Comparison Of The Stanford Prison Experiment

What is the Stanford Prison Experiment?

Phillip Zimbardo conducted the Stanford experiment where 24 physiologically and physically healthy males were randomly selected where half would be prisoners and the other half prisoner guards. To make the experiments as real as possible, they had the prisoner participants arrested at their homes. The experiment took place in the basement of the Stanford University into a temporary made prison.

The prisoners were given prison uniforms and number. The prisoners were subjected to numbers over their names and required to remember their names as ordered by the guards. When they reached the prison, they were blindfolded, stripped naked and forced to wear a dress as humiliation and entertainment

They were “teachers” told by Milligram to shock their “students” who were actors every time they got a wrong answer and increase the shock after every wrong answer. Even though the actors were crying frantically more and more as thought of the teachers the increase of shock, most of the teacher continued administrating shocks to their students.

In the Stanford Prison Experiment many of the prisoners obeyed the guards even though they were in such extreme discomfort mentally to not have to face the harsher treatments of not obeying them. However, not all of them followed their order and kept protesting their inhuman orders, even knowing with the harsh treatment that came afterwards. Like the Milligram Experiment, the teachers understood the harsh pain they were enlisting into the students, they continued the orders of the experiment to increase the shocks after every wrong answer. Then again, like the Stanford Experiment, not all of them followed the order of guards as did a few of the teachers in the Milligram experiment. Two prisoners left the Stanford experiment and presumably the same could be said for the Milligram

Now sure, the Stanford prison guards didn’t go that far as the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib but the torture and abuse towards the prisoners became worse by the day indicating they could have gone as far as Abu Ghraib. However, in both cases there are unusual punishments and cruelty. This was due to the authority allowing it, ordering it, just didn’t care or didn’t know. Like the Stanford Prison Experiment, Zimbardo didn’t do anything to stop the abuses at the mock prison but allowed it.

In both cases for humiliation, the guards forced the prisoners to strip naked for the guards’ enjoyment. The guards put a bag over the prisoners’ head covering the whole face. The Stanford guards had some of the prisoners clean the toilet with bare hands while the Abu Ghraib had many of prisoner covered in human feces. The Stanford guards had chained their prisoners while the Abu Ghraib guards had men standing on a box only to have wires put on their fingers, toes and penis to electrically torture