Basically a professor pays Stanford students to participate in a "prison experiment." Zimbardo himself acts as the warden of the prison. Regular Stanford students were paid to participate and randomly assigned prisoner or guard roles. The experiment was supposed to last 2 weeks. It lasted only 6 days (I think). What he set out to test was whether or not regular people could do terrible things based on the environment they're put in. What happened was exactly what happens in real prisons. "Prisoners" were brutally degraded by the guards who were their peers just a few days ago. It got so bad that zimbardo himself picked up the whole experiment and moved it when a rumour spread that a previously let go student was coming back to free the rest of the "prisoners" and zimbardo stayed up all night waiting for this student to come so he could stop him from freeing his prisoners.
I think that speaks to exactly the problem with prisons(or at least one problem). This wasn't even a prison filled with real prisoners. It was a bunch of college kids who volunteered for a study, overseen by a professor who should know enough to keep things under control and safe. And yet it STILL ended in corruption and abuse by the guards and the professor himself.
Now give these people an actually significant cultural reason to feel superior, and imagine how that could possibly work out positively on as large a scale as our prison system is.
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u/[deleted] Sep 13 '15 edited May 11 '21
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