Stanford Prison Experiment
Stanford Prison Experiment was carried out to see good people in bad and evil place. To see does the situation outside of you, the institution, come to control your behavior or does the things inside you, your attitudes, your morality allows you to rise above a negative environment. Dr. Zimbardo chose prison to create a negative environment.
At first I didn’t quite get how the term racial difference relates to this prison experiment since all the guards and prisoners were white males. I had to look up what racial discrimination really means. What I got was that racial discrimination does not only mean difference among races but also treating people differently through a process of social division into categories which is not necessarily related to races.
In this video the guards are the privileged oppressors and the prisoners are the oppressed beings. Guards enjoy the power to control the prisoners the way they wanted to. So some guards took charge to mistreat the prisoners while others chose not to. It clearly shows that a man with power has a choice to make between good and bad. On the other hand the prisoners were treated badly to see their reaction. Some Prisoners reactions were alarming. This whole experiment to me was quite shocking. It shows how a person could behave if he has the power and the right to use it over others. Also gives some insight of human nature in an oppressed condition. It really made me think of people who are in prison in places like Iraq where they are not only for two weeks but may be for their whole lives and their even physical abuse is not prohibited. Some of them could be innocent beings but the evil place like prison would do no good to them.
I agree. I watch prison shows sometimes (its weird, I know) and the way prisoners act is much like an animal would act. This video makes me feel like we are somehow stripped of everything we've been taught so in these situations we revert to what we can do to survive. For example, I remember seeing a story about a member of a white supremacists group who would never have done anything like that outside of prison (or so he said) he had to join to survive because he couldn't separate himself from situation and he was outnumbered so he joined them.
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