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Comparing Lord Of The Flies And The Stanford Prison Experiment

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In both Lord of the Flies and the stanford prison experiment, it is demonstrated that people’s more dark and savage side comes out when they are placed in a situation where they are isolated from civilization. In the stanford prison experiment, the college students’ dark sides came out only 36 hours into the experiment: “And finally, about were hostile, arbitrary, and intensive in their forms of prisoner humiliation. These guards appeared to thoroughly enjoy the power they wielded, yet none of our preliminary personality tests were able to predict this behavior,” (SPE 12). The experiment began with average middle class college students who were told to act like prison guards. For the time being, they were isolated to the prison and interacting with the “prisoners” all day. …show more content…

Similarly, in Lord of the Flies, Jack, who is the main antagonist, was an English choir boy whose savage behavior was shown after being isolated to an island. When Ralph is talking to Samneric, they inform him that “They’re gonna hunt [Ralph] tomorrow,” (Golding 188). After this exchange when Ralph asks what they’re gonna do, Samneric simply respond by saying, “Roger sharpened a stick at both ends,” (Golding 190). Sharpening a stick at both ends is an implication that Jack and his tribe will put Raph’s severed head on the stick, like they did with a pig that they captured and ate. This behavior is completely savage, especially when Jack began as an English choir boy. The boys were isolated on an island for a short amount of time and in that time Jack’s savage behavior demonstrates how his savage side comes out after a very short period of isolation from civilization. In both scenarios, seemingly ordinary boys are confined to an area which isolates them from civilization and in a very short amount of time they turn into

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There are uncanny similarities and differences between the novel Lord of the Flies by William Golding's and the Stanford Prison Experiment, conducted by Philip Zimbardo. Two of the main subjects from LOTF were civilization and savagery. When put into isolation, would the boys on the island be civilized or fall into the trap of savagery. In the SPE, Zimbardo wanted to find out how humans would perform in a prison-like environment. He put 24 male students in a prison simulation, role-playing as prisoners and guards.

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983 Words | 4 Pages

In society, the people with more power are likely on a higher level than those who have less power. A person who is given orders has the right to decide whether to follow them or not, and this idea is clearly the situation from reading “The Perils of Obedience,” “The Stanford Prison Experiment,” and watching “A Few Good Men.” At the end of the film, why did the two marines not have to go back to jail, but were no longer allowed to be Marines? Why was their case pardoned from prison sentencing?

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751 Words | 4 Pages

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

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770 Words | 4 Pages

To begin with, the group on the island changed physically because of the their lack of society. “[Jack] began to dance and his laughter became a bloodthirsty snarling” this quote shows physical change and coincidently behavioral change. Jack started off being a civil choir boy but when he was let into the wilderness without adults to maintain his logical way of thinking he started to act more on instincts and doing things out of character. Also without judgement from

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598 Words | 3 Pages

The ¨Stanford Prison Experiment¨ was a breakdown of the morals and rules on how people would act toward one another due to their environment, rather than how they should. The study had created more questions than answers, specifically about the darkness and lack of moral standards that inhabits the human soul. It showed that methodical abuse and denial of human rights is nothing new in prison facilities. The novel Lord of the Flies shows how easily people become dangerous depending on their situation, and how easily humans become savages when there are no definite rules. Lord of the Flies and ¨The Stanford Prison Experiment¨ have many similarities in the way they both show the effects that occur when you lose all moral standards, and lack of rules.

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901 Words | 4 Pages

Jack and Ralph use barbaric behavior to strike fear in the other boys on the island and get them to follow their evil wishes (Lord of the Flies 146). People can also reveal their evil side as an attempt to conform to stereotypes and social groups. In the Stanford prison experiment, the guards and prisoners both let their savage instinct take the better of them when they were trying to fit the part of their assigned social role. “Within a very short time both guards and prisoners were setting into their new roles, with the guards adopting theirs quickly and easily” (“Zimbardo” 2). All of these outside effects take part in the internal struggle between ones good side and evil nature in adults, but the effects of evil can grow even more apparent in

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1122 Words | 5 Pages

In the first chapter “The Sound of the Shell,” all of the boys elect a chief. The way that Jack acts toward Ralph expresses how he is unhappy with the decision of Ralph being chief. The quote “[...] and the freckles on Jack’s face disappeared under a blush of mortification,” expresses how much he wanted to be chief and when he was not elected as chief, he was embarrassed and upset. In chapter 11 “Castle Rock,” Jack wants to become chief and behaves more violently towards Ralph. The text explains that the boys have became more vicious without adult supervision.

