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Summary Of The Stanford Prison Experiment

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From the video provided this week and doing some personal reading, the phenomenon behind the Stanford prison experiment was a social psychology experiment, this was a prison environment simulation that was supposed to last 2 weeks. The goal was to observe the effects of variables on participants' reactions and behaviors, this experiment was designed to determine if prison brutality is a result of malicious guards and evil prisoners, or whether institutional roles of guards and prisoners embitter and harden even compassionate individuals. Zimbardo wanted to put good people in an evil place and see what would happen. As the Social Psychology textbook says “Do the people make the place violent, or does the place make the people violent? Cristina …show more content…

Role-playing is an exercise that consists of a certain select set of norms that establish how people should behave in a given social position or situation. In the film, the roles have been given of prisoners and guards, they were all given uniforms and all necessary materials. Unfortunately in the case of the stanford prison experiment, role-playing was taken to far, the prisoners and guards fell into their roles, prisoners became insensible and began to rebel, and the guards became brutal and began inhuman acts, for example taking inmates beds, stripping them, they also harassed the prisoners. The concept of roles in this experiment showed us that people are more willing to change their behaviours and personalities if they are placed in a position of power or …show more content…

Going against what is accepted as right. Going against social norms. The participants were in unsafe, unsanitary and dehumanizing conditions. Zimbardo and the guards actions would be considered immoral as taking part in the role-playing causes the guards to go against their initial beliefs and morals. Another example is when prisoner 416 went on a hunger strike, they placed him in solitary confinement and began to harass him, and then took a vote from the other prisoners that they would either give up their blankets or #416 stayed in confinement. Prior to the experiment starting, Zimbardo's rules stated that the max time for solitary confinement was 1

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