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One of the infamous experiment in the history of psychology was the Stanford Prison Experiment. Its creator, Dr. Zimbardo, main objective was to see what effects would occur when a psychological experiment into human nature was performed. As I began to perform some research of my own, I noticed that my thoughts on the matter were similar to many; that as a scientific research project, Mr. Zimbardo’s experiment it was a complete failure. However, his findings did provide us with something that was much more important that is still being talked about today; insight into human psychology and social behavior.…
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The experiment took place in the basement of the Psychology department in Stanford University and selected 24 undergraduate students out of 70 volunteers due to their lack of psychological issues and had no criminal record. Zimbardo paid each of the 24 participants 15 dollars a day in a span of one to two weeks. The 24 volunteers were randomly assigned to play a role as either a guard or a prisoner. The cell was made up of three prison cells, each one holding three mock prisoners. The guards chosen had to work in an eight hour shift alongside two other participants. The guards chosen have their own cell to themselves and one small room for solitary confinement. Kendra Cherry stated in her article that, “According to Zimbardo and his colleagues, the Stanford Prison Experiment demonstrates the powerful role that the situation can play in human behavior” (Cherry). The volunteers for this experiments took on their role almost instantaneously.…
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(“On the Ethics of Intervention…” narration 1-3). More than seventy people signed up, but only a total of twenty four people were ‘clean’ from crimes or psychological problems (“On the Ethics of Intervention…” 1). “Virtually all had indicated a preference for being a prisoner because they could not imagine going to college and ending up as a prison guard. On the other hand, they could imagine being imprisoned for a driving violation or some act of civil disobedience” (“Reflection on the Stanford…” 5). Prisoners were arrested for either burglary or armed robbery (Lestik 1). The guards and convicts were destined to their roles by a flip of a coin to be fair (Lestik 1). College students who were selected to represent the role of prisoners were arrested by the Palo Alto police as if they actually committed action against the law (Lestik 1). Rights were read, fingerprints were stamped, and they were handcuffed into a police car (Lestik 1). The prisoners did not know what was going on even though they signed up for the experiment (Lestik 1). “We were studying both guard and prisoner behavior, so neither group was given any instruction on how to behave. The guards were merely told to maintain law and order, to use their billy clubs as only symbolic weapons and not actual ones, and to realize that if the prisoners escaped the study would be terminated”…
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The Stanford Prison Experiment was a study conducted in 1971 by Dr. Phillip Zimbardo. According to Dr. Steve Taylor (2007), “It’s probably the best known psychological study of all time.” (Classic Studies in Psychology, 2007). Zimbardo stated that the point was to see what would happen if he put “really good people in a bad place” (Dr. Zimbardo, 2007). He did this during a time were most college students were protesting for peace and were against anything authoritarian. The experiment contained both positive and negative aspects; which will be discussed further in this paper.…
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The stanford prison experiment is one of the infamous experiments conducted in the history of psychology. The experiment was conducted at Stanford University in August, 1971 by a team of researchers led by psychology professor Philip Zimbardo. The basic premise was to find out and determine what happens when you put good people in an evil place? Does humanity win over evil, or does evil triumph? Does the system that we inhabit and are a part of start to control our behaviour or our inner morality and values continue to direct it? It was a study of the psychological effects of becoming a prisoner or a prison guard. To carry out this experiment, a subterranean jail was set up in the psychology department building. Adverts were placed in local newspapers offering $15 per day for participants in this program. Of the 75 responses, the 24 male subjects judged to be most mentally and emotionally stable were selected. Those 24 were then divided into two groups randomly, of 12 prisoners and 12 guards. The group selected to be the guards were outfitted in ‘military-style’ intimidating uniforms. They were also equipped with wooden batons and mirrored shades, to prevent eye-contact and make the guards appear less human. The researchers held an orientation session for guards the day before the experiment, during which they instructed them not to physically harm the prisoners. In the footage of the study, Zimbardo can be seen talking to the guards: "You can create in the prisoners feelings of boredom, a sense of fear to some degree, you can create a notion of arbitrariness that their life is totally controlled by us, by the system, you, me, and they'll have no privacy... We're going to take away their individuality in various ways. In general what all this leads to is a sense of powerlessness. That is, in this situation we'll have all the power and they'll have none." The prisoners were instructed to wait at home "to be called" for the start of…
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Test subjects were randomly assigned to either the role of the prison guard or the prisoner and were set to remain in this position for two weeks. They were then placed in a section of the basement in the Stanford psychology department, which was transformed into a makeshift jail. Several guards, who had not previously shown any signs of violent behavior, began using forceful ways to control the prisoners. On the other hand, the prisoners began to show signs of dehumanization and became totally dependent on the guards. Relationships between the two groups changed drastically very soon. After only six days, the experiment got out of hand and was shut down out of fear that one of the prisoners may become seriously injured. Following the experiment, many of the guards were shocked by how they behaved in that situation, and many of the prisoners couldn’t believe they acted in such cowering and depending…
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11. What did the Stanford Prison Experiment study? How did the student’s act during the study? 12 guards 12 prisoners 24 students. Experiment suggest the substantial problem with group behavior.…
