Prison Environment

The year is 1971, in the Palo Alto, and you are a college student struggling to make ends meet financially. You come across a newspaper article that reads as the following: “Male college students needed for psychological study of prison life, $15 per day for 1-2 weeks beginning Aug. 14. For further information & applications, come to Room 248, Jordan Hall, Stanford U.” You decide that the extra cash could help out, and how bad could it be really? You are then given both diagnostic interview and personality tests to weed out those that had psychological problem, medical disabilities, or any history of a troubled background with crime or drugs. Out of the seventy candidates that answered the article you are left with twenty three others that

Is it their environment, which is responsible factor for these changes? Is there some kind of weakness that is within a person which can cause these type of changes? In the case with the Stanford Prison Experiment, this study showed the effect of how the prison environment can take a healthy normal person, and after being immersed into a controlled situation, in which they are treated as a prisoner, they become mentally altered into someone that was hardly recognizable. Within a short amount of time, not only the prisoners, but the guards were transformed by the environment. The idea that the social situation determines the conduct seems to be accurate. This is in contrast to the idea that our behavior is related to internal factors. If our behavior was related to the internal factors only, then the prisoners would have been able to go along with the experiment and not be traumatically transformed within a matter of days. This external factors determining a behavioral change is also shown in the experiments, conducted by Stanley Milgram, in his obedience of authority of participants to deliver life threating shocks to other

There was another experiment, forty years later, and the findings where quite different from the original experiment. Rather than the prisoners or guards conforming to the assigned roles, there was what was called “creative leadership and engaged followership within a group of true believers”. So is the case of suicide bombers that don’t give up their lives from thoughtless obedience to an authority figure, but because they have become so entwined with the group and the cause that it signifies. This argument, although not a better conclusion, shows that if someone is brought into a different environment, that they can choose to become a follower and then have such conviction that they act according to beliefs that will accomplish the end