Stanford prison requirement

Stanford Prison Experiment
Most people would cringe at the thought of standing out in a crowd. They would rather comply with social norms in order to fit in with the general public. This avoidsdrawing unwanted attention. It is very hard to go against the mainstream. For example, no one wants to sympathize with a person that is being ridiculed to make it stop. That is too hard and most peoplewould rather take the easy road. Take laws for example, laws are set into place to make society run smoothly. If a law is broken then there are consequences. People choose obedience simply because therisk is much too high to do otherwise. This can be seen in the article, “A Pirandellian Prison,” which was written about a psychological study that was conducted called the Stanford Prison experiment.Wanting to learn the psychological effects of becoming a prisoner, Philip G. Zimbardo conducted a research project in the Stanford area. Zimbardo was a former psychology professor at StanfordUniversity. He designed the experiment along with three graduate students. An add was placed in the local Stanford area classifieds looking for Male college students who were willing to participate in astudy, and in compliance they would earn fifteen dollars each day. Students were selected to participate based on the fact that they were middle class, law abiding citizens. Once inside the mockprison, the students chosen to be prisoners had to follow the strict rules Zimbardo set for the guards, who were also students. The prison was constructed in the basement of the psychology building atStanford. It was constructed to closely resemble an actual prison.
Since it was so much like an actual prison, the mock prisoners suffered the same kind of emotional strains that real prisoners have inprisons today. Zimbardo states, “Real prisoners typically report feeling powerless, arbitrarily controlled … dehumanized, and emasculated.” (Zimbardo, 2). They felt this way in the Stanford prison...