Of The Stanford Prison Experiment By Dr. Philip Zimbardo

In 1971, Dr. Phillip Zimbardo conducted the Stanford Prison Experiment in which he recruited normal young men who were college students and drastically changed their environment in order to show what the desire for obedience can do to a person’s sense of civil responsibility. The cruel acts committed at Abu Ghraib blurred the lines between the prisoners and the guards because the prisoners were stripped away of their freedom and their human rights. The prison at Abu Ghraib was originally used by Sadaam Hussein to torture and execute political prisoners . The Stanford Prison Experiment puts prisoners against each other in a prison environment in order to access how far human beings are willing go in order to be obedient . Philip Zimbardo

In each instance, these honorable members of society were obedient to a new set of rules and the results were tragic. During his experiment, Zimbardo discovered that the men who played the role of guards were told to keep order in the prison. They did as they were told as many people would do. The guards kept the inmates in line by using evil looks and intimidating tactics. As the experiment progressed , the guards became extremely hostile, degrading the inmates and humiliating and tormenting them using psychologically . Even Zimbardo himself got irritated at one point during the experiment. The inmates behaved in the same way, becoming more concerned about keeping the peace rather than treating each other with respect. American soldiers tortured and humiliated prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison The inhumane acts against these prisoners were exposed to the world. The fallout from these events was tremendous and people everywhere were disgusted by the cruel acts that that were inflicted upon the Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib at the hands of American soldiers in the name of

The guards and soldiers got so carried away with their position of power that they lost sight of what their job really were. The students involved in the experiment started behaving in the same way because they thought that they were really in prison and that they were not informed that it was still an experiment. The isolation caused the groups to develop an us against the world mentality which led them to believe that no one would understand what they were going through except for the other members of the communities. A while after the experiment, a prisoner was asked about his experience during the experiment and was asked to discuss on his time in solitary confinement. He talks about how he lost his identity and how he became just another prisoner at the time. Zimbardo compared this prisoner's response to an actual prison inmate that had just been let out of prison. Their responses were very similar, both describing the loss of pride and humanity for the actions which put them in prison in the first place. People around the world were applaud after they heard what happened to the prisoners at Abu Ghraib. During his research Zimbardo concluded that , the need to conform and be obedient to authority figures can produce serious consequences. The