...Critical Thinking Questions Zimbardo and Milgram Excelsior College SOC 101- Introduction to Sociology Module 2 - Assignment By: Tammy S. Wood Due Date: Sunday March 13, 2016 Professor: Charles Seagle Zimbardo and Milgram Experiments In this critical thinking assignment questions will be addressed that pertain to the Stanford prison experiment and the Milgram Experiment. The Milgram experiment participants were selected after responding to an advertisement to take part in a study at Yale University. The participants drew lots to find out who would be the "learner" and who would be the "teacher". Electrodes were placed on the learner and the teacher would ask questions, if question was answered incorrectly the learner would receive an electric shock. With each wrong answered the "learner" would receive a higher volt of shock("Milgram Experiment (Darren Brown),"n.d.). The Stanford Prison experiment participants were recruited by an advertisement placed in the newspaper offering male college students fifteen dollars a day to participate in a study of psychology of imprisonment. Participants were divided up into groups of two one group being the guards and the other group being the prisoners("Zimbardo shows how most evil comes from hierarachy," n.d.). The Stanford Prison experiment purpose was to understand the development of norms and the effects of positions, social expectations, and labels that are endured in a prison environment. Yes, this experiment is...
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...The Zimbardo Research and its Effect on the Participants Jennifer Ashley Reese PSYCH/620 June 20, 2016 JD Wehrman The Zimbardo Research and its Effect on the Participants A faculty member from Stanford University, Dr. Phillip Zimbardo, did an experiments that changed Social Psychology forever. He put an ad in the newspaper in 1971 for participants (students) to study prison life for the amount of 15 dollars a day for two weeks. Back in the early seventies, fifteen dollars was an acceptable amount for the time period for the day. Over the 75 applicants, two dozen were randomly picked by looking at their applicants for normality and healthy lives to begin with. The people were divided into two groups, the ‘prisoners’ and ‘guards’. The ‘guards’ helped set up the prison and picked their outfits to help them ‘get into their role’. The ‘prisoners’ were arrested by real city police to help them get that experience of being arrested. The ‘guards’ blindfolded the ‘prisoners’ to their location, the basement of the police station to start the experiment (Classic, 2007). The guards were to strip search the prisoners, delouse them to get the effect of what real prisons do to their prisoners. The next day, the guards used ‘force with force’ when the prisoners rebelled against obedience. The guards stripped the prisoners and put the prisoners in the hole for rebelling and took everything except air as a privileges such as food, clothes, bed etc. (Classic, 2007). To maintain order and...
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...The Stanford Prison experiment was a psychological experiment that took place in 1971 at Stanford University and was conducted by Philip Zimbardo a psychology professor who believed that prisons were violent places because of the nature of the roles guards and prisoners were expected to play and the rules and expectations attached to these roles. Zimbardo argues that no matter who was placed in such a position they would act in the same manner, based on their expected and perceived roles. Zimbardo attempted to prove his hypothesis by putting law-abiding middle class male students in the position of prisoners and guards. Twenty four male volunteers were chosen and randomly divided into two groups, 12 guards and 12 prisoners. Uniforms were issued to each group, very few rules were given except that the guards were permitted to do whatever they felt necessary to keep order...
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...Sociology and psychology go hand in hand in some aspects and this can be seen explicitly in the experiments zimbardo’s Stanford Prison, and Milgram’s study on obedience. These experements, although unethical, provide a clear glimpse into a human’s obedience toward authority and conforming into social roles. Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison was an experiments by Philip G. Zembardo to see if and how readily people would conform to the roles given to them in a guard and prisoner setting. The experiment was kept as real as possible by going so far as to have the participents arrested, booked, and transported to a mock prison build in the Stanford psychology building’s basement. In aditon to the arrest they were stiped naked, relieved of their possesions, delouced, and given a set of prison cloths with only a number to symbolize them, and had a chain tied around their anckle to remind them of their captivity. Ultimately the participandtss began to conform the the rolses assigned to them and if prisoners tried to rebell they were met with the guards’ anger leading the the prisoners becoming more docile because of their dependence of the guards. This study not only showed that people would conform to the roles given to them, but it also showed how people in a state of power can abuse that power to, for example, dehumanize prisoners to achieve obedience. Throughout learing about this experiment I was surprised quite often. First by the great length they went to presever the realism and second...
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...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...
