Summary Of The Stanford Prison Experiment

The “Stanford Prison Experiment” was a psychological experiment done in the year of 1973, which was lead by Philip Zimbardo. The experiment purpose was to study the psychology of prison life and the effects the environment induced on the people involved with it by using volunteers that would act out the roles of the people that would be in a prison, such as prisoners and guards. The experiment’s reshaped publication, originally from The New York Times Magazine, shows Zimbardo’s description of the experiment in an analytical manner. Zimbardo’s background as a psychologist gives him leverage over the audience’s emotions because his profession has allowed him to know what type of behaviors might evoke certain emotional responses that would make

the reader feel more relatable to this essay. His literary purpose in his use of descriptive sentences for this essay is to shape certain elements of the essay, such as specific words, in order for them to captivate the audience’s attention by appealing to their emotions. Zimbardo’s writing specifically aims to attract readers to his essay, because the allure that he uses in his writing clearly strives to attract as much public attention as he can get, which in turn reveals his commercial motives that are underlying his writing style.
Zimbardo uses a very detailed style of descriptive sentences in order for his audience, the general public, to be able to personally identify themselves with the situations at hand that are being described to them as they read through his work. The original audience was intended to be psychology majors and psychology related professionals but since Zimbardo made a business out of this experiment the type of writing he chose to adapt was one that would capture more attention and relate to more general emotions instead of just specifically informing the sequences and results of his experiment.
For example, his descriptive literacy starts off immediately as he presents the very first paragraph, “on a quiet Sunday morning in August, a Palo Alto, California, police car swept through the town picking up college students as part of a mass arrest for violation of Penal Codes 211, Armed Robbery, and Burglary, a 459 PC” (para. 1). In this sentence, when Zimbardo says “mass arrest” he is forming an image in the minds of his audience in which they see a round up of criminals, who were actually students. Here the notion that the essay was reshaped with a purpose of entertainment is clear, the dramatic effect that is being added to the simple information, an officer picking up students for the experiment, transforms it to be more intense than what it was. Zimbardo means to provoke a state of panic and confusion for the audience, by doing so he captures their attention and gives them a feeling of intellectual hunger for knowing what follows this shocking scene that they have just felt through their emotional appeal.
Zimbardo instills a frightful feeling in the audience as he says, “The suspect was picked up at his home, charged, warned of his legal rights, spread-eagled against the police car, searched, and handcuffed – often as surprised and curious neighbors looked on” (page, 1).

As the audience read the sentence, they came face to face with one of the essay’s most impactful words, “suspect.” What comes to mind when reading said word? Criminals. Zimbardo intentionally used the word to deprive the students of their innocence, their humanity, and everything else that a person loses when they become what are considered criminals. Their names are changed forever and henceforth the negative connotation evoked from the word follows them for the rest of their

lives.
In another sentence in the first page, Zimbardo tells his readers, “The suspect was then taken to a holding cell where he was left blindfolded to ponder his fate and wonder what he had done to get himself into this mess” (page, 1). When Zimbardo uses action verbs like “left” what comes to mind, as readers emotionally indulge themselves with the sentence, is a feeling of hopelessness that reveals the true shock that comes from the realization of actually finding oneself in such a particular situation. Desperation and panic surrounds the audiences’ thoughts as they have just realized what sitting in a holding cell and being uncertain of the future feels like.
The audience can relate to the volunteers’ frightened states of being, as the uncertainty of their situation completely caught them off guard without notice and just dropped them into a figurative “hole” that seems pretty impossible to get out of. Zimbardo literally named a closet “The Hole” to represent the solitary confinement section of a prison, which makes the feelings of loneliness and despair that the volunteers were going to endure all too real for the audience (page, 2). The actual use of the word “hole” tightens on the feeling of hopelessness that Zimbardo is trying to tap inside the emotions of the audience.
As with the previous examples, in the third page of his essay, Zimbardo once again emphasizes words that promote a feeling of shock to his audience when he says, “The use of ID numbers was a way to make prisoners feel anonymous. Each prisoner had to be called only by his ID number and could only refer to himself and the other prisoners by number” (page, 3). When a reader finishes going through this sentence they will basically fall back on any memories of a point in life where a similarities can be drawn from, such as images of the Holocaust in which Jews were differentiated by numbers that were imbedded in their skin. The presence of ID’s and numbers gives off elements of dehumanization to the readers as they relate to the feelings of these innocent volunteers and therefore exalts them to feel compassion for them.
Zimbardo made remarks about the use of physical punishment, in the fourth page of the essay, when he tells readers, “When we saw the guards demand push-ups from the prisoners...

However, we later learned that push-ups were often used as a form of punishment in Nazi concentration camps...” (page, 4). Zimbardo’s exaltation of this physically demanding punishment serves as hint as to the alarming words that were to follow, the mentioning of the Nazi’s. By comparing the guards action to that of the Nazi’s he is awakening the feelings of sorrow and regret that the rest of the world feels when reading this sentence and thinking of the horrors of

WWII.
Once again we see how specific words chosen by Zimbardo tap into the audiences’ emotional appeal in reaction to the story that is being told. The feelings that are evoked by these specific words and phrases demonstrate how when placing those words in specific parts of a paragraph they can serve a great purpose for the reading experience, especially if the means are to get the readers attention.
In conclusion, Zimbardo uses literary elements in his essay that serve as bodacious tools for him to capture the audience attention and by doing so he relates to their emotional appeals. He does this be using specific words such as “suspect” and mentioning the Nazi’s. When realizing the purpose of the use of this literary style it becomes clear that Zimbardo’s intentions when reshaping this essay was no longer to inform a specific group, but instead to entertain and be of commercial usage.