What are the Implications of the Stanford Prison
Experiment for Humanity?
“His desire to squeeze and hurt was overmastering”. This is how writer William Golding describes Ralph’s feelings in ‘The Lord of the Flies’ as the children carry out another one of their sadistic rituals. The book was set during the Second World War, a horrific period when five million Jews were slaughtered under the Nazi Holocaust to go along with over sixty million more casualties.
As a result of all these human disasters, people have been trying to work out exactly what drives man on and causes him to commit such evil actions. In the summer of 1971, Dr Philip Zimbardo conducted a psychological experiment – The Stanford Prison Experiment -using eighteen students and a real life prison cell. He divided the volunteers into ‘guards’ and ‘prisoners’, handing total authority to the guards. The main tools of this authority were bats, handcuffs and better living conditions than the prisoners - the interesting inclusion being silver-reflected sunglasses to make them seem less human and less emotionally weak. Iron bars were put into place inside the cell to make the prisoners feel more contained, and they later nicknamed it ‘the hole’. The experiment was scheduled to go on for two weeks, but had to be stopped after six days.
The results that followed were extremely disturbing. The first major event came just 36 hours into the experiment, when Prisoner 8612 suffered from huge mental and emotional stress, causing endless screaming and calls to be released. The guards seemed to be poisoned by their power as they beat prisoners and carried out strip searches after waking them in the middle of the night, making fun using degrading insults. Added on to all this during the course of the six days were needless, excess push ups and harsh ‘punishments’, including forcing inmates to clean toilets with their bare hands. All these things the prisoners had to endure, and they were certainly pushed to their limits. This showed when prisoner 416 was so desperate he went on a hunger strike. Even Zimbardo got carried away when he later entered as a prison warder, showing that in some way he became a subject of his own experiment, which shows that there was something in the atmosphere that was influential. After the practical was brought to a cease, Zimbardo was shocked at the mad behaviour of the guards. According to him, the volunteers were just typical student ‘peaceniks’ who all of a sudden ‘acted like Nazis’.
