Have We Gotten The Stanford Prison Experiment All Wrong?
Now, I feel confused and duped about the experiment
The Stanford Prison Experiment was one of the most infamous and terrifying psychological experiments in history — a lesson to all of us that perceived power and roles can lead ordinary people as prison guards to treat ordinary prisoners very sadistically.
Every person who has taken the most introductory of psychology courses knows about the Stanford Prison Experiment, led by psychology professor Phillip Zimbardo in 1971. In one of the most controversial psychology experiments ever, college students were assigned the role of prisoner and prison guards. Zimbardo and his group wanted to see whether the brutality among prison guards in American prisons was due to dispositional personalities of guards or whether it had to do with the prison environment.
Zimbardo and his group chose 24 of 75 applicants who were judged the most physically and mentally stable and the least involved in antisocial behaviors. They were all paid $15 to take part in the experiment, but had no idea what the experiment was about. Prisoners were treated like criminals, being arrested from their homes and taken to a police station, and then blindfolded to go to the basement of the psychology department at Stanford, where Zimbardo set with barred…
