Philip Zimbardo's The Stanford Prison Experiment

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. In the six days that the experiment ran they saw the personalities that the prisoner and prison guards took.

When a Catholic priest came to the site of the experiment the researchers noticed, “He interviewed each of the prisoners individually as I watched in amazement as half the prisoners he spoke to, when he introduced himself, responded by giving their numbers rather than their name.” (Stanford Narrative 11). This is important because this shows that given the situation a person is in, it could change the identity of the person itself. This is startling because given the situation of a prison a person could lose the freedom of identity. Where they are willing to give up their name and take the name or in this case their number that are given as their identification. This is also seen in the handmaid’s tale where Offred says “[…]I want to keep on living, in any form. I resign my body freely, to the uses of others. They can do what they like with me. I am abject.” (Atwood 286). When Offred was face with the possibility of death she was willing to give up her freedom of identity to ensure that she lives. She was willing to give up the little freedom that she had left to be alive. This is interesting because throughout the novel she says that she will not surrender to

In Plato’s allegory of the cave he enplanes the effect of society. In the allegory there are people chained in a cave. All they know are the shadows that they see. The shadows are being made by the shadow master who is in front of a fire. So if the shadow master shows them a shadow of a toy dragon then the people in the cave will believe that dragons are real because they saw the shadow. When one of the person is allowed to leave the cave and see the real world they don’t believe it. Even more when they return to the cave to tell the others. The others won’t believe the person that left because all they know is the shadows. That’s why Plato says “[…] that the true analogy for this indwelling power in the soul and the instrument whereby each of us apprehends is that of an eye that could not be converted to the light from darkness except by turning the whole body.” (Plato 750). This is true because we have the freedom to look, to find out what truth is out there, and yet we choice not to because we are content looking at the shadows that others cast and accepting that as truth. In the Handmaid’s Tale the house where Offred lives at has days where everyone gathers in the living room to her the commander read from the bible. The commander’s wife puts one the news to pass the time until the commander shows up. Offred says