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Maxfield and Babbie in their book Basic of Research Methods for Criminal Justice and Criminology explain the purpose of the Stanford Prison Experiment was to test the situational hypothesis of the prison environment itself. Maxfield and Babbie state, “…the prison environment creates dehumanizing conditions independent of the kinds of people who live and work in the institutions (Maxfield and Babbie, p. 43. 2009).” The experiment took on an exploratory design, which indicates the specific problem had not been clearly defined (Maxfield & Babbie, 2009). Zimbardo himself could only compare experiments of this nature to his high school friend, Milgram who conducted research on obedience to authority figures as related to the Holocaust. Exploratory research is begun to explore an issued regarding society to answer of the questions needed to conduct further studies. To this date the Stanford Prison Experiment has not be replicated exactly in any series of further on experiments related to the outcome of the original. The experiment was created by Curtis Haney, Craig Banks, and Philip Zimbardo (1973) in the basement of the Stanford University psychology department building where the “prison” was constructed. The “prison” consisted of cells, a “yard”, and a solitary confinement cell. An ad was placed in a newspaper and 75 volunteers answered the call but only twenty-one were chosen. The subjects with physical or psychological problems were vetted and those left were offered $15.00 a day to participate. The left over subjects were randomly assigned to be either guards or prisoners (Babbie & Maxfield, 2009).…
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The experiment took ordinary college students and had some agree to be prisoners and the rest would be guards for the prisoners. Both groups received no training on what to do or act like. They had to get all of their knowledge of what to do from outside sources, such as television and movies. The guards were given uniforms and night sticks and told to act like an ordinary guard would. The prisoners were treated like normal criminals. They were finger printed and booked, after that they were told to put on prison uniforms and then they were thrown into the slammer (in this case a simulated cellblock in the basement was used). All of the participants in this experiment at first were thought to be similar in behavior but after one week, all of that changed. The prisoners became "passive, dependent, and helpless." The guards on the other hand were the exact opposite. They became "aggressive and abusive within the prison, insulting and bullying the prisoners."…
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In 1971 Phillip Zimbardo conducted a controversial study know as the Stanford prison experiment. The experiment was a psychological study of human reactions to being imprisoned and how the effects would interfere with the normal behaviors of both authorities and the inmates in prison. Zimbardo and his team hypothesized “that prison guards and convicts were self selecting of a certain disposition that would naturally lead to poor conditions.” Zimbardo used undergraduate volunteers to play the roles of the guards and the prisoners in a mock prison he created in the basement of the Stanford psychology building. He then recorded how both the prisoners and guards quickly adapted to their roles, and soon this lead to one-third of the authorities taking place in sadistic acts towards the prisoners, which was argued to have lead to psychologically harmful situations. Due to the appalling conditions of the prison, both sanitarily and psychologically the experiment ended on August 30, 1971 just six days after it began, which was eight days short of the foresighted fourteen days it was supposed to have lasted. Many similarities in the ethical concerns of the Stanford experiment were found in the Milgram experiment which was conducted in 1961 by Stanley Milgram one of Zimbardo’s high school friends.…
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In Zimbardo’s experiment they constructed a prison in the basement of Stanford University’s psychology building. There were twenty-one participants (ten prisoners and eleven guards), all of which were…
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The Stanford Prison Experiment was an experiment to see what would be the psychological effect of becoming a prison guard or a prisoner. To do the experiment they set up a prison in the basement of Stanford’s Psychology Department Building. They used a sample of 24 students from the U.S. and Canada who were in the Stanford area and wanted to make $15 a day for participating in the study. To begin the experiment the boys were divided into two group half guards and half prisoners. To help get a better prison environment they called the services of experienced consultants. To closely monitor the prisoners they videotaped and recorded the events.…
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What followed was an investigation into human nature. Prisoners experienced extreme degradation, punishment, despair, oppression and depression as they began to wholly believe they were prisoners. The guards took their role quite seriously as they strictly enforced the law and asserted their given power and authority. The Stanford Prison Experiment, which was supposed to last for two weeks, ended after six days when researchers realized that guards were becoming incredibly abusive and that the prisoners were beginning to forget that they were not actual prisoners.…
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The Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) by Phil Zimbardo has been for me an example of the astonishing things that we humans are capable of. I guess as an example of human gullibility, I had not been skeptical about the experiment, which lacks quite a few scientific markers (aside from its ethical problems). During a talk by Barbara Oakley, she was asked to comment about the SPE because it showed the influence the situation and roles could have on human behavior. She responded that there are quite a few questions about this experiment and pointed us to a summary of the critique at Wikipedia. I finally had a chance to review this and am retiring another holy cow now: the experiment is, well, crap not nearly as thoroughly tested against reality as we are led to believe… (Thanks to a discussion in thecomments, I now understand that Zimbardo does deserve credit for pointing to the importance of situational influences. I still think, though, that he, at best, could use SPE for the development of hypotheses, not as support for a theory, as he seems to be doing. ).…
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In 1971, Philip Zimbardo conducted one of the most infamous experiments known to this day as the Stanford Prison Experiment. Its objective was to understand the effects prisons can have on human behaviour. Zimbardo, together with his research team hypothesized that in a prison environment, the personality traits that are inherent in a person are chiefly responsible for abusive behaviour. His research participants were twenty-four male college students who attended Stanford University. They were interviewed and screened to ensure that they had no criminal records, medical conditions or any psychological disorders. Through a random coin flip, half of the participants were then given the role of prisoner, while the other half were given the role…
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