The Experiment of the Guards and the Prisoners - Essay Example

Summary

The paper presents the experiment which conducted in Stanford University involving randomly 24 selected college students to test the hypothesis that the guards and the prisoners are the cause of the abusive behavior in prison was a successful experiment to explain why chaos exist in the prisons…

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The Experiment of the Guards and the Prisoners

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Subject: Psychology
Type: Essay
Level: Masters
Pages: 1 (250 words)
Downloads: 3
Author: oratke

Extract of sample "The Experiment of the Guards and the Prisoners"

Several situations in the experiment seemed quite unethical. The striping of the participants who were acting as prisoners, the punishment the prisoners had to undergo like the cleaning of the toilets with bare hands, the sanitation bucket that the guards could not let the prisoners empty that posed has a health hazard and sleeping on the concrete floor. These situations could have been avoided and an optional way to punish them would have been preferred (Haslam & Reicher #155). Prisons have still been associated with the hell due to the crimes that still exist in them.

Inmates are killed, injured, subjected to sexual abuse and others forced to work without food as a punishment from the guards. It is ironical that the prisons are meant to improve the behavior of the criminals positively though, the output is still wanting. The behavior showed in the experiment is no different from what is experienced in the prisons today. If changes are there, then they are very minimal (Zimbardo, #30). A good modern example is the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse and torture in Iraq in 2004.

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