The Stanford Prison experiment

The Stanford Prison experiment was a study conducted by Professor Philip Zimbardo at Stanford University. Basically an ad in the local news paper was placed to gather a few undergraduates to participate in an experiment where they would play roles as either the prisoners or the guards in a mock prison. 24 out of 70 students were chosen to participate, and they were split up into their roles. Although the experiment was set to run for two weeks the professor had to terminate it after six days because things grew out of hand. The Guards at first did not know how to show authority over the prisoners, but then they started to rudely awake the prisoners randomly during the night for no apparent reason; sometimes they would force the prisoners to do pushups, and they even took away the mattresses in which they slept on so the prisoners were forced to sleep on concrete. By the second day the prisoners rebelled and they barricaded the cell doors so that the guards couldn’t get to them and they began to taunt and curse at them and rip the caps and identification numbers which they were given when they began the experiment. The guards were outraged by this so they grabbed the fire extinguisher, sprayed the prisoners until they opened the door, stripped them naked, and sent the leaders of the rebellion to solitary confinement. Because the guards and the prisoners hated each other so much and too much harassing went on the experiment was shut down by the professor six days after it began. During the experiment some prisoners experienced emotional psychological effects such as disorganized thinking, and uncontrollable crying and rage. It is said that some prisoners never recovered.