There is a 3 part special on Nat Geo right now that takes a look at the Stanford Prison Experiment. They interview the men who volunteered as well as Dr. Zimbardo and his wife (then girlfriend). The premise of the experiment was to take a random group of men and make half of them guards and the other half prisoners, and given a very basic set of rules. See how they would behave.
This comes on the heels of the Milgrim experiment where participants were told that they were working on a Project to increase memory and learning and see how their behavior would be when asked to give shocks that could be deadly to one of the other participants in the study.
After watching all three parts of the show you probably would come to the conclusion just as I that people do behave a bit crazy after a while without controls in place. In the beginning of the show, the men who were interviewed claimed that they were just acting for the six days. But doctors Zimbardo explains how he could not believe that that is the case, based upon the videos and the observations that he saw over the. Six days.
What I find interesting is that we live in a world where that experiment has been done in different ways such as TV shows like big Brother or other reality shows like the real world. People do behave as you think they might behave unless there are rules and people are watching. But after a certain amount of time, people forget that they’re being watched. Ultimately, I think Zimbardo had a very good understanding of human behavior.
he did not believe that people were inherently evil from what I gathered from the show, but rather that without checks and balances and strong, external influences that people can do things that they would not normally do and behaving ways that they would not normally behave in society given a structure That tells them that they are the role of the overlord versus the criminal.
This show comes at a good time when the world is at the precipice of doing things that are related to group think. Are we willing to standby and let other people behave badly? This is the thing that we should be contemplating as members of society. What is the difference between right and wrong good and evil and what we are willing to standby and let other people do without the kind of checks and balances that are normally in place.? Where do our ethics lie?
So, after watching the show, I listened to an episode of the Hidden Brain podcast. This podcast discussed the prison experiment after the three-part series premiered and provided additional insights beyond what the TV show offered. While the participants claimed to believe they were demonstrating the negative aspects of prisons, they failed to consider the perspective of Zimbardo’s girlfriend or reflect on his own reflection on the experiment. Zimbardo realized he had become detached from the reality within the prison he had created. A normal person would never condone such behavior, but as the administrator, he treated it as routine. Therefore, I believe Zimbardo’s self-reflection on the experiment led to differing viewpoints and ultimately resulted in him becoming a renowned expert in examining human behavior based on his own experience conducting that experiment.
