Zimbardo's Psychological Experiment and Fromm's Correlation

Zimbardo’s Psychological Experiment and Fromm’s Correlation

Over 4 decades ago, a Stanford psychology professor named Phillip G. Zimbardo administered an experiment that re-created a prison environment. The goal of the experiment was to simply study the process by which prisoners and guards “learn” to become compliant and authoritarian, respectively (Zimbardo 732). What would emerge from the “Stanford Prison Experiment” article were more than just compliance and authority. The experiment gave rise to the nature of evil and obedience in human beings. Thus like Zimbardo’s experiment, Stanley Milgram’s “The Peril of Obedience” found that under certain circumstances and conditions, human beings were also capable of being immensely subdued to authority and obedient when told to shock the student. Beyond this, however, is a bigger picture in which Zimbardo and Milgram present in various ways. Although both experiments were psychologically cruel, both Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment and Milgram’s The Peril of Obedience present an organized evil in nature with which most humans are subjected to another person’s voice. The human’s obedience goes from autonomous to heteronomous and the conscience proceeds from humanistic to authoritarian without a person even consciously knowing it.

Phillip Zimbardo began setting up the Stanford Prison Experiment by placing an ad in a local newspaper calling for male college workers for a psychological study of prison life. The volunteers were paid $15 dollars a day for 1-2 weeks. The ad evoked up to 75 responses and of the 75, Zimbardo and his group of researchers selected 21 of the participants whom were mentally stable, healthy, and law-abiding citizens to play the roles of the guards and priso...

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...t an organized evil in nature by which most humans are subjected to another person’s voice. Good people become heteronomous, authoritarian, and start doing evil deeds whenever they overlook one self’s conscience by obeying to the evil and cruel demands of an authority figure. As in Zimbardo’s case, he himself became caught up in the sadistic experiment that he created and grew into that authority figure.

Work Cited

Quiet Rage: The Stanford Prison Study. Dir. Ken Musen. Stanford University, 2004. DVD.

Zimbardo, Phillip. “The Stanford Experiment.” Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum. Ed. Laurence Behrens and Leonard J. Rosen. 11th ed. Boston: Longman, 2011. 732-743. Print.

Milgram, Stanley. “The Perils of Obedience.” Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum. Ed. Laurence Behrens and Leonard J. Rosen. 11th ed. Boston: Longman, 2011. 692-704. Print.