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2200 Words | 9 Pages

"(Lord of the Flies 230) Jack had inherited all the wretchedness of the adult world and he displayed them freely. When he found that he could act at will, without being challenged nor cautioned by a grown-up hand he unashamedly turned himself and his choir boys into savages and openly indulged in hunting and murdering, not only animals, but even fellow human beings. He thirsted for blood and lusted all the while for power and position.

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1254 Words | 6 Pages

Situational effects and personality come into conflict when discussing behavior. Personality is someone’s “usual pattern of behavior, feelings, and thoughts” (Twenge, 2017, p.20). It remains constant throughout different situations, but some situations can be stressful enough to make a person act out of character. The transition between a person’s normal personality and behavior to a more evil, sinister behavior fascinates a man named Philip Zimbardo, who conducted the infamous Zimbardo Prison Experiment, or Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE). Zimbardo is an American psychologist at Stanford University and the mastermind behind the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment (The Story).

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Even though there are people willing to risk it all to go back to the life they had, there are some that become submissive and stop fighting. In Stanford Prison Experiment conducted by Stanford phycology department. They recruited college students to run a mock prison so they could study the effect of becoming a prisoner and a prison guard. In this experiment that was supposed to run for two weeks ended up being stopped by the researchers on the six day because it was getting out of control. This is stated by the heads of the experiment Philip Zimbardo, Craig Haney, W. Curtis Banks, and David Jaffe in their report of the experiment.

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599 Words | 3 Pages

Stanford Prison Experiment Philip Zimbardo questioned, “What happens when you put good people in an evil place? Does humanity win over evil, or does evil triumph?” (Zimbardo, 1971) In 1971 a psychologist named Philip Zimbardo conducted an experiment on the effects prison has on young males with the help of his colleague Stanley Milgram. They wanted to find out if the reports of brutality from guards was due to the way guards treated prisoners or the prison environment.

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443 Words | 2 Pages

The Environment Can Control In times of difficulty, individuals tend to change who they are. For example, when one tends to grow up and go through the stages of adulthood, they change their ways in which they act or think. Situations and environment are able to control and manipulate an individual. Situations can become so severe that they can lead to savagery in one’s individual environment.

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The Monitor on Psychology article “What makes good people do bad things?” by Melissa Dittmann analyzes the results of the Stanford Prison Experiment conducted by Stanford psychology professor Phillip Zimbardo in 1971 and discusses what the experiment can tell us about human nature and what causes humans to be evil. In the novel “Lord of the Flies” the author William Golding discusses the effects of the theories mentioned in the article by creating his own fictional experiment with children stranded on an island during a nuclear war. Throughout his novel Golding explores the focus of Dittmann’s article; that environments and situations can bring out the evil that is inside all of us. People can act good or bad depending on their environment, and these actions are not entirely their fault because when people are not held accountable for their actions their more violent natures are revealed.

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1129 Words | 5 Pages

Unit 1 Written Assignment Literature Review of article on Standard Prison Experiment Introduction This article concerns the Stanford Prison experiment carried out in 1971 at Stanford University. The experiment commenced on August 14, and was stopped after only six days. It is one of the most noted psychological experiments on authority versus subordinates. The studies which emerged from this have been of interest to those in prison and military fields due to its focus on the psychology associated with authority.

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1114 Words | 5 Pages

Authority gives a person the chance to feel superior, and as seen throughout this film, those within the position of authority will only then abuse this opportunity. Given the chance for people to gain authority or rather the sense of authority is enough to awaken the evil within. Within the movie, The Stanford Prison Experiment the guards were enabled to set a line of difference between the prisoners and themselves. They were able to make the prisoners feel weak or emasculated, forcing the students to strip and wear the assigned prison clothes that barely covered their genitals (Alvarez). Forcing the prisoners to wear these feminine articles of clothing and assigning them a number, gives the opportunity to strip away their personality and

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