Summary Of The Stanford Prison Experiment

The Stanford prison experiment was organized by three psychologists from Stanford University with a purpose is to observe the behavior between guards and prisoners in a simulated environment, and whether or not a prison environment aided in rehabilitating inmates, or increased the possibility of violent behavior. Formal hypotheses were developed describing that an assignment to either role of prisoner or guard would result in significantly different reactions on behavioral measures of interaction, emotional measures of mood state and pathology, attitudes toward self, as well as other indices of coping and adaptation. The resulting conclusions demonstrated a pathological relationship between aggressive dominant behavior and complete authoritarian
Furthermore, the environment was so convincing, complete role acceptance was visible within the first day, consequently several prisoners were victims of extreme emotional distress. Additionally, some guards were noted to exhibit excessively aggressive behavior, even on the second day, when questioned on why this behavior occurred, many participants claimed that they were just playing the part. I feel that a major flaw of the study was the lack of role definition of the guards, as well as the degree to which the guards were aware that they were being monitored. I feel a more accurate study would be to eliminate the observations during the process and compare an initial review, one in which the subjects are observed only during the initial frame of the study. Allow the subjects to assume their roles unsupervised over the next several days, and make a final review of the circumstances. I believe we would see much more exaggerated abuse of power, to a point in which the excuse of playing the role may no longer be valid. I also believe further defining the guard role could also remove the ‘fitting the role excuse’ all together. As the study revealed that the guards were quick to abandon even their own guidelines on prisoner handling protocols. Moreover, it would be interesting to see
The most important aspect that was revealed from this study is that a person does not need to have a predisposition for violent behavior to demonstrate aggressive control tactics. It was simply the role and uniform of the guard that introduced this need to demonstrate aggression as a means of asserting their power as a guard. Given the freedom to engage in any form of interaction, the nature of encounters between guards and prisoners was mostly negative, hostile, and dehumanizing. This seemed to be the natural human response in a situation where they have total control over another human being. The effect was even more exaggerated in more private situations, either in places with little to no recording equipment or if they were isolated enough from the other guards as well. Prisoners also seemed to almost immediately fall into an absolute form of surrender. The data obtained from this study could be used to examine more effective ways of training and managing prisoners that could result in a more positive result for prisoner rehabilitation and improve their chances of re-integrating into society and preventing future regressive