Prison Experiment performed by Phil Zimbardo in 1971. In an attempt to show what life was like to be in prison, the inmates and guards of Stanford County Jail, were placed in an almost inhumane setting. The tyranny of the men in charge, along…

Raymond Chandler’s The High Window introduces Philip Marlowe as a private detective. Mrs. Murdock is in need of a private detective, and she heard Marlowe can get the job done. He is hired and his duty is to find Mrs. Murdock’s daughter-in-law, Linda, without anyone getting arrested. Linda has stolen one of the valuable coins that Mrs. Murdock’s deceased husband collected. Already the suspicion starts when Marlowe senses that Mrs. Murdock is not telling him the entire story; she doesn’t want her…

King Lear is a tragic play written by William Shakespeare sometime in the early 1600s. The play was first performed in front of an audience on December 26, 1606 at Whitehall Palace as part of his company’s Christmas celebrations. According to the introduction of the book “King Lear is Shakespeare’s most perfect embodiment both of his own artistic vision as a “poet” and of the tragic genre he and other early modern dramatists inherited from classical authors” (Ioppolo viii). The story is about a…

Good can be viewed as morally right or righteous while bad can be defined as immoral or malevolent. Human nature isn’t good or bad but daily surroundings in our lives affect our decisions. In the novel Lord of the Flies (1954), some boys get stranded on an island and lose sense of their personal identity and most become complete savages, because of the lack of civilization. On the contrary, in Hamlet, every decision Hamlet decides is not because he is evil or mad but, because of his beliefs or…

The Iraqi prison twenty miles away from Baghdad Abu Ghraib is now infamous for maltreatment. It is unknown how many people the prison held. The vast majority of prisoners were civilians picked up by the military at traffic stops. They were undocumented in the prison or placed under an ambiguous category of "common criminals" or those suspected of "crimes against the coalition". Most were not meant to be in Abu Ghraib, but since many prisoners were undocumented, this went overlooked as did the…

In 1973, Philip Zimbardo, a professor of psychology at Stanford University conducted a summer experiment showing how humans in would react towards being in closed in a prison environment. He recruited college students and offered to pay them, too many it was more interesting than a summer job. The experiment was supposed to continue for two weeks and the participants would be divided into two group’s containing prisoners and guards. As volunteering prisoners of this experiment they would have to…

Through Phillip Zimbardo 's work, nearly 45 years ago, it was discovered what a person could do to another human being when they have near absolute power. A vast majority of people believe that they would never be able to do all the harmful things that were conducted during the prison experiment; yet I feel, after reading about this experiment and other similar experiments, that everyone is susceptible to the tantalizing taste of power. As an example, just recently I had a spat with my older…