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Pros And Cons Of The Stanford Prison Experiment

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In my opinion, a debate over the ethicalness of this experiment is unnecessary. The Stanford Prison Experiment was undoubtedly unethical, due to the mortification and the psychological distress subjected on the participants. Also, there’s no debate over the major flaws within the experiment, the main flaw being Philip Zimbardo. Zimbardo was a participant in this own experiment, taking the role of the warden of the “prison”, therefore couldn’t be an impartial leader. Due to his active participation in the experiment, Zimbardo started to lose his perception of reality and was overtook by a facade, like the other participants, and couldn’t recognize the unethical ways of the experiment. The fake prison started to become a reality for the participants …show more content…

An example would be Nazis; the experiment made it easy to comprehend the mentality of the Nazi regime regarding their capacity for evil. Without a doubt, the experiment was extreme but if it weren’t as extreme as it was, the results would’ve probably been different.
The Stanford Prison Experiment was a field experiment. As the experiment didn’t take place in a laboratory but it can classify as a field experiment, due to it taking place in a “natural” environment with the manipulation of certain factors. The independent variable are the participants such as the prisoners and the guards, also the environment such as the “prison”. The dependent variable is the behavior of the independent variable (participants).
With regard to the conflict theory, during the experiment through humiliation and creation of privileges, the guards established their authority over the prisoners, which led the prisoners to oppose the structure of inequality unsuccessfully. Only white males were allowed to participate in the experiment, which eliminated racial or gender conflict. During the first day, the authority of the guards was established, with Zimbardo telling the guards they had authority over the prisoners but no physical abuse towards prisoners was allowed. Conflict over that authority and privileges were a constant between the prisoners and

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Power and authority can be a dangerous thing depending on who has it, and this novel demonstrates this. In the novel it shows that guards have a short leash when it comes to what they will tolerate. There is no respect between the correction officers and inmates. Inmates test incoming prisoners to see how they will fit into the prison structure. The same goes for the guards.

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In Kyle Patrick Alvarez’s The Stanford Prison Experiment, 20 college aged boys are selected to play different roles in a simulated prison located within Stanford. This experiment was thought of and carried out by Philip Zimbardo, a professor of psychology. The boys, who were also students at Stanford, were randomly selected to be a guard or a prisoner. The prisoners were taken by real police officers to the Stanford jail. When the experiment started, most of the prisoners thought of the situation as it was intended to be, an experiment.

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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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The prisoners lost their identity. They became a number. The Stanford Prison Experiment displayed a sense of urgency to evaluate our ability to “run with the crowd” or remain true to your ethical beliefs. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study was conducted on the effects of syphilis when it remains untreated.

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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

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The experiment took place at Stanford University in August of 1971 in the basement of the psychology department. The Stanford prison experiment wanted to explore the adverse effects that oppression from prison guards would have on

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The guards were instructed to maintain order anyway they wanted without using physical violence. Zimbardo wanted the guards to seem intimidating while the prisoners were made to look inferior and were to be referred to with their ID number only. After the prisoners were assigned their roles and the guards took their post was the effect of the experiment finally setting in. On the morning of the second day the prisoners began to rebel against the guards by ripping off their ID numbers and barring the doors while taunting the guards. This event was the first step down the slippery slope that would follow.

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Normal People Behaving Evil The Stanford Prison Experiment was an experiment to see if normal people would change their behavior in a role-play as a prisoner or a prison guard. The experiment was conducted by Dr.Philip Zimbardo in 1973 at Stanford University that caused numerous amount of trauma to prisoners by prison guards in their role-playing position which forced Dr. Zimbardo to officially terminate the experiment six days after it was introduced. Due to the cruel aggressive behaviors from the guards, the experiment led to a question, "Do "normal" people have the capability of behaving badly?" The answer to that question is that most likely an individual who behave normally will have the capability of expressing evil behavior due to the environment that they are surrounded.

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Introductory Textbooks know that they don’t need the Stanford Prison Experiment to be awesome since the belief is that they’re already awesome. You and I might not share the same opinions but who knew textbooks could be all that. Which is ironic because The Stanford Prison Experiment is one of the most famous experiments in psychological history. Haslam and Reicher say the SPE website receives 7,000 visitors each day. Richard Griggs asks the question, is with the Stanford Prison having such prestige, why don’t some textbooks include this famous experiment and critiques?

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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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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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The second aspect that should be highlighted from the author’s hypothesis is that guards themselves, the authority was in a specific mind-set which comes with the role, and most significantly the uniform which played a major role. This enabled them, psychology to commit the negative acts against the prisoners in the experiment. What reinforces this idea the uniforms enabled this is the experiment encouraged negative as well as positive engagement with the prisoners. However most of those involved in the guard roles engaged almost entirely in negative behavior.

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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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Another thing that makes this experiment beautiful is that it can help the police and military offices to train their people in coping the stress of being imprisoned among the prisoners. It would help them to know how that prison environment has a great factor in creating brutal behavior among the

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While the test subjects did in fact consent to the experiment via documents, they developed this false understanding through the experiment that they could not leave at any time, that “there was no way out”. During this time period, there were no existing laws that this experiment violated but it did pave the way for several to be introduced. For example, in the consent form it stated that the prisoners would not experience physical harm, but several days later they were brutally beaten by the guards. A few scenarios such as this one would be considered illegal with today’s legal system. One law that was created after this required federal prisons to separate minors awaiting trial from adults to avoid them suffering from abuse.

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