The Stanford Prison Experiment Summary

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Introductory Textbooks know that they don’t need the Stanford Prison Experiment to be awesome since the belief is that they’re already awesome. You and I might not share the same opinions but who knew textbooks could be all that. Which is ironic because The Stanford Prison Experiment is one of the most famous experiments in psychological history. Haslam and Reicher say the SPE website receives 7,000 visitors each day. Richard Griggs asks the question, is with the Stanford Prison having such prestige, why don’t some textbooks include this famous experiment and critiques? I can’t believe that Gray decided to leave out the SPE because he couldn’t agree with the usual interpretation that the situation affects how people behave. He also couldn’t …show more content…

It’s important to note that the researchers of this experiment did not take any leadership roles which is different from the SPE. They concluded that chaos comes from the less powered individuals identifying with more violent regimes and their leaders just like when I was watching the Interview and the North Korean leader was sitting in a tank listening to Katy Perry. The BBC study also failed to show the brutality of the guards like in the SPE so no paper bags for those prisoners. This study is different from older studies including Gray’s study about his decisions in his evaluation because the authors of the introductory textbooks have more information on the SPE than studies from the past. Thank god for the advancement of technology. The purpose of this study is to find what these authors have covered of the SPE in their textbooks. Griggs and Jackson made sure that the books were contemporary by picking the latest copyright dates between 2011 and 2013. So, we can all be pretty sure these books aren’t covered in inches of dust. All the books were checked to make sure they include the full story and the critiques of both the SPE the BBC Prison Study. The present study aims to see how much current books reference the SPE. First, Griggs and Jackson looked at the 13 copies of the books and checked the indexes for Zimbardo or SPE. Also, they went page by page for information not stated in the index which would give anybody a headache. If there was coverage, they wrote down the page numbers and how many paragraphs covered the experiment which I’m sure took forever. They determined the extent of the coverage by subheading the text and determined the completeness by what other related studies were