Stanford Prison Experiment Effect

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The screams and cries burned into the minds of the tormented participants, their lives scared with images and memories of their terrible experience, the horrible happening that took place in The Stanford Prison Experiment. The Stanford Experiment was a brutal and demented trial due to the persecution and the sadistic pleasure the fabricated guards took in the prisoners’ misery, filled with emotional and physical trauma, and the experiment being persecuted to an unnecessary extreme. The experiment took place in the makeshift prison, created in the basement of the Stanford University on August 14th to August 20th, 1971. Psychology Professor, Philip Zimbardo, led the experiment to find the mental effects of being put into the roles of being a …show more content…
The perpetrators would not do anything about the guards not obeying the rules even going as far as joining in with the torment. Zimbardo admitted that “Guard aggression was emitted simply as a ‘natural’ consequence of being in the uniform of a ‘guard’ and asserting the power inherent in that role.”(BBC) In the experiment the students were paid $15 ($89.14 in current time) a day for participating. Was the money really worth it? The conductors of the experiment when to an excessive extreme with the experiment.
The process of bringing the participants to the counterfeit prison was unnecessary. The participants were charged with codes 211 and 459 which are armed robbery and burglary. Real cops came and arrested the college students at their homes. After which the cops drove them to the local police station, finger printed and booked to the prison. The treatment in the case could be compared to the treatment at the Alcatraz Penitentiary. During the experiment prisoners began to develop realistic prisoner characteristics as well did the guards. After the experiment got out of hand, the guards would treat the prisoners as …show more content…
The fabricated prison was not the cleanest place in the world and probably wasn’t appropriate for human inhabitants. Roaches and mice were often spotted everywhere. Trust between inmates themselves began to fall apart. Prisoners began to team up with the guards, ratting on other inmates that did not obey the rules. Turned prisoners would also join in with the abuse of others in hopes that they could avoid the torment. Then turned prisoners began to harass others without the guards even being there. The prisoners had no one to consult for the entire duration of the test. Zimbardo started to act more like a warden than a researcher of the experiment. Most of the prisoners would rat on each other if anything bad was said so the trust between most of them was shattered and they could not even rely on each other for support. The effects of this experiment were so bad that “Prisoner#8612 had to be released after 36 hours because of uncontrollable bursts of screaming, crying and anger” (McLeod). The behavior that Prisoner#8612 showed were common signs of depression. The psychologist that examined the participant said that the condition could be lasting, a condition that the participant didn’t have a short time before. The perpetrators were a main reason why the effects of the participants were so harsh, considering that they could have
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