The Stanford Prison Experiment (14 Aug 1971 – 20 Aug 1971) was a social psychology experiment that attempted to study the psychological effects on perceived power, focusing mainly on the struggles of police officers and prisoners. In the study, volunteers were assigned to be either "guards" or "prisoners" by the flip of a coin, in a mock prison, made in the basement of Stanford University. The experiment that was supposed to last for 2 weeks was instead shut off in 6 days.
This was mainly because the prisoners (Stanford's students) felt psychologically abused and tortured because of the cruel and sadistic treatment from the ‘guards’. Even though the study did not complete its own goals, it proved how good-common people (the voluntary guards) could turn evil due to thinking that their behavior would be advantageous to the greater good i.e. Science
This was termed as Demand Characteristics. In psycho,logy this refers to the fact that throughout an experiment the volunteers interpret the desired goal of the experiment and therefore behave in a way that they usually wouldn’t behave in. The experiment head, Dr. Zimbardo conducted it to focus on the power of roles, rules, symbols, group identity, and situational validation of behavior that generally would repulse ordinary individuals. Such an example is: one of "the most abusive guard" felt his aggressive behavior was helping experimenters to get what they wanted.
Even though throughout the experiment, any type of physical harm was prohibited, the guards were specifically asked to make the prisoners feel dehumanized, mentally tortured, and bored. After only 35 hours, one prisoner began to act "crazy", as Zimbardo described: "#8612 then began to act crazy, to scream, to curse, to go into a rage that seemed out of control. It took quite a while before we became convinced that he was really suffering and that we had to release him." Guards forced the prisoners to repeat their assigned numbers to reinforce the idea that this was their new identity (thus, mentally dehumanizing them), the prisoners were also led to believe that they little or no control of what would happen to them which caused them to stop responding and then give up.
This entire experiment was proof that people behaved differently when given power and when refrained from it (especially on themselves).
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