Step 7: Aftermath
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Ok, So how in the world did all of this happen exactly?
Philip ZimbardoWho exactly is this guy? He's a Stanford Professor who conducted research to evaluate human behavior in the 1970's. Being an employee at Stanford, he created a fake prison in the basement of one of the buildings, and then recruited 24 Stanford students to participate in his research.
He paid each participant $15 per day, and the experiment was supposed to last for two weeks. However, it did not last that long. Zimbardo had random students assigned to be either a prisoner or a guard. The ones who were selected as prisoners were then "arrested" from home, and taken to the police station to be processed. Experiment: Once they were, they were blindfolded and taken to the basement of the building to the fake prison. This is when the experiment started. It did not take long for the prison guards to begin to abuse their powers. At 2:30 in the morning (on the first night!) they began using their whistles to abruptly wake up the prisoners for "roll" and only called them by their prisoner number (sound familiar?). From there on, it got much, MUCH worse. |
The experiment lasted six days due to some of the participants experiencing permanent trauma from maltreatment from the prison guards. Physical and mental abuse took place, which forced Zimbardo to call of the experiment earlier than he had anticipated.
Ok, so what does that mean? Through his highly controversial experiment (that ended up doing a significant amount of harm to some of the people who participated), Zimbardo came to understand that, "We can learn to become good or evil regardless of our genetic inheritance, personality, or family legacy." Nelson Mandela, who survived 27 years of unjust imprisonment in South Africa while fighting for freedom, reaffirms this as he wrote about a prison guard that had a reputation for treating prisoners very poorly. "Badenhorst had perhaps been the most callous and barbaric commanding officer we had had on Robben Island. But that day in office (Badenhorst wished Mandela well as the guard left for another position), he had revealed that there was another side to his nature, a side that had been obscured but that still existed. It was a useful reminder that all men, even the most seemingly cold-blooded, have a core of decency, and that if their heart is touched, they are capable of changing. Ultimately, Badenhorse was not evil; his inhumanity had been imposed upon him by an inhumane system. He behaved like a brute because he was rewarded for brutish behavior." |