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...To start, both of these experiments are quite disturbing and yet interesting as to how people react or act in situations if given the opportunity. I actually looked up the Milgram and the Zimbardo experiments. I watched videos of both actually. I think Milgram wanted to prove that the prison guards, doctors, etc..., did not necessarily think that they were to blame for the atrocities that occurred in concentration camps, but were in their minds “just following orders”. In his experiments people issued shocks to others in increasing intervals of strength without any concern for the pain being inflicted. They were just following orders. Zimbardo turned a Stanford University Basement into a prison with half the participants as guards and the other half as inmates. The level of cruelty that the “guards” sank to is truly amazing. Both sides of the experiment literally assimilated to the roles given. It is my belief that the subjects in these experiments used the position of following orders or authority to let the ID free and do things they would never consider in normal society with rules and laws. In Milgram’s study the ones issuing the shocks probably did enjoy or get pleasure from what they were doing. Literally they let the “order” to shock someone give them pleasure. It would be interesting to know if any of the “shockers” had become sexually excited during this experiment. Zimbardo’s experiment really shows how the ego was affected by the experiment. Guards became abusive and...
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...the surrounding factors of that person’s life will inevitably affect the decision at hand. Often, without knowing it, we are placed in a role that life, in general, expects us to fulfill. Once we find ourselves in a role, it is difficult to displace ourselves from it, and as a result, we rely on this role to aid us in our decisions. Professor of psychology Philip K. Zimbardo finds that people are obedient in accepting roles assigned by others. Zimbardo’s “Stanford Prison Experiment” discusses male college students placed in a prison experiment and assigned the role of either “prisoner” of “guard.” Zimbardo claims to have “sought to understand more about the process by which people called ‘prisoners’ lose their liberty, civil rights, independence and privacy, while those called ‘guards’ gain social power by accepting the responsibility for controlling and managing the lives of their dependent charges” (365). Zimbardo concludes that the roles of guard and prisoner can be seen in many realms of life. Zimbardo suggests that sexism, racism, and shyness are, for many people, prisons of the mind. Furthermore, Zimbardo feels that marriage can be described as a prison: The physical institution of prison is but a concrete and steel metaphor for the existence of more pervasive, albeit less obvious, prisons of the mind that all of us daily create, populate and perpetuate ... The social convention of marriage ... becomes for many a state of imprisonment in which one partner agrees to be...
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...write about the ethics of the Stanford Prison Experiment led by psychologist Philip Zimbardo. I think a number of factors in this study would not pass current ethical standards set by the American Psychological Association (APA). The first is I believe that even though all of the participants of the study were given informed consent before the start of the experiment, I don’t believe that the subjects were aware of the physical and mental humiliation that they would have to endure during its course. At the very start, the subjects were taken from in front of their homes in front of neighbors by armed police officers. They were then taken to the prison blindfolded and made to strip down naked in a degrading manner in order to purposely humiliate them. They shaved their heads in order to take away any of the prisoners personal identity. I think there was also great deception on behalf of the researchers when the participants’ families came to visit them. The guards cleaned the cells, clean shaved the prisoners, fed them a large meal and played music over the loud speakers to make the visitor blind of the real situation. This manipulation shows that Dr. Zimbardo knew that the physical conditions of the prison were unsanitary and could have posed a health risk, and that the treatment of the prisoners was in fact un-ethical. According to this website http://www.simplypsychology.org/zimbardo.html Zimbardo claimed that he could have not predicted that any of these things could have happened...
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...How much control do we have over our own circumstances // fate vs. freewill The first case study is The Stanford Prison Experiment. Why doesn’t Philip Zimbardo stop the experiment after the guards violated an important rule? Philip Zimbardo doesn’t stop the experiment because he wanted to see the full effect the experiment would have to the participants. He also wanted to see how the guards and prisoners would handle the problem themselves. The experiment escalated with further problems happening, causing the experiment to end so shortly. Because of these problems it caused far more damage to the participants and everyone involved. Making the guards and prisoners, who were determined healthy and mentally stable, change into “pure evil” as Christina...
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...Student’s Name Instructor Course title Date Banality of evil In life some situations and circumstances happen that force us to be what we never imagined yet these acts are normal to them and nothing is wrong. A normal person does something that cast doubts whether that person was really in a stable mind. Cases have been reported where real parents especially the father killing the child and also murdering the mother this is an onslaught murder. Cases of homicides been reported on a daily basis in the federal bureau of police. But why does this happen? These are normal people in their normal behavior but abruptly change and their behavior create an impact that affects the lives of others forever. For others, their presence only affects others and makes their lives look more disastrous this is the life we live and we have to accept the changes that occur and influence us (Adams and Balfour) The life history of great people like Adolf Hitler who just had normal life, but later on we see a change of things suddenly. Nobody had trained to be a murder and kill the Jews in the first place. No single parents teach their kid s to kill as part of learning in the early stages of life. Thus it is evident theta these are normal people who just change because of situations they are put in or may be because of the...
