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Purpose Of The Stanford Prison Experiment In Prison

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The Stanford prison experiment was a study conducted in 1971 that consisted of 22 subjects, half of which were assigned to be “prisoners”, and the other half assigned to be “guards” in a fake prison. (Haney, Banks & Zimbardo, 1973). The original purpose of the study was to provide insight into how the United States prison system functions and the psychological effects of being an inmate in a prison. The study also sought to explain the “deplorable condition of our penal system and its dehumanizing effects on prisoners and guards”. (Haney, Banks & Zimbardo, 1973). As noted in the introduction of the study, one possible explanation for this is that either prisoners, guards, or both are just bad or evil people who deserve to be locked up or deal with people that are locked up. This is not the case, however. The only hypothesis brought forth by the author of the study was that assigning people to be either guards or prisoners would drastically change their psychological outlook. (Haney, Banks & Zimbardo, 1973). …show more content…

(Haney, Banks & Zimbardo, 1973). There were originally 75 people that responded to the newspaper ad for the study, and each was subjected to numerous psychological tests to find the most “normal” people. The 22 subjects were then divided in two groups, randomly, with one group being guards and the other prisoners. One guard did drop out right before the study began, so when the study started there were only 10 guards. The participants were not told specifically what the study was for, but the guards were interviewed and they thought it was to study prisoner behavior. (Haney, Banks & Zimbardo,

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The Stanford prison experiment was led by Philip Zimbardo with the purpose of studying the psychological effects of being a prisoner and a prison guard. The participants of the research study were male college students. Once selected, a coin toss determined which males would be prisoners and prison guards. The experiment took place at Stanford University, where a mock prison was crafted. Zimbardo acted as the warden or superintendent of the mock prison.

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The Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) had a main goal to find out how much of an influence a specific setting location could have on how individuals behave. The experiment took place in 1971 and many psychologists used as a reference to analyze people’s mind under certain circumstance. Young individuals were given the roles of prisoner and guard in prison-like setting located at the Psychology department Stanford University. I strongly believe that this experiment was ethically wrong and did not surprise me at all, since the participant in the study were not fully aware of how dangerous the experiment could turn. Furthermore, the guards were acting like real inmate’s officers

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The Stanford Prison Experiment was a research study administered by Philip Zimbardo in 1971, which gathered twenty-four men to be put into a pseudo-jail to see the impacts of prison on the guards and inmates. Twelve of these volunteers were randomly selected to be inmates and the other twelve became guards. Not surprisingly, the inmates endured incredible torment and a few of them had psychological collapses due to severe emotional distress. The guards were consumed with their own power and felt little sympathy for the inmates that were under their care and stripped them, whipped them, dehumanized them. The research was expected to keep going for two weeks; however it went on for only six days due to the inmates encountering damaging levels

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The “guard mentality” can create negative traits that lead to the inhumane treatment and abuse of prisoners. On the other hand, prisoners that act out in violence and brutality can be traced back to the being confined in a cell. Haney, Banks, and Zimbardo created a mock prison experiment to see how these hypotheses truly affected the guards and prisoners. The subjects for the experiment

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I decided to conduct my research on the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE). This study was conducted in August of 1971 by a psychology professor named Phillip Zimbardo. The bases of the study was to focus on the psychology of human behavior, more specifically psychological effects between prison guard and prisoner. The experiment was to last 2 weeks but only lasted 6 days, due to dangerous behavior between the guards and prisoners. Twenty-four people volunteer to participate in the study, out of this group, they were randomly selected to be either prisoner or prison guard.

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Stanford Prison Experiment: "Evil" by Nature vs. "Evil" by Circumstance? Overview of the Experiment The "Stanford Prison Experiment" was conducted by a psychologist at Stanford University known as Philip Zimbardo. The experiment itself was conducted in order to find out the effect of becoming a prison guard and being a prisoner from a psychological standpoint, and Zimbardo was interested in seeing how good people acted in an evil and oppressive regime. The test subjects voluntarily joined the experiment; the prison guards were paid a low sum of money for their participation, while the prisoners were undergraduates attending Stanford University.

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The Stanford prison experiment, conducted by Philip Zimbardo, vividly demonstrated the influence of social roles, social norms, and scripts on human behavior. In this study, participants were randomly assigned the roles of either guards or prisoners in a simulated prison environment. The participants quickly internalized their assigned roles and began to conform to the corresponding social norms and scripts. The social roles in the Stanford prison experiment were evident as participants took on the roles of guards and prisoners. The guards, for example, displayed behaviors associated with their role, such as asserting authority, maintaining control, and enforcing rules within the prison.

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Discussion 3 The Stanford Prison Experiment was conducted in 1971, at Stanford University, California, in which a group of students were recruited to act as prison guards and prisoners to study the psychological effects of imprisonment. The experiment was supposed to last two weeks, but it was terminated after only six days due to the harmful outcomes. The prisoners suffered mental breakdowns, while the guards developed sadistic behavior, imposing physical and emotional abuse on the prisoners, violating their basic human rights. The study highlighted the power of situations and systems to transform normal individuals into abusive ones.

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Stanford Prison Experiment was conducted by Professor Philip Zimbardo in August 1971. During this experiment, Zimbardo and his colleagues created a prison atmosphere by using realistic methods. College students participated to either become prisoners or guards; they were used to see how people react in certain social situations where a person has more power than another. This experiment revealed how much people’s personalities change when given the opportunity to act superior over another person. This experiment began with the Palo Alto police arresting the group of college students who were the “prisoners.”

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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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You evaluate the pros and cons of the situations at hand as they are developing. Take for instance in this study, the guards had specific instructions not to abuse the prisoners physically, yet there were instances where it did occur. The psychologists decided to allow it to see the reactions and to see how the prisoners would handle it. They also wanted to see if the guards would figure things out and self-correct. Right or wrong, they were evaluating the psyche of the people involved within the study and did not

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In 1971, Philip Zimbardo and his associates at Stanford University conducted a highly influential and contentious study named the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE). Originally setting out to prove that positional factors affected prison conduct equally as much as or even more so than dispositional factors, the study not only supported their theory but also garnered extensive media coverage along with significant ethical ramifications. Furthermore, a docudrama thriller film of the same name, directed by Kyle Patrick Alvarez, premiered in 2015—aiming to disseminate the events of the study to a wider audience. Consequently, the SPE continues to remain highly controversial and one of social psychology’s most well-known experiments.

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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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It showed how normal civilians acted when they were given authority over others. Even the most cordial, intelligent people can take on an evil, machiavellianistic nature when introduced to a dominant role in an individualized setting. This experiment taught psychologists so many things about human behavior and the prison system. It is an event that is taught in classrooms all over the world. While some people question the ethics of the experiment, it paved the way for more understanding as well as the reform of psychological practices

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During this period, Zimbardo observed the radical change in the personalities of the participants embodying the role of the prison guard, as they changed from ordinary young men to men with a vicious and sadistic character. Zimbardo stated that he was trying to portray what transpired when all of the individuality and dignity was stripped away from a human, and their life was completely controlled. He wanted to demonstrate the dehumanization and loosening of social and moral values that can happen to guards immersed in such a situation (“Stanford Prison Experiment”). This experiment has been used to exemplify the cognitive dissonance theory and the power of authority. In addition, the findings advocate the situational explanation of behavior rather than the dispositional one.

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