What Was The Effect Of An Experiment On The Stanford Prison Experiment

Investigation:
The Stanford prison experiment was originally intended to run for a fortnight. However it lasted only 6 days and was ended earlier than initially planned due to the terrible living conditions and psychological problems that developed as the ‘inmates’ and ‘guards’ interacted.. The experiment was run by Philip Zimbardo, Craig Haney, David Jaffe, and W. Curtis Banks. The test subjects were young male college students that were chosen from 75 volunteers. The volunteers had replied to an ad in the paper and were paid 15$ a day to participate. The students were taken from the middle class, they were intelligent and healthy, and they were screened for any psychological problems, medical issues, or crimes to ensure that none had preexisting
Guards were strict but not unkind and 'prisoners' were subservient, although they resented the rules and the emotionally suffocating environment. This would show that the changes in personalities and actions were due to situational differences as the guards and 'prisoners' acted according to how they believed they had been instructed. [E4] However, by the first night, the "guards" started to assert their dominance over the 'prisoners' by taking away the mattresses from some of the less docile 'prisoners' and making them sleep on the floor. When the guards weren’t reprimanded for their ruthless actions, they continued and their cruelty escalated. This change in behaviour is considered to be ‘dispositional’, or internal to the person or subject, as there was no change in the environment that would have resulted in a change of a person’s action. Change in a person’s action, on the other hand, represents a personal choice where, left to their own devices, they were intentionally mean. Additionally the guards woke 'prisoners' throughout the night by blowing their whistles in the common area, which was adjacent to the prison cells. The guards also acted without explicit instructions and forced 'prisoners' to do menial and humiliating tasks. Less than 36 hours into the experiment, serious problems started to occur. “Prisoner” #8612 began to show early signs of having a breakdown and started to scream and rage.
In the experiment, he had people shock others with electricity and discovered that people are easily convinced to provide a (thankfully, feigned) lethal level of shock to another person when instructed that they “had to” by an “authority”, a tall white male in a lab coat. The experiment was done by telling people that another person had done something wrong and had to be punished for their mistake. The authority figure suggested that the test subject shock the wrongdoer. A pre-recorded scream would then sound, and although no one was truly hurt, the test subject didn't know that. Approximately a third of test subjects “shocked” the wrongdoer and went all the way to the top or the board, meaning that if the wrongdoer had, actually existed they would have been subjected to a ‘lethal’