Essay On The Stanford Prison Experiment

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Stanford Prison Experiment The Stanford Prison experiment consisted of a study between twenty-one college students where the kids were able to choose their role as either a guard or prisoner. Ten prisoners and eleven guards were divided and all were brought to the psychology department building in Stanford University that was decorated by Zimbardo, the lead psychologist, to look like a prison. The guards and prisoners were uncertain how to act at first but quickly began to play their roles where the guards began to yell at the prisoners and the prisoners obeyed their commands. Not to long after all of the prisoners obeyed the guards, the guards became much more aggressive with their commands and actions leading to a revolt by the prisoners locking themselves in their rooms so that the guards couldn’t reach them. This revolt led to the guards punishing the …show more content…
The study conducted was a case study because it was the examination of a certain group in depth. This study was created with random assignment where the participants were given either the position of either prisoner or guard without any requirements or differences. The study also conveyed manipulation towards the prisoners that let the researchers understand the real behavior of a prisoner when put in the setting of a “fake prison.” The Stanford Prison experiment is very popular due to the fact that it was very questionable of the ethics in the research that was done based on the results of how the “prisoners” were effected emotionally. “It is terrible what you are doing to these boys!” is the quote received from one of the fifty or more outsiders that saw the prison and actually questioned the morality of what was being done. (Saul McLeod, 2008) This experiment created requirements to have conducted experiments approved at the national level to see if it was ethical before research was allowed to be