Compare And Contrast Stanford Prison Experiment And Philip Zimbardo

In 1971, Philip Zimbardo set out to conduct an experiment to observe behavior as well as obedience. In Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison experiment, many dispute whether it was obedience or merely conforming to their predesigned social roles of guards and prisoners that transpired throughout the experiment. Initially, the experiment was meant to test the roles people play in prison environment; Zimbardo was interested in finding out whether the brutality reported among guards in American prisons was due to the sadistic personalities of the guards, disposition, or had more to do with the prison environment. This phenomenon has been arguably known to possibly influencing the catastrophic similarities which occurred at Abu Ghraib prison in 2003.The

Neither one of the circumstances was ethical at any point and had been publicized by the media for its explicit type of interrogation methods as well as sadistic behavior. In particular, Phil Zimbardo has argued that the study shows that strong situational forces can override individual differences in personality and moral values. In Abu Ghraib, soldiers were inserted into the role of prison guards and began to sadistically torment prisoners there and at other detention sites in Afghanistan and Iraq. Many of the specific acts of humiliation were similar to those that transpired in the Stanford Prison Experiment, according to Zimbardo. This theory has been challenged by allegations by Seymour Hersh, in the New Yorker, that these soldiers were in fact acting under direct orders of their superiors as part of a top secret Pentagon intelligence gathering program authorized by Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld. In summary, the purpose of the Stanford Prison Experiment was supposed to demonstrate that powerful situational forces, much like Abu Ghraib, could over-ride individual dispositions and choices, leading good people to do bad things simply because of the role they found themselves