Stanford Prison Experiment Analysis

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The Stanford Prison Experiment was a study designed to test the psychological effects of becoming a prisoner or guard. It was administered by a crew of researchers and led by psychology professor Philip Zimbardo. The research team placed an advertisement in the newspaper offering fifteen dollars a day to male college students for participating in the experiment. Twenty-four males were chosen and they were told they would be appointed to play the role of either a prisoner or guard. It was planned to last for two weeks. By re-creating a prison environment, the subjects’ state of mind quickly altered. The guards suddenly behaved as if they were greatly above the prisoners, but in reality, they were all just college students who got assigned to their position by a flip of a coin. The prisoners obeyed all of the orders the guards assigned to them, no matter how ridiculous they were. For example, the guards told the prisoners to act as if they were Frankenstein and to put their arms out in front of themselves, then hump each other, and the prisoners did so. It is obvious, in the film, that the prisoners did not want to hump each other, but they listened to the guards because believed it was their job during the experiment. The prisoners carried other absurd and immoral acts. Such as, making their beds over and over again, stripping naked, …show more content…
He did not know what the outcome of the experiment was going to be or how the participants would adapt to their roles. Zimbardo did not expect the prisoners to have emotional and cognitive reactions. The study compares to the ethical issues from the Milgram study because both experiments are determining how far people would go in a situation. If I had been the experimenter in the study I would have chose people who were actually going to jail to participate in the experiment. Rather than having innocent college students be scarred for

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