The Stanford prison experiment was a social psychology experiment that attempted to investigate the psychological effects of perceived power. It was conducted at Stanford University on the days of August 14–20, 1971, by a research group led by psychology professor Philip Zimbardo using college students. The experiment’s findings have been called into question, and the experiment has been criticized for unscientific methodology.
About Stanford prison experiment in brief
The Stanford prison experiment was a social psychology experiment that attempted to investigate the psychological effects of perceived power. It was conducted at Stanford University on the days of August 14–20, 1971, by a research group led by psychology professor Philip Zimbardo using college students. The experiment’s findings have been called into question, and the experiment has been criticized for unscientific methodology. Variants of the experiment have been performed by other researchers, but none of these attempts have replicated the results of the SPE. The U.S. Office of Naval Research funded the experiment as an investigation into the causes of difficulties between guards and prisoners in the United States Navy and United States Marine Corps. Early reports on experimental results claimed that students quickly embraced their assigned roles, with some guards enforcing authoritarian measures and ultimately subjecting some prisoners to psychological torture. Many prisoners passively accepted psychological abuse and, by the officers’ request, actively harassed other prisoners who tried to stop it. Several prisoners left mid-experiment and the whole experiment was abandoned after six days. In the study, volunteers were assigned to be either guards or prisoners by the flip of a coin, in a mock prison, with Zimbardo himself serving as the superintendent. The study can be seen to be talking to the guards: “You can create the feelings of boredom, a sense of fear to some degree, and a notion of arbitrariness. That is all this leads to all this…
We’re going to take away their individuality in various ways… In all this situation, we’ll have no privacy in this situation in which we have all this power in the situation.” The experiment was conducted in a 35-foot section of a basement of Jordan Hall. Each cell contained only a cot for the prisoners. Prisoners were confined 24 hoursday. In contrast, the guards lived in a very different environment, separated from the prisoners, and were given rest and relaxation areas, and other comforts. The team selected the 24 applicants whose test results predicted they would be the most psychologically stable and healthy. These participants were predominantly white and of the middle class. The group was intentionally selected to exclude those with criminal backgrounds, psychological impairments, or medical problems. They all agreed to participate in a 7- to 14-day period and received USD 15 per day and received $1,000 per day for their participation in the experiment. The participants were recruited and told they would participate in the two-week prison simulation. They were assigned the role of prisoner, while the other twelve were assigned a role of guard. Zimbardi took on the roles of the superintendent and an undergraduate research assistant took on a role as the warden. He designed the experiment to induce disorientation, depersonalization, and deindividuation, and in order in order to order the participants to the experiment for the orientation session for the participants in order for the study to take place.
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This page is based on the article Stanford prison experiment published in Wikipedia (as of Jan. 04, 2021) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
