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Research Paper On The Stanford Prison Experiment

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The Stanford prison experiment is renowned since it gave valuable information about how human beings react in different situations. I have been studying psychology in school and I remember this experiment catching my attention and therefore it was a clear choice for me to make a paper about. In psychology, there are many perspectives that explain human beings’ behaviour. But what I find attention-grabbing in this experiment is that no matter what perspective you look from, this is gives us a hindsight how human beings tend to act in groups.

All sources I have used in this paper, are from the Internet. I have compared information from different angles to try to get a comprehensive and “objective” view of the experiment. A main source of information is the report from Dr Zimbardo whom was in charge of the experiment. Information is also collected from …show more content…

When the prisoners talked with the priest half of them introduced themselves with their ID-number. During the conversation the priest told the prisoners that they had to get a lawyer to be able the leave the prison for good.
5. Why did the Stanford prison experiment terminate earlier than expected?

The experiment was expected to last for a fortnight. But already after six days the experiment had to terminate. The chance of someone being damaged physically or mentally for the rest of their life was too big.

The experiment was terminated for mainly two reasons. The guards started to abuse their power against the prisoners during the nights when they thought nobody watched them on the web camera. The guards forced the prisoners to do inappropriate acts which started to look more and more like pornography. The other reason was that Christina Maslach started to question if this experiment really was moral when she saw the prisoners wearing bags over their heads and having their legs chained

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