Quiet Rage: The Simulated Prison Experiment by Dr. Zimbardo in 1971
by In 1971 an experiment was conducted to measure the psychological stress that a prison environment produces among the people sentenced to living there and those whose job it is to try to keep the peace.
This was a research paper I wrote that broke down the experiment and gives insight to how people follow/lead each other. This was an extreme example but sheds some light on recent events in our history.
In 1971 an experiment was conducted to measure the psychological stress that a prison environment produces among the people sentenced to living there and those whose job it is to try to keep the peace. It was also an extreme example of power dynamics in a social situation according to the article by Meredith Alexander written for the Stanford Report (2001). In the video documentary titled, Quiet Rage: The Stanford Prison Experiment, Dr. Zimbardo explains in great detail the steps that were taken to launch this experiment. They had conferred with an ex-convict for hours upon hours and came up with what would reflect to the closest degree possible a real prison. It was impossible to use a real prison because of security reasons and also because it would be impossible to extract whether the reactions of the prisoners and the guards came from what the prison brings out or what the people bring into it according to Dr. Zimbardo in Quiet Rage: The Stanford Prison Experiment (1988).
The experiment emulated the formula that is used in classical experiments. Our textbook, “Research Methods for Criminal Justice and Criminology,” define a classical experiment as being structured with independent and dependent variables, pretesting and post testing, and finally, experimental and control groups (Maxfield & Babble 2005). The prison simulation was a good experiment for observational purposes and tested the hypothesis that prisons can bring out the worst characteristics in the individuals who work there and are incarcerated (Maxfield & Babble). Zimbardo and his colleagues defined the operations they would use to measure the pressures of stress, observe the data collected from questionnaires administered on a daily basis, and record the interactions of the guards and prisoners. The two units of analysis were simulations of a formal organization, the guards, and a group, the prisoners. The participants were voluntary and were told what the experiment was about and how it would be conducted. There were independent and dependent variables, working definitions for the purpose of the simulation, and a hypothesis that was being tested. This experiment followed, as best it could, the criteria necessary to be considered a classical experiment. Some experiments do not always have a control group and an experimental group. In the prison experiment there was not an obvious control group but for the purpose of this experiment, it can be assumed that the control group could be the individuals who are not in prison and not subjected to such a harsh environment.
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