January 31, 2004
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What happens when you put good people in an evil place? Does humanity win over evil, or does evil triumph? These are some of the questions we posed in this dramatic simulation of prison life conducted in the summer of 1971 at Stanford University.
How we went about testing these questions and what we found may astound you. Our planned two-week investigation into the psychology of prison life had to be ended prematurely after only six days because of what the situation was doing to the college students who participated. In only a few days, our guards became sadistic and our prisoners became depressed and showed signs of extreme stress. Please join me on a slide tour of describing this experiment and uncovering what it tells us about the nature of Human Nature.
--Philip G. Zimbardo
http://www.prisonexp.org/index.html
From MissJSerenity
Comments (1)
They did something like that when I was still in Junior high school... you were either part of the elite or part of the lower echelon-- amazing how in just a short time we all started identifying with the class to which we were assigned.
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