Stanford Prison Experiment

Paper One


In 1973, Philip K. Zimbardo, a psychology professor at Stanford University began researching how prisoners and guards internalize submissive and authoritarian roles. He placed an ad in the newspaper seeking male college students needed for a study of prison life. The experiment would last for only two weeks and they would get paid $15 per day. The ad attracted seventy-five responses, but only twenty-one were selected. The men were divided into two groups: Prisoners and Guards. They were warned that as prisoners of this experiment their privacy and other rights would be violated, as well as being harassed.
Zimbardo’s goal for this experiment was to find out the period in which the prisoners and guards become controlling and passive. In order to do this he had to set up a mock prison. The prisoners were given the same smocks to wear, lived in cells, and were given ID numbers. The guards were assigned identical uniforms, and were given billy clubs, whistles, handcuffs, a...