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...Student’s Name Professor’s Name Course Date Phil Zimbardo – Heroes What does Zimbardo mean by the term “hero”? (4 points) According to Zimbardo, a hero is an individual who goes out of their way to help others and make their lives better. Zimbardo further asserts that heroism stems from the ability to stay firm in one’s decisions and restrain from the societal pressure. Zimbardo gives examples of children living in the ghetto and they are constantly seduced to engage in evil things like drug use, bullying and illicit sex. A hero, in this case is an individual who looks at the greater good and simply does not focus on the instant gratification and the need to be liked. He further urges people to be supportive of other people especially those...
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...1971 by Philip Zimbardo of Stanford University. The Stanford experiment is the study human response to captivity, in particular, to the real world circumstances of prison life. Participants were randomly assigned to play the role of "prisoner" or "guard". Those assigned to play the role of guard were given sticks and sunglasses; those assigned to play the Prisoners were arrested at their own homes, without warning, and taken to the local police station and, forced to wear chains and prison clothes, and transported to the basement of the Stanford psychology department, which had been converted into a jail. Several of the guards became progressively more sadistic particularly at night when they thought the cameras were off. The experiment quickly got out of hand and a riot broke out on day two. One prisoner developed a psychosomatic rash all over his body upon finding out that his "parole" had been turned down. After only 6 days, the experiment was shut down; for fear that one of the prisoners would be seriously hurt. Although the intent of the experiment was to examine prison life, the results is used to demonstrate how people are more likely to mistreat people when provided with a legitimizing system and social and institutional support (e.g. prison). It is also used to illustrate the power seniority/authority. It can be argued that the conclusions that Professor Zimbardo and others have drawn from the Stanford Prison Experiment are not valid. Professor Zimbardo was not merely...
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...interest. Before the study commenced, participants were dutifully screened for abnormal psychological traits and were randomly assigned the roles of prisoners and guards. The experiment was to be conducted over two weeks with Zimbardo himself dual hatting as a prison supervisor and that of a researcher. Steps were taken conceal the identities of the guards, to create a sense of anonymity and deindividuation. The students were not given any form of training on how to perform as normal prison guard and rules were poorly defined. As part of the study process, the counts sessions were simply intended as a role call and to ensure that the prisoners were made aware of their identification numbers and the rules. However, the count sessions very quickly became abusive from the first day. The sessions went beyond the intended duration, during which prisoners were humiliated, physically abused, psychologically weakened and punished without reason. At one point, the abuse even turned sexual in nature. As a result of the rapid escalation of abuse, the study was terminated just after 6 days. Yet, for the duration of the study, Zimbardo and the other researchers did not intervene in any of the abuse that took place. At the end of the study, Zimbardo put forth several observations and key insights on why good people do evil things which I believe are very relevant and applicable to corporate governance. Corporate governance Corporate governance as...
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...grounds of Stanford University. Before being placed in the stimulated prison that was designed by Zimbardo and his colleagues for this particular study, each student was given the option to be a prison guard or prisoner. The prison study was originally scheduled to last approximately two weeks. During the prison study researchers immediately observed the behavior changes of the guards and prisoners. For instance, the morning of the second day of the study prisoners began to rebel by taking off their stocking caps, ripping off their numbers, barricading themselves inside their cells, and not following the guards instructions. As a result, the guards became very aggressive and abusive toward the rebelling prisoners which resulted in them abusing their power to harass and intimidate prisoners. The guard’s abusive behaviors left the prisoners feeling extremely stressed, depressed, and experiencing episodes of anxiety (excessive crying and other negative emotions). In fact, several prisoners who experienced severe negative emotions were immediately released from the study. In view of these facts, the prison study only lasted a total of six days due to the guards, the authority figures, abusing their power and slowly dehumanizing their prisoners. In the end, the study demonstrated that bad will overpower the good in many people, especially when they are given power over another individual (Zimbardo, 2012). With that in mind, many authority figures abuse their power everyday. For instance...
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...actual names (Zimbardo). They began small talk, then the priest asked “Son, what are you doing to get out of here?” At first, prisoners were confused by the question, but he explained that the only way out of prison was with the help of a lawyer. The priest then told the prisoners that he would contact their parents in order to hire a lawyer for them, some of the prisoners accepted the offer enthusiastically. There was only one prisoner who decided not to talk to the priest, which was Prisoner #819. Prisoner #819 was vomiting and urged that he would be brought to a doctor, not a priest. Staff ended up persuading Prisoner #819 to speak to the priest and Zimbardo to see what they could do to...
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