Stanford Prison Study

The article I decided to post on was our reading about the Stanford Prison Study. What this article was about, as you all should know, is how people took on certain roles, if you will, that they were assigned to imitate for a short period of time. This study was conducted by Zimbardo, from Stanford University. The way he conducted this study was by building a fake prison in the basement of the college and then assigning certain students to be "guards" and "prisoners". He would then act as the "warden" of the prison as he was conducting the experiment. His study went from being a harmless scientific study to, unfortunately, a shocking and disturbing dose of reality. What I mean by this is he found that not only were the students starting to fall victim to their roles, but he was as well. The students who were supposed to be prisoners ended up acting as if they were actual prisoners, even though they had the right to end the study at anytime, by having conflict with the guards, becoming belligerent, and also planning forms of escape. The guards on the other hand were treating their fellows classmates, as if they were really criminals who were actually imprisoned under their supervision. They started doing things to the prisoners, such as, name calling and punishing them in several ways for trying to form escape plans. What was most shocking of all about this study is that Zimbardo himself, started believing that he was a "warden" opposed to his real role as the experimenter. The reason I choose this study to blog on was because I found it extremely shocking that as humans, we can fall victim to what we are told to do. If you would have asked me before I read this if humans were capable of this kind of behavior, I would have told you no way, but after reading this, I have concluded that anything is possible.