The Stanford Prison Experiment Summary

The Stanford prison experiment is an article that describes an experiment conducted by Zimbardo (1973) aimed at investigating how readily people would conform to the roles given to them in a role-playing exercise in a simulated test. Zimbardo (1973) wanted to determine whether the brutality reported among the inmates in America prisons was because of the sadistic dispositional tendencies of the guards or was caused by the jail environment and situations. Thus, this experiment was directed at examining whether the aggressive and domineering behavior of the guards resulted from the disrespectful nature of the prisoners to law and order (McLeod, 2016). The alternative to this would be that the aggressive and hostile manner of the inmates and guards was due to the social environment and the power structure in these prisons. The hypothesis for the experiment was that,

The prison environment created the brutal behavior in guards and the passive mood in the prisoners thus supporting a situational explanation of the behavior of the participants. The guards immersed in the norms of the group to the point that they forgot their personal responsibility and sense of identity. This phenomenon referred to as deindividuation. The learned helplessness explains the prisoner’s submission to the guards because they learned that whatever they did have no effect on what happened to them (McLeod, 2016). The social behavior of this experiment cannot be applied to other settings because this was an American prison and prisons around the word do not behave in the same manner. While America is an individualistic culture, Asian countries are a collectivist culture and hence the results may alter in such settings. Thus, this study may explain the social behavior in American prisons, but it’s hard to apply these findings to prisons in, say,