The Stanford Prison Experiment

BY: SKYLLAR

PICTURE LINK

This week in my psychology class we learned about social psychology. Social psychology is the scientific study of how people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagine, or implied presence of others. Originally, I had no interest in learning about social psychology and didn’t see this branch as something I would be interested in. My thoughts on this changed once my professor started talking about the Stanford Prison Experiment.

The Stanford Prison Experiment was a psychological study about the psychological effects of perceived power. The study was done by a social psychologist named Philip Zimbardo. The study involved a group of teenage boys, who volunteered to be a part of the study. The boys were randomly assigned, half of them were prisoners in a simulated prison that Zimbardo constructed, and the other half were prison guards. At first, the guards were calm. They didn’t have any rules except that they couldn’t harm the prisoners. Seeing as it was just a study, everyone was a little unsure of how they should act at first. That began to change very quickly. After only two days the guards began to act extremely powerful over the prisoners. The prisoners wore ID numbers, which is how they addressed one another. The prisoners soon began to lose their sense of identity and became their number. The guards sent prisoners to “The Hole” to discipline them, which was their version of solitary confinement, they made the prisoners constantly doing physically exerting tasks, such as push-ups and jumping jacks.  The guards also harassed the prisoners quite often. The study was supposed to last two weeks, but because of how evil the guards were becoming and how mentally unstable the prisoners were becoming it had to come to an end after only six days.

I read about the study online and also watched the movie “The Stanford Prison Experiment” which, to my surprise, actually portrayed the original experiment extremely well. Professor Philip Zimbardo also wrote a book about the experiment called “The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil”. The book sounds extremely interesting and I definitely want to read it in the future. This study has sparked my interest so much, and it’s crazy to think that originally I never had any interest whatsoever in social psychology.

Zimbardo, Philip G. "Home." Stanford Prison Experiment. N.p., n.d. Web. 16 Nov. 2016.