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Essay On Stanford Prison Experiment

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THE STANFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT
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To begin with, the Stanford prison experiment was an attempt to investigate the psychological effects of percieved power. The aim was to investigate how readily people would conform the roles of guards and prisoners in a role-playing experiment that simulated the situation in prison. The experiment was carried out by a well-known and acclaimed psychologist Philip Zimbardo in 1971, this is the most known experiment he did. Even though the experiment itself is a big asset to behavioral psychology it is rejected by most of the people even after so many years. In the following lines, I’d like to describe to you how the experiment was getting on and show you my personal opinion on this matter. At the beginning of the experiment professor Philip Zimbardo and his team were choosing candidates that would be most suitable and then divided them into two groups — prisoners and guards based on their psychological profile. Participants were students who got paid $15 a day during 14 days long experiment. The students that were picked to be part of this experiment were formally arrested because Zimbardo wanted the experiment to be as real as possible. The students …show more content…
Professor Philip Zimbardo as a psychologist should not have conducted an experiment that might have caused long-term effects. The guards should have been told about using physical punishments being not allowed. They behaved to the prisoners as if they were a piece of furniture. On the other hand, I think it was a great lecture for the prisoners especially, they had the opportunity to try what the life in prison is like. I don’t think any of the prisoners have committed crime ever after that and I don’t expect any of them to be in prison now. That is the only advantage of the experiment to them. Maybe, It would be good if every person had to stay in prison for example for a week, the criminality would be surely

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