Zimbardo The Lucifer Effect

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After having a ground understanding of how situational forces can make people do immoral thing through conformity and obedience, the psychology of evil: The Lucifer effect can now be explained by Zimbardo’s famous study - Stanford Prison Study. Zimbardo and his team began the experiment by choosing twenty-four healthy male students from his college with no physical or mental disorders or illness, assigned twelve of them to play prisoners role, while the other twelve volunteers were randomly assigned the role of guards. The guards were dressed and provided with wooden batons, uniforms, whistle, and even sunglasses to avoid eye contact with prisoners. Meanwhile, the prisoners were dressed with ill-fitting smocks and stocking caps with chains under their ankles, just like real prisoners. These prisoners were treated like actual criminals and guards were told to do everything they could to maintain law and order in the prison to makes the inmates respect them. …show more content…

At first, guards started to taunt prisoners with insults, give them meaningless tasks to do, and punish them by making them do push-up. After a while, they became more aggressive and assertive by using fire extinguishers to punish prisoners, stripping them, and even taking their beds out of their cells. Meanwhile, prisoners started crying, screaming and became depressed. Many of them had to be released after a few days because they had symptoms of emotional disorders and early stage of depression that could have had lasting consequences for their health (McLeod, 1970). In the end, the experiment had to end earlier than expected because the prisoners could not take it anymore (McLeod,

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