The documentary film recorded the process and some afterward feedback on Stanford prison experiment, which was a study held by Stanford University exploring the psychological effects of ordinary people becoming a prisoner or prison guard. This experiment itself was very powerful and the result was quite shocking to me.
It's astonishing to see how fast people can act like someone else according to a certain situation and power relationship. Both the "guards" and "prisoners" adapted to their roles more than they were expected, stepping beyond the boundaries of what had been predicted. One-third of the guards were judged to have exhibited "genuine sadistic tendencies", while many prisoners were emotionally traumatized. In this experiment, many of the prisoners passively accepted psychological abuse and, at the request of the guards, readily harassed other prisoners who attempted to prevent it. The experiment even affected the researcher, Zimbardo himself, who, in his role as the superintendent, permitted the abuse to continue. Two of the prisoners went mental breakdown and quit the experiment early and the entire experiment was forced to stop after only six days.
The film recorded many valuable footages of the acting power of situation, and the fact that human behavior is so weak under certain situational forces. For example, rules, roles, symbols, and uniforms. They can lead to a dangerous place and result in psychologically damaging situations to everyone. In such powerful process, I find that the lost of identity or personality act as a key point in crushing the feeling of being in control or being yourself. For instance, the experiment use numbers instead of names to identify prisoners. The power of language is astonishing. After repeating the sentences after the guards in loud voice several times, prisoners started to accept the situation and unconsciously builded up a psychological recognition. Using bad language and public humiliation just acts like physical punishment to human beings. The effects of this experiment to those "prisoners" were incredible. Like prisoner 416, after two months of the end of this experiment, he still believed that it was not just an academic experiment. The lost of personal identity let him feel like his real personality was remote form himself. The experience harmed him badly, especially when he realized that how horrible normal people can be turned into or how badly people can act to each other under certain circumstances.
In this experiment, the whole builded up prison society was very unreal, however the power acted quite factual and profound. Especially when the prisoners' parents and the priest accepted this system and acted according to it. The guards responded on this system strongly by accepting their uniforms, the authority, the power of feeling in control. There's even one guard believed that he was doing an experiment by his own, trying to explore if there's one to question the authority he had, and he was amazed that "no one stand up to stop me". Such situation reinforced him to act in power and performed badly to prisoners and totally forgot that his real identity. Yes, this just showed that anybody could be a guard; and anybody could be made into a prisoner.
This experiment is very related to today's world. When people in a certain position or in a power relationship, like husband and wife, parents and children, teachers and students, government and citizens, everyone would act responding to their power-roles, not just behavior according to their identity or personality. It just reminds me of the lost of humanity in human behaviors in some major wars, like the massacres did by the Nazis or Japanese in WWII.
Those effects of situation, the power of being in control can easily change a person's social behavior and psychologic activity. Such result leads to many questions to our human natures, and challenges many conventional values in our society.
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