Ra’Nishia Gray
Engl 1123
Mr. Oliver
16 February 2014

Good People Change Due To Bad Situations
In “Revisiting The Stanford Prison Experiment: A Lesson In The Power Of Situation” By Philip G. Zimbardo the author purpose for writing this article is to inform people that people morals and behavior can change when they are put in positions of authority. For example “Psychologists had also found that research participants were often willing to obey authority figures even when doing so violated their personal beliefs.” (Zimbardo 302).The exigence of this article is the power within social groups. “They showed, for example, that groups of strangers could persuade people to believe statements that were obviously false” (Zimbardo 302). The target audience is people of power, politicians, psychologist, and college students. The context is “The Yale studies by Stanley Milgram in 1963” (Zimbardo 302).
Zimbardo thesis was, “The critical message then is to be sensitive about our vulnerability to subtle but powerful situational forces and, by such awareness, be more able to overcome those forces. Group pressures, authority symbols, dehumanization of others, imposed anonymity, dominant ideologies that enable spurious ends justify immortal means, lack of surveillance, and other situational forces can work to transform even some of the best of us into Mr. Hyde monster”(Zimbardo 307). One of my supporting is “In one experiment from 1969, female students who were made to feel anonymous and given permission for aggression became significantly more hostile than students with their identities intact. Those and a host of other social-psychological studies were showing that human nature was more pliable than previously imagined and more responsive to situational pressures than we cared to acknowledge. In sum, these studies challenged the sacrosanct view that inner determinants of