Wednesday, September 26, 2012

The Stanford Experiment "Prison Life"

Many sociologists collect a number of data from different experiments they conduct. When I saw the video "The Stanford Experiment" it amazed me on how real an experiment can be. Without thinking about it, our minds can make us believe that we are in a prison cell for eternity when it's only a two week paid experiment. In the summer of 1971, we saw this take place where college students were paid to do an experiment where they would be in a prison like environment for two weeks but only lasted for sx days. Philip Zimbardo was the head of the experiment and was also the head guard. it was such an wonderful thing to see that each and everyone in the experiment got carried away with the position they were assigned to. Even the prisoners were convinced that they were real prisoners and they were going to stay in their cells for a long time. All of the students knew that this was an experiment, they were even getting paid $15 a day but they got to drawn to their fictional characters. Philips Zimbardo himself confessed that he didn't feel like this experiment at all but he thought it was real life, that is why they had to cut the experiment short. This just shows that it does not matter where you are or what you are doing, but if you're in an enviroment where you see one thing like being surrounded by bars and having people tell you that what your seeing is true, like the guards telling the prisoners that they weren't coming out the prisons for a while, than your mind will lead you to believe that what you're seeing and what you're hearing is absolutely true. This is why we have to be very careful about how we operate our experiments.

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