The Stanford Prison Experiment: Film Analysis

In Kyle Patrick Alvarez’s 2015 film The Stanford Prison Experiment, he illustrates Stanford professor Philip Zimbardo’s 1971 study of the psychological effects of becoming a prisoner or prison guard. In Zimbardo’s experiment, he had his subjects adopt roles as either prisoners or prison guards and set up a mock prison in the basement of Jordan Hall, Stanford’s psychology building. In psychology, a role is a set of expectations concerning the ways in which people are supposed to behave in certain situations. Generally, the prison guards were psychologically abusive to the prisoners, making prisoners endlessly repeat menial tasks and attempted to make them turn against each other. Although some of the guards felt bad about doing these things,

they went along with it because they felt they were just doing their job. The prisoners at first went along with the guard’s demands, but eventually broke and started resisting orders by trying to escape and barricading themselves in their cells.
The Stanford prison experiment shows the power of authority and symbols, as well as how people will resist if they forced to do something that contradicts a deep belief. Although the subjects were all generally good people, the stress placed on them during the experiment caused them to do bad things. I feel that the only thing that made them go on with the experiment was that the researchers never stepped in and that the subjects portraying prisoners were genuinely afraid of the subjects portraying guards. The study’s findings support a situational explanation of the guards’ brutal behavior because it was caused by situations; the resistance of the prisoners created stress and the researchers never stepped in and told them to stop, so their actions were perceived as allowable. Also, all of the subjects were of sound body and mind during the screening process, so I do not believe that something internal caused their actions. I believe that the “prisoners” final submission to the guards was caused by learned helplessness. By stripping away the layers of their identity, such as by referring to them as numbers instead of their given name or by making them wear dresses as to belittle their gender identity, they made them feel powerless, which led to them to give in to any commands.