How Humans Can Take a Role
SuyYing Lama
General Psycholgy
Professor Nelson Lucca
December 7, 2016
Looking back at how Nazis followed Hitler’s commands without even asking question or doubting it even once, people might ask themselves why such heartless and cold people exist in this world. If ever asked, “Would you ever kill someone if asked to?” many people would most likely answer with a definite “No” and they mean it to the maximum. Keeping in mind that they are not in the circumstances needed to follow such brutal orders is understandable that they answer with a no.
Philip G. Zimbardo was born on March 23, 1933 in New York City. He studied at Brooklyn College and graduated in 1954 with majors in sociology, anthropology, and psychology. Zimbardo attended graduate school at Yale University, where he completed his PhD in psychology in 1959. He has been working at Stanford University as a Psychology Professor since 1968. Zimbardo has written many books since his career started such as:
Selected works by Philip Zimbardo
• The Cognitive Control of Motivation (1969)
• Influencing Attitudes and Changing Behavior (with E. Ebbesen, 1969)
• Shyness: What It Is, What To Do About It (1977)
• The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (2007)
• The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time That Will Change Your Life (with J. Boyd, 2008)
• The Demise of Guys: Why Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do about It (2012)
His research ideas involve how good people can do evil deeds, how smart people do dumb things, how ordinary people do unexpected things and how the power of the social situation can overwhelm and alter the values of personalities and behavior of every person.
Zimbardo is mostly known for an experiment he conducted in 1971. The experiment was the Stanford Prison Experiment and it was designed to see how social environments influence participants and how the participants act under the social role. The experiment was done at the basement of the psychology building and the offices were made into cells, in each cell there was nothing but three beds and in the “jail” also they also had a tiny room they called the “hole” which was used for solitary confinement. There would be 24 participants, half of them would be guards and the other half would be the prisoners, their role was chosen at random. Zimbardo would be a participant in his own experiment as well, as the prison superintendent and his assistant would be the warden. He posted an ad on the local newspaper informing students from the college of an opportunity to earn 15 dollars per day by participating in an experiment that was going to last 1-2 weeks. Then they took 24 participants and made them take multiple sets of psychological tests to make sure that they were healthy. When they were given their roles, the guards were given their khaki uniforms that included the handcuffs, whistle, a billy club, and also a pair of mirror sunglasses which Zimbardo explained that because they could not see their eyes they would lose their way of humanity. According to a blogger, “He [Zimbardo] and his staff encouraged the guards to be cruel, albeit without physical abuse. . .” (Melissa). The prisoners on the other hand were told they would be arrested, not how or when. Their experience was undoubtedly different, and not as pleasant. The prisoners were arrested and taken to an authentic police station, where they had to go through a booking progress, they were then blind folded so they did not know where they were being taken. They were given a number and they were only to be directed to as that number, their names would not be used at any given time. When they arrived to the basement they were stripped down, deloused and given a dress to put on. The prisoners had to wear a chain on one of their ankles so it would remind them that they were no longer free.
Day one started and it was very calm, Zimbardo thought the experiment was going be very long or it was going to go nowhere. A guard even said “. . . I felt it was like a day in summer camp” (Dave Eshleman). The prisoners soon started rebelling and doing things to irritate the guards. Since the experiment was not a controlled experiment the guards could do anything except hurt the students with physical abuse. At first the guards would make the prisoners do pushups, and lock them in their cells without clothes. But the punishments got more and more severe. It did not take long until everything turned into chaos. On day two the rebellion continued, the prisoners would attack the guards with hurtful insults and would get personal. The guards saw the prisoners as threatening and made an arrangement to stop it. The mastermind of all this was convict 8612 whose real name is Doug Korpi he was put into the hole. They took the cells doors down, took the prisoners out, stripped them naked and ultimately broke the uprising. 8612 talked to Zimbardo about wanting to leave the experiment but Zimbardo answered not as a
psychologist, but as the prison superintendent, telling him that he would talk to the guards so that they would not hasle him personally. But in exchange he wanted 8612 to give him some information in other words telling him to become an informant. 8612 then went back to his cell and told the rest of the prisoners that they would not let him leave, that no one could leave. Not too long after coming back, he started to act crazy because he thought that if he acted crazy, they would have to release him, they released him. A fabrication began that 8612 would come back with backup to help free the rest of the convicts. Zimbardo thinking as the prisons superintendent thought that his most important objective was to not let the prison liberation occur. So he decided to move the prison to another part of the building. He waited for 8612 to come with the help and tell him that the experiment was no longer going on. But a colleague came asking questions about the independent variable. Zimbardo gets mad because he is thinking as the superintendent and not as a psychologist. The help never came so they had to go back to the basement and fix up all the cells and bring back the prisoners. The corruption started to escalate and escalate. The guards started to demean the convicts, they would make them do whatever they wanted and whenever they wanted it. Waking up from their sleep to
do push-ups, making them say things they usually would not, turning them against each other, and cleaning the toilets with their own hands. After the first convict had the first breakdown it started to happen to many. For the next couple of days after the first one, they had to discharge a convict every day. Until one-day Dr. Zimbardo’s at the time girlfriend went to visit. And she saw how demeaning it was and it opened the Zimbardo eyes and he shut down the experiment. The experiment only lasted for 6 days out of the two weeks that it was planned. Zimbardo noticed that he was getting engaged too deep into his experiments role to notice how far the things had gone before he shut it down.
This experiment was not the most pleasing experiment to be conducted. But it did show people act under a role that is given to them. How serious they take it and how far they will go with the small power they have. It is easy to take on a role and go from good to bad like this quote says, “The line between good and evil is permeable and almost anyone can be induced to cross it when pressured by situational forces.” (Phillip Zimbardo). This experiment teaches all of us that anyone can do bad under social influence, does not matter how good or bad they are. We are all humans and as Professor Lucca always said, us, humans, are the cruelest species on earth to ourselves and to others.
References
H. (2011). Retrieved December 02, 2016, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZwfNs1pqG0
H. (2015). Retrieved December 02, 2016, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gb4Q20z0T1Q
Philip Zimbardo. (n.d.). Retrieved December 02, 2016, from http://www.goodtherapy.org/famous-psychologists/philip-zimbardo.html
Philip Zimbardo Quotes. (n.d.). Retrieved December 05, 2016, from https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/p/philipzimb271920.html
Stanford Prison Experiment Image Gallery. (n.d.). Retrieved December 05, 2016, from http://slideplayer.com/slide/6245500/
The Stanford Prison Experiment. (2014). Retrieved December 02, 2016, from http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2014/03/stanford-prison-experiment/