The Stanford Prison Experiment In Lord Of The Flies By William Golding

Try to picture how you might respond to a crisis. Would you be calm, cool, and collected? Or you would you succumb to the pressure of the situation and simply snap? Should your behavior be blamed on the circumstances or on biological factors? This idea is explored in the realistic fiction novel Lord of the Flies by William Golding when a group of young school boys find themselves stranded on an uninhabited island after a plane crash with no hope of rescue in sight. As they spend more and more time away from civil society, the boys become increasingly savage and stray further from their previously proper ways. It becomes clear that the shift in the boys’ demeanor is brought on by the drastic situation they are in. In Golding’s Lord of the Flies,

One such example of this was the Stanford Prison Experiment. “In 1971, the psychologist Phillip Zimbardo tried to show that prison guards and convicts would tend to slip into predefined roles, behaving in a way that they thought was required, rather than using their own judgement and morals” (Shuttleworth). Zimbardo believed that the test subjects would act based on the environment they were placed in, and he was correct: “The experiment appeared to show how subjects reacted to the specific needs of the situation…” (Zimbardo). Both the prisoners and guards began behaving in a way that suited the circumstances, regardless of how they believed they should act. They were changed by the environment. A second example of this can be found in the 1960’s Milgram Obedience Experiment. In this investigation, “Each participant took the role of a ‘teacher’ who would deliver a shock to the ‘student’ every time an incorrect answer was produced. While the participant believed that he was delivering real shocks to the student, the student was actually a confederate in the experiment who was simply pretending to be shocked” (Cherry). In the end, the experiment produced results in favor of the ‘nature’ side of the nature versus nurture argument. “...this experiment suggests that situational variables have a stronger sway than personality factors in determining obedience…” (Cherry). The environment obviously affects human behavior strongly, and both of these investigations reflect that