Essay On The Stanford Prison Experiment

Social psychology is a discipline that uses scientific methods to understand why and how people act and behave the way they do. "To understand and explain how the thought, feeling and behaviour of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined or implied presence of other human beings" (Gordon Allport, 1985). Conformity is encouraged by social influence to conform to different social groups and ways, whereas obedience to authority in social influence is where an individual acts the way the person in authority says so. Obedience is usually done through a hierarchy of power; the people at the top do the telling at the people at the bottom do the actions. When researching conformity and obedience it is vital to compare the experiments to real

The Stanford Prison Experiment. Zimbardo aimed to find out how quickly people would conform to roles and was researching if this could be the case for the high level of verbal and physical abuse in the American prison system. Zimbardo was interested in finding out if the behaviour was due to personality traits or the environment. "That line between good and evil is permeable, any of us can move across it....I argue that we all have the capacity for love and evil--to be Mother Theresa, to be Hitler or Saddam Hussein. It 's the situation that brings that out." This was known as the Lucifer Effect and Zimbardo believed strongly that it applied to everyone. Zimbardo’s experiment is also liked to Cognitive Dissonance Theory. This is the struggle people experience to maintain internal consistency. Our behaviour seems to control our beliefs, attitudes and morals and when confronted by our actions we usually try to justify or change our minds towards a more accepting manor. All of the patients in this experiment struggled to maintain this, they found it hard to differentiate between realities and make believe. Zimbardo converted a basement area in the university into a prison environment and used 21 male students to participate. All participants were screened by professionals and all deemed mentally stable. Each participant was assigned to the role of either a prison guard or prisoners and were given realistic props and outfits to suit their character. To make everything as realistic as possible, without prior warning, prisoners were arrested, finger printed and went through all the procedures of a real arrest. Both prisoners and guards took to their roles easily and quickly, guards tormented and degraded prisoners and enjoyed doing so whilst the prisoners talked about prison life and in one case caused a riot. Many prisoners became submissive and the more they did the more the guards enjoyed