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How Did Philip Zimbardo Conform

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This essay will describe Phillip Zimbardo’s conforming to social roles experiment and its contribution to our understanding of human behavior. It will start by talking about how the experiment started and how Phillip Zimbardo chose who became prisoner and who became prison guard it will then go on to discuss how the social roles started and began to change the students morals and ethics when the prisoner was stripped away from their identity and completely controlled and how power took control of the situation it will then lead on to the understanding of human behavior and how this changed the experiment that was supposed to last two weeks end just after six intense days. It will then end with the conclusion as a result of the experiment psychologists …show more content…

These series of events seemed to bring out the worst in both prisoners and guards. Prisoners were losing all sense of personal identity after being referred to as numbers and not personal names this made them feel less important and they successfully believed it to be true.
After six intense days of Phillip Zimbardo’s conforming to social roles experiment a graduate student who was only there to take notes and interview was so shocked by what she saw she demanded the experiment end straight away as it was degrading to watch and degrading for all who took part as Phillip Zimbardo and his team watched the situation descend into chaos she was only the voice that spoke up about how bad the experiment truly …show more content…

Two ‘prisoners’ had to be removed early from the experiment and several were emotionally distressed.
However, it does show the power of situation on people’s behavior and decision-making. The people chosen for the experiment were regular students. They were assigned to their roles randomly – the prisoners had not done anything ‘wrong’ and the guards had not earned their position of authority. However, the ethical decisions they made during the experiment were directly related to the roles they were assigned – the guards believed it was ‘right’ to punish and humiliate the prisoners because the prisoners were ‘bad’.
As for the ethics of the experiment, Zimbardo said he believed the experiment was ethical before it began but unethical in hindsight because he and the others involved had no idea the experiment would spiral to the point of abuse that it did.
The Stanford Prison Experiment reveals the powerful role that the situation can play in human behavior. After the experiment, the students who played the guards were interviewed and found to still be shocked by their behavior within the fake prison environment, unrecognising that side of them or that they were even capable of doing such evil and abusive

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