Zimbardo’s primary reason for conducting the experiment was to focus on the power of roles, rules, group identity and situational proof of behavior that wouldn’t happen every day. He wanted to see how ordinary people could be led to engage in anti-social acts by putting them in situations where they felt anonymous, or see other people in ways that made them less human. He wondered what would happen if they made people feel devalued in an experimental environment where they could document the entire process. He wanted to find out whether the brutality among guards versus prisoners was due to the personalities of the guards or had more to do with the prison environment. It is important to understand group behavior because that is mostly what our society runs by. It’s not so much about a person as an individual anymore. Everyone is thought of by groups and then broken down to the individual. Individual behavior has be shown to be influenced by the presence of others. Which in a prison your individualism is pretty much gone and you are only known as a number. The research method was qualitative because he was trying to understand social behavior in a group. Social interaction is the foundation of society, but society is more than a collection of individual social actions (Anderson pg. 98).

To do this, Zimbardo converted the basement of the Stanford University psychology building into a fake prison. He paid college students to be guards and prisoners for 2 weeks. Male students were chosen and randomly assigned to be either a guard or a prisoner. The students were arrested at their homes, fingerprinted and then transferred to the university. The guards made the prisoners do ridiculous things like clean toilets with nothing but their hands and harassed them to no end. The first revolt they had was to barricade their prison doors with their beds which