The Stanford prison experiment is a renowned psychological study of the impact of confinement on natural human response, and was conducted in 1971 at Stanford University by psychology professor Philip Zimbardo. Funded by a government donation from the US Office of Naval Research, the sole purpose of this experiment was to interpret the development of standards and the effects of positions, labels, and social expectations in a conditioned prison setting. Twenty four male students were chosen to take on randomly assigned roles of guards and prisoners in the Stanford psychology building’s basement, which had been transformed into a mock prison. Within a very short time, the characters adopted to their roles. The guards began behaving in a very sadistic manner as they imposed dictatorial measures on the prisoners and eventually subjected them to psychological torture. The prisoners also complied with their characters quite well, and as they became more submissive, the guards’ aggression increased significantly. Zimbardo himself was affected by this experiment, because he permitted the abuse to continue, as superintendent. …show more content…
Zimbardo stated that they had no incentive to extend their cooperation in the experiment after having lost all financial rectification, they did however, because they had internalized the prisoner character. So the students were going beyond the role playing standards, and took their roles to the next level, leading to a blurred line between reality and role playing. Similar to the sequence of events in the novel “Lord of the Flies”, the test subjects formulated their own social value