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The Stanford Prison Experiment Summary

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In this paper, I am going to look at a well-known psychology experiment that was done by Philip Zimbardo; the experiment was called The Stanford Prison Experiment. The goal of Philip’s experiment was to look at the impact of becoming a prisoner or prison guard. “The Stanford Prison Experiment, one of the most controversial studies in the history of social psychology (Konnikova, 2015).” Philip and his colleagues set up a simulated prison in the basement of Stanford University's psychology building. They then looked over a list of 70 volunteers to screen for ones that were best fit for the experiment. Out of the 70 volunteers, 24 were picked; the screening picked those 24 “because they had no criminal background, lacked psychological issues, …show more content…
The guards began to become abusive towards the prisoners, the interactions were aggressive, hostile and downgrading in nature. The prisoners became depressed, some even began crying and had to be let out of the experiment early. Some people are claiming the results are unacurate, saying that it was meant to be downgrading towards the prisoners. For example, one of the appearls worn by the guards were sunglasses, people are not happy about those. Othere people are comparing the results to other things and showing how this happens in real life. For example; an article online says, “The human rights abuses that occurred at the Abu Ghraib prison under the authority of the American armed forces in the aftermath of the 2003 Iraq war may be a recent example of what happened in the experiment in real life (phsycologistworld.com).” Philip Zimbardo’s The Stanford Prison Experiment may not have went as planned it still showed us results that we can all learn from. The experiment taught us how power can go to our head and how when that power is used against us it can make us deeply depressed. Philip’s experiment is known as one of the most controversial experiments in history, but it did provide some decent

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