Zimbardo Experiment Reflection

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Reflection Paper 7
The Zimbardo experiment was the study of a group of students who would portray bodyguards in a prison, while the other group were the inmates of the prison. The study was conducted to determine whether or not people will conform to their social norms based on power and stereotypes.
Zimbardo gave the guards their own uniforms and sunglasses to wear, it gave them a sense of power and they felt they could use that power in their favor. By exposing the guards to such an atmosphere could have potentially corrupted their minds and made their thinking more disorganized and be more violent. The guards became aggressive and hostile with the prisoners. It seemed as though the guards enjoyed tormenting the prisoners. The guards dehumanized …show more content…

First, arresting the prisoners for no reason, or giving them only numbers to use as identification; this can cause a loss of identity. Second, providing dresses for the prisoners to wear which implies to the guards that they should treat the inmates in a particular way (humiliate them). Then constantly having someone in your face screaming at you and telling you what to do all the time can break you down. It’s like a dictatorship or a boot camp testing you to see how much you can take. If you done something wrong, you were punished. All of that would break a person down after a while, that’s why during the experiment, several participants had to be released because they were showing signs of depression. The emotional stress that these prisoners experienced in jail will negatively impact their real social behavior, after they have been released from prison. The ex-prisoner will have antisocial behavior. These behaviors include: shying away and enjoying solitude, irritability, aggressiveness, brutality and being out rightly rebellious to any authority as a result of the harsh prison

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