What Is The Stanford Prison Experiment

On August 17, 1971, a team of researchers at Stanford University conducted a several day observational study to understand the psychological effects of becoming an inmate or corrections officer. Led by psychology professor Dr. Philip Zimbardo, the research team randomly assigned twenty-four male college students to play the role of a prisoner or guard in a makeshift prison that had been constructed on university grounds. Weiten (2013) defines random assignment as: “The constitution of groups in a study such that all subjects have an equal chance of being assigned to any group or condition.” Because the subjects were assigned to their individual roles by flipping a coin, Zimbardo successfully integrated random assignment into the design of his

While it lacked most of the characteristics of a proper experiment, the study is a major contribution to the field of psychology and our understanding of situational forces. Hock (2012) states, “the mock prison situation was so powerful that it had morphed…into reality. [The students and experimenters] had become their roles…These roles were so powerful that individual identities dissolved to the point that the participants and experimenters had difficulty realizing just how dangerous the behaviors in the ‘Stanford Prison’ had become.” The Stanford Prison Study made major waves in 1970s understandings of why people do what they do, what makes good people do bad things, and how situational forces can have control over people’s behaviors. The Stanford Prison Experiment was a game changer in understanding human behavior and what compels or motivates our actions—is it the situation or our principles?
Years earlier in 1963, Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram was conducting his own series of experiments on obedience. “Milgram’s idea for this project grew out of his desire to investigate scientifically how people could be capable of carrying out great harm to others simply because they were ordered to do so” (Hock, 2012). He hypothesized that humans have a proclivity to obey, especially to people in a position of power. Moreover, he hypothesized that people would obey authority, even at the expense of their own ethical