SOCIAL STRUCTURE, SOCIAL INTERACTION and SOCIAL GROUPS

Seventy male students at Stanford University were asked to participate in an experiment designed by Dr. Philips Zimbardo. Students were paid to give up their vacation and volunteer for the simulated prison experience in the basement corridor of a classroom building. By a flip of a coin, half were designated as prisoners and the others as guards. The guards were instructed to establish their own rules to maintain law and order.
Dr. Zimbardo designed this experiment to study prison life – whether the brutality in prisons is a result of guard brutality. The volunteers were selected after proper screening. Two dozen mature; intelligent and emotionally stable young people had been selected out of 70 applicants. None of them were anti-social and their reason for joining the experiment was money. Even though the experiment was designed for 6 weeks, it barely lasted a week. The student guards had been told that they were responsible for maintaining law and order in the mock prison, ...