Stanford Prison Experiment Inhumane

Stanford Prison Experiment SPE The Stanford Prison Experiment has given a strong hint about how influential the society and situation can be. The experiment was originally designed to test whether the tension in prison was a cause of inmates’ inherently flawed personality; however, the result has revealed that any healthy human being can be transformed into a violent figure after being assigned a specific role and put in a designed situation. Indeed, the result was shocking, and the procedure of the setting of the prison was insanely inhumane. Despite the criticisms, the experiment serves a good purpose for people to better understand social psychology. The group structure, or the network and community pathways, of the prison simulation,
At the beginning of the experiment, everyone had an ascribed role or a role assigned by the conductor of the experiment. Professor Zimbardo was ascribed to be the superintendent. 24 healthy male college students were randomly assigned to be either the guards or the prisoners. The guards’ responsibility was simply to cause chaos and disturbance among the inmates without using physical force. A small degree of protest was expected from the prisoners. Surprisingly, a prisoner was already emotionally out of control and refused to cooperate on the second day of the study. Some guards even secretly attacked the prisoner with fire extinguishers regardless of the rules. Since then, the guards and prisoners started to develop roles defined by themselves and eventually attaining achieved roles in the prison. The guards gain status, or social importance, by constantly bully the prisoners psychologically, equipped with wooden batons and enjoy comfortable beds and meals. Meanwhile, the prisoners are abused and suffering from lack of food and other comforts unless they passively follow the orders given by the guards, and hence the
The degree of attraction among in-groups is fairly strong. The guards who identify themselves as one group has strong bonding. The earlier examples of all guards agreed with attacking inmates with fire extinguishers and designing even crueler plans for them to manage the prisoners have shown strong cohesiveness among them. Similarly, the original prisoners would protest against the are prisoner 416’s action that resulted in punishment among them. Predictably, there seemed to be a lack of cohesiveness among the out-groups. The prisoners and guards who identify themselves as acquiring rivalry roles tend to exaggerate the differences and negative qualities of the opposite group. The prisoners view the guards as brutal abusers, while the guards treated them as if they were worthless. Towards the end of the experiment, it had become a norm for the guards to torture people and the prisoners to obey orders. Prisoner 416 who came in later in the study who refuses to conform with the other prisoners, was also viewed as an out-group by