Stanford Prison Experiment Summary

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Program Summary:
In this program, ABC news redoes Milgram’s experiment from the 1960s. ABC news does a psychological test where an experimenter watches and pressures the men and women participants to shock the learner that’s behind the wall, causing him pain. This ABC program also discusses the McDonalds incident that happened in 2004 and the 1971 Stanford prison experiment. This experiment conducted by ABC news started with male and female participants. The “teacher” who was the participant, met the “student” who would be receiving the electroshock if they got the answer wrong. It is the teacher’s job to teach the learner a list of word pairs. The teacher would then read the first word of each pair and give the learner four possible answers. The learner would then press what number out of four they
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The young girl was abused and she did not try to escape while this was taking place. When asked why she did not do anything to stop this she said that when an adult tells you to do something, that’s what you do. You don’t argue. After the McDonalds incident, ABC discussed the Stanford prison experiment by Philip Zimbardo. College students were paid to be guards and prisoners in a make-believe jail. The guards took advantage of their power and started harassing the prisoners, making them do push-ups as punishment and waking them up in the middle of the night. Within 24 hours, everything got out of control. The prisoners would barricade themselves in the cells and they would taunt the guards and curse at them. The guards became more abusive and made the prisoners exercise nonstop, deprive them of food, sleep, and bathroom rights. Some prisoners were suffering from severe trauma and were taken out of the experiment. Even though these guards did not have an authority figure telling them what to do, subjects lost their moral compass. As ABC news talked about all three of these situations, they all had one thing in common. Anyone is capable of anything in