Prison Experiment Essay

610 Words3 Pages
The Stanford Prison Experiment was an experiment to see how ordinary men would respond to a radical change to their normal roles in life. This all happened in the summer of 1971. Suspects answered a local newspaper ad asking for volunteers in study of the psychological effects of prison life. There were more than 70 applications turned in for review and their were 24 middle-class male college students were chosen. Half of the selected boys were assigned to be prisoners and the other half were assigned to be a guard. It all started when arrest by the city police blindfolded and took into the jail cell one at a time and greeted by the warden which conveyed the seriousness of their offense. The “prisoners” were arrested by a police car, were fingerprinted, blindfolded and put in a cell, then they were searched and stripped naked given a uniform, a number and had a chain placed around one foot. The other participants were “guards” in which they wore uniforms and were given clubs. The guards were given no training on how to be guards and how to do their job. They created the prison by boarding up each end of the corridor in the basement of Stanford’s Psychology Department building by taking the doors off some laboratory rooms and replacing them with specially made doors with steel bars and cell numbers. To understand what goes through prisoners minds and to get the full effect on how they act and what they do, they put a videotape and recorded what events occurred. An intercom system was also placed to monitor what the prisoners discussed. There were no windows or clocks so they couldn’t tell how much time has passed which later resulted in some time-distorting experiences. The prisoners were often rudely awaken at 2:30 in the morning for “counts.” They punished them by making them do push-ups. After the second day the prisoners did not corporate and they

More about Prison Experiment Essay

Open Document