Stanford Prison Experiment

In 1971, Dr. Phil Zimbardo (later to become the president of the American Psychological Association), took healthy Stanford University students, assigned them roles as either “guards” or “inmates,” and locked them in a makeshift “prison” in the basement of Stanford University. The roles they played in the structure had a profound impact on their psychological health and behavior.

In just days, the “prisoners” began to demonstrate symptoms of depression and extreme stress, while the “guards” began to act cruel and sadistic (the experiment was ended early, for obvious reasons). The point is that simply being treated like prisoners and guards had, over the course of just a few days, created a momentum that caused the subjects to act like prisoners and guards.^[1]

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