Headed by Phillip Zimbardo, the Stanford Prison Experiment was designed with the aim of investigating how readily people would behave and react to the roles given to them within a simulated prison. The experiment showed that the social expectations that people have of specific social situations can direct and strongly influence behaviour. The concepts evident in the Stanford Prison Experiment include social influence, and within that, conformity. The experiment also greatly showed how external attribution
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Ms. Elliott was a woman that went above and beyond her job as a teacher, and took it upon herself to teach her children something school would never teach them typically. She taught them moral values and the unfairness of prejudice and discrimination. I found the experiment interesting; I was wondering what the children would get out of this discrimination experiment. The reactions of the children were obvious that they learned their lesson on understanding discrimination because they lived through
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Abstract What is the purpose of the article, from where is it based, toward what does it hope to strive? How was the study conducted, who, what, when and where did the study take place? What were the results of the study, where they as expected? What were the conclusions drawn from this study, what were the major impacts on the field from the conclusions and conduction of this study, is this kind of impact typical? The article explains to the readers how the experiment works from start to finish
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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
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There are a number of limitations to Milgram’s work when translated over to mass killing however. The first issue, raised by Orne and Holland (1968), was that the artificial environment, along with the passively calm and distant experimenter may have suggested to the learner that they were the ones being tested. Participants may then have been aware that their actions did not cause any real harm to the Learner, and as such would feel little anxiety about implementing the shock. Perpetrators of
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Stanly Milgram’s Obedience Test In chapter two of Opening Skinner’s Box, by Lauren Slater, she talks about a man named Stanley Milgram and his test to see why people obey even the worst of orders. His studies were compelled by the holocaust. German soldiers were getting hit by war time crimes but all they had to say about them was “I was just obeying orders” so what was it exactly that made these soldiers kill of tons of people even though they knew what they were doing was wrong? What he did was
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work, along with the likes of Zimbardo (1969) and Asch (1951) revolutionised the field of psychology and our understanding of the influence situations have on an individual’s behaviour. As in Altemeyer’s study on teachers and learners above, Milgram’s results, which inspired Altemeyer’s study, also indicated that the most significant factor driving a person to commit violent acts is not the individual, but rather the situation they are placed under. This explains why an increased number of teachers
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on the authoritarian personality does seem to show a correlation between certain personalities and prejudice, the same tests can also be used to correlate authoritarian personalities with politically conservative beliefs (Ray, 1985). Therefore, studies into personality are unable to distinguish between psychological tendency to support fascist’s governments and behaviour, and conservative belief (Kressel, 1996). Furthermore, many groups that commit mass killing, including the Nazis, were not homogenous
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Unfortunately, domination is just too much too handle and almost always takes people too far. This is clearly demonstrated in stories such as The Stanford Prison Experiment and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. The Stanford Prison Experiment is a film about a group of scientists and psychologists who gather up young college boys and place them in a simulated prison, several boys acting as the guards and the rest acting as prisoners. Almost immediately after the experiment began, the guards turned extremely
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Psychologists aim to break through previous understandings of the human mind, but there is always a question as to whether or not the tests go too far. Milgram intended to break down the understanding of why people allowed the Holocaust to happen, but many people question the necessity of his experiment. In the article Some Conditions of Obedience and Disobedience to Authority, we learn that Milgram set up an experiment to see if the subjects would shock someone to the point of physical harm in order
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