¶ … Lucifer Effect," which describes the circumstances in which good people are capable of performing evil actions. Through mounting pressure and situations that push them into levels of stress that they are unused to experiencing (and therefore dealing with), otherwise normal individuals can commit some of the most horrific crimes. This paper will discuss how this change occurs in the human personality, what can be learned from Zimbardo's prison experiment, what correlations can be drawn from conditions in Abu Ghraib, and whether I personally could follow commands received by an authority figure. Hong's (2012) article begins with a description of a twenty-year, seemingly ordinary Army veteran (Sergeant Russell) suddenly experiencing severe mental stress, going to the mental health clinic on four occasions before finally shooting five of his colleagues in Bagdad. From this introduction into a concrete example of a normal individual acting evilly, Hong segues into Zimbardo's book via a discussion of Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971, in which normal college students posed as prisoners or guards and gradually assumed these identities to such an extreme that Zimbardo had to shut the experiment down out of fear for what it was doing to the subjects' psychology. What Zimbardo learned was that through authoritative...
In their ordinary lives they are not subjected to an evil authority -- but if they do become subjected to one, they can find it difficult to resist and thus will execute evil commands because of the orders they are given. This applies to the Abu Ghraib prison, where horrific acts were committed against prisoners by guards. As Hong (2012) notes, "the abuse at Abu Ghraib was sanctioned at the highest levels" (p. 58) and therefore was not really seen as abuse but rather as the proper order within the system. What participants failed to acknowledge and/or assert was that the "systemic failures" were evil in and of themselves and should have been reported to an external authority. This finding is meaningful in the field of psychology because it points to the importance of an external authority being made available to individuals so that they feel they have a place to…
Zimbardo (1973) did discuss for future experiments the use of a neutral person that would observe the experiment, not be involved and would call it quits if things got out of hand. This is a good idea, however safe guards would be needed just in case this person became pulled into the experiment. There would need to be clear definitions of what meant that the experiment was getting out of
Stanford Prison experiment was to examine the psychological and sociological effects of incarceration. In particular, researchers set out to examine how prisoners reacted to being bereft of power. Ultimately the experiment illustrated not just how prisoners reacted to being powerless, but also how simulated guards reacted to being bestowed with nearly unlimited power over others. The experiment was therefore exploratory in nature. Shuttleworth (2008) claims that the researcher Zimbardo
Among the dozen investigations of the Abu Ghraib abuses, one found that the landmark Stanford study provided a cautionary tale for all military detention operations. In differentiating the comparatively benign environment of the Stanford prison experiment, this report makes obvious that in military detention operations, soldiers work under demanding combat conditions that are far from benign. The insinuation is that those combat conditions might be anticipated to produce even
Human Aggression and the Stanford Prison Experiments Studies of human aggression tend toward myriad and often competing conclusions about that which drives us to behave ethically or unethically, about the forces that incline us toward altruism as opposed to those which incline us toward aggression, about the impulses to behave according to internal values and the pressures to bend to contextual authority. Perhaps few studies on the subject have penetrated the
Stafford Prison Experiment is a study and film based on the study detailing the psychological effects people undergo when becoming a prison guard or prisoner. Stanford University held the conduction of the experiment from August 14-20 in 1971. Psychology professor Philip Zimbardo led a team of researchers for the study and funding came from the U.S. Office of Naval Research. The Marin Corps and the U.S. Navy had interest
Response to the Stanford Prison ExperimentAfter watching the Stanford Prison Experiment video, it is clear that in spite of being randomly assigned to the role of �prisoner� or �guard,� the subject in this experiment readily accepted their respective roles as well as the corresponding expectations. For example, students playing �prisoners� in this experiment soon mirrored the social expectations of people who are incarcerated, including becoming passive and stressed. Likewise, students
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