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Psychological Effects Of The Stanford Prison Experiment By Zimbardo

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The Stanford Prison Experiment was a psychological study conducted to find out the effects of people assimilating into the roles that they are assigned as well as to find out the effects of imprisonment on the human psyche, even if it was only for a week. The people chosen to participate in the experiment were chosen very carefully; Zimbardo, the man who designed the experiment, made sure that the participants were healthy and had no psychological issues that would mar the results of the experiment or add too many confounding variables to the mix. He randomly split the participants into two groups, 9 guards and 9 prisoners with 3 alternates for each group making a total of 24 people. He kept them in a “prison” and allowed them to have full autonomy over what happened during the experiment. …show more content…

By the second day the prisoners became non responsive and refused to adhere to the rules set down by the guards, and this set off a chain reaction where the prisoners began to rebel more and more to the guards. The guards in turn became more and more sadistic and cruel to the prisoners in an attempt to quell this perceived rebellion. The regular students who were picked for this experiment turned into cruel savages, both from the prisoners side and the guards side. The experiment had to be ended early, because the guards were being so cruel to the prisoners that it became a liability for Zimbardo. By the end of the experiment, most of the prisoners truly felt like they were actually prisoners, and the guards felt like they were actually guards assuming the identities that they had been

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