Questions On The Stanford Prison Experiment

PSY-362 Social Psychology and Cultural Applications
Stanford Prison Experiment

Directions: Answer each of the questions below with a minimum of 200-words. Use scholarly research to support your answers. Include APA in-text citations in your answers where necessary and list your reference at the end of the document.

1. Do you think that kids from an urban working-class environment would have broken down emotionally in the same way as did the middle-class prisoners? Why? What do you suppose the outcome would have been if women were used a prisoners and guards instead of men? Explain. Kids from an urban working-class environment are more or less exposed to the strivings found within society and may be more emotionally coherent compared to
While the Stanford Prison experiment is considered unethical, what usefulness has come from the experimental outcomes? Was it right to trade the suffering experienced by participants for the knowledge gained by the research? Explain how the experiment and consequently the suffering has added to current research in the field of social psychology.

The experiment could have been unethical and unjustified from an angle of academic and experimentation prudence. Considering the experiment's outcome, subjection to collective thinking provides the germinal seeds for the subsequent breakdown of individual autonomy and therefore rationality between what may be wrong or right (Reicher & Haslam, 2006). The experiment demonstrated that people subscribed to the same social thinking such as guards, reinforce their inherent ideologies and feel confident in the company of one another. On a second note, persistent disempowerment of an individual or group of people in the wake of a form of oppression degrades the will power to rebel and alternatively inculcates acceptance of a tyrannical form of leadership. The hypothetical prisoners were regularly subjected to degrading treatment and therefore traded their willpower for the tyranny. It is logical and duly credited to the participants that such sacrifices are critical to the furtherance of knowledge. However, such an experiment does not deserve
On the other hand, Grimwood and Berman (2012) emphasize that imprisonment carries an element of retributive justice that has been researched to be linearly related to recidivism. In a nutshell, prison does not work, and therefore a redress to the corrections is well overdue. However, the question remains what could be done about offenders that would reflect justice as well as rehabilitation? Grimwood and Berman (2012) propose a multipronged approach where correction follows age and nature of the committed crime. For persons of young age, the duo suggests tighter parental and school involvement. For older offenders, the pair suggests vocational training intensively tailored towards invoking the thirst for behavioral correction. For white-collar criminals, shaming on-spot arrests are encouraged. However, to crown such a noble pursuit of justice and correction, it is suggested that the police take the forefront in patrolling high-crime areas and closely monitoring individuals with a higher propensity for