Summary and Critique of The Stanford Prison Experiment The Stanford Prison Experiment of 1973 raises troubling questions about the ability of individuals to exist repressive or obedient roles, if the social setting requires these roles. Philip K. Zimbardo, professor of Psychology at Stanford University, began researching how prisoners and guards assume submissive and authoritarian roles. He set out to do this by placing advertisements in a local newspaper, stating that male college students would be needed for a study of prison life paying fifteen dollars per day for one to two days. Of the seventy-five responses, twenty-one were selected, half of them as “guards” (Zimbardo p. 364) and the other half as “prisoners.” (Zimbardo p. 364) Philip Zimbardo’s primary goal in this experiment was to find out the process when prisoners and guards become controlling and passive. He did this by setting up a mock prison in which all of the prisoners were assigned the same uniforms and cells, and used numbers instead of names. The guards were assigned uniforms and offices, somewhat similar to the prisoners except they were equipped with billy clubs, whistles, handcuffs, and keys, and had freedom. These conditions allowed a setting similar to prisons; this also allowed everyone to be stripped of identifying characteristics, therefore “equal.” One of Philip Zimbardo’s claims was the “process” of becoming a prisoner. In this process, all of the applicants were arrested, read their rights, and charged with a felony. After they were taken down to the station to be fingerprinted, each prisoner was left isolated to wonder what he did. After a while, he was blindfolded and transported to the “Stanford County Prison.” Here, he was stripped naked, skin-searched, deloused and given a uniform, bedding, soup, and a towel. In this “mock prison” (Zimbardo p. 365) “prisoners&...
