The experiment conducted at Stanford mock prison in 1971 was falsified. A young psychology professor at Stanford University, Philip Zimbardo designed a simulated detainment facility at the undercroft of the psychology department in the university and selected 18 college students volunteers to take the role of guards and prisoners. The experiment aimed to get an insight of the prisoners and guards’ behaviors in real prisons (Zimbardo 2017). The interpretation of the experiment is based on the conditions of detention, where one group exercise power over another group that has been denied individual identities making the latter to develop maladaptive responses similar to the responses often experienced in real prisons.
The result of this experiment could not have been genuine because; 18 young men were asked to act the role of guards and prisoners after a series of reported cases of prison riots and guards’ brutality. Definitely, the actors had to play their roles as real prisoners and guards, more accurately based on their stereotyped perspectives of what detainees and guards do. Obviously, Zimbardo who was the head of the experiment could have felt dissatisfied if the prisoners sat comfortably in the mock detention. Research has revealed that most participants in psychological experiments are usually inspired to act towards experimenters expectations. Therefore such characteristics that make participants in an experiment predict what are the intended behavior by their experimenters is termed as demand characteristics. In a justifiable experiment, it is significant to minimize demand traits. However, in the Stanford Prison experiment, the demand characteristics can be observed everywhere (Zimbardo 2017). Subsequent findings on the experiments have also revealed that the guards did not even have the chance to guess what was expected of them. One of Zimbardo’s associates, David Jaffe instructed them on what to do.
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References
Zimbardo, P. G. (2017). On the ethics of intervention in human psychological research: With special reference to the Stanford prison experiment. Cognition, ( ).
