Stanford Prison Experiment Essay

Plato once said," The measure of a man is what he does with power," and in psychology, that quote could easily relate to perceived power and human responses. There are three psychological experiments that immediately come to my mind, The Stanford Prison Experiment, Milgram's infamous electroshock experiment, and Asch's peer pressure experiment in the 1950s. These experiments recorded data that reflects on how some people reacted in those situations.

The Stanford Prison Experiment only lasted six days instead of its planned fourteen days. In 1971, Philip Zimbardo a psychology professor, at Stanford who desired to learn about the development of norms and the results of roles, labels, and social expectations in a fabricated prison environment.

The experiment focused on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience. In 1963, Milgram observed justifications for acts of genocide given by those accused at the World War II, Nuremberg War Criminal trials. Their defense was that they were simply following orders, being obedient to their superiors. To test this out, Milgram had volunteers recruited for a lab experiment studying "learning". Volunteers were all male, anywhere between the ages 20-50, various types of jobs, and all from the New Haven area. The experiment was rigged because at the opening of the experiment, they were introduced to another participant, who was working for Milgram. The unaware participant was always the "teacher" and applied the "electricity" to the other participant who was the "learner". The teacher is told to inflict an electric shock each time the learner gets a question wrong, enhancing the level of shock each time. There were 30 switches on the shock generator marked from 15 volts (slight shock) to 450 (danger - severe shock). The learner essentially gave incorrect answers (on purpose), and for each of these, the teacher gave him an electric shock. When the teacher protested administer a shock, the experimenter was to give a series of orders/prods to ensure they continued. Two-thirds of the participants continued to the highest level of 450 volts. Stanley Milgram tested his experiment with 18 variations of his