The Stanford prison experiment was a study held at Stanford University by Professor Philip Zimbardo, to study the psychological effects of becoming a prisoner or a prison guard. The expirament was conducted from August 14 to August 20 of 1971 by a team of researchers led by psychology Zimbardo, and funded by the US Office of Naval Research because it was an interest of both the US Navy and Marine Corps as an investigation into the causes of conflict between military guards and prisoners. In the expirement, twenty-four male students out of 75 were selected to take on a randomly assigned role of either prisoner and or guard in a mock prison situation. This mock prison was set up in the basement of the Stanford psychology building. The participants quickly adapted to their roles, exceding Zimbardo’s expectations. Within the first few days, the guards started to enforce authoritarian measures and ultimately subjected some of the prisoners to psychological torture. However, falling into their role, many of the prisoners accepted psychological abuse. This brainwashing got to the point where, at the request of the guards, the prisoners would readily harass other prisoners who attempted to rebel against or question the guards authority. However, the guards and prisoners were not the only ones who were effected by the experiment. Even Zimbardo himself, was effected. In his role as the superintendent, he permitted the abuse to continue. These harsh and hostile surroundings caused two of the prisoners to quit the experiment early and the entire experiment was abruptly stopped after only six days due to how out of hand it had become. When the Abu Ghraib military prisoner torture and abuse scandal was made public in March 2004, many similarities to the Stanford Prison experiment were shown.Observers of the event noticed this and chief among them was Zimbardo himself, who paid close attention to the details of the story. He recognized the shift of blame that the official military and government representatives' used for the torture and abuses in the Abu Ghraib American military prison, with the very shift of blame he used in his own experiment. Just as the guards in his experiment had fallen into their abusive, sadistic, roles, so had the guards at Abu Ghraib. Just as those officials pushed the blame off of themselves, so had he when his assistant told him his experiment had gone to far. By pushing the blame off on "a few bad apples" rather than acknowledging and accepting it as their own, the Abu Ghraib torture and abuse scandal demonstrates the possible systemic problems of a formally established military incarceration system, just as Zimbardo’s study showed.