REWORD/REPHRASE ALL OF THE FOLLOWING
1. Living in an environment that has no clocks, not view of the outside world, and minimal sensory stimulation is a way in which prison guards can further break down the prisoners. In a state like this the prisoner will loose all sense of time and space, have no reminders of the outside world, and thus become more and more hopeless with each passing day. It is also used so as the prisoners feel like their sentences are longer, thus potentially rehabilitating them even more.
2. The process of stripping, delousing, and shaving the heads of prisoners and military alike is to make the individuals loose their identity. By stripping them of all their personal belongings it forces the individual to let go of his personality and individuality, as is shaving their heads. By breaking prisoners and military personnel like this it allows for them to reemergemore subordinate and timid, making it easier for the guards or superiors to have control over them.
3. In the beginning of the study non of the participants, guards and prisoners alike, took the experiment as seriously. For this reason the idea of push-ups as a form of punishment was not very aversive. However, as the members of the experiment became more and more emerged in their roles any and every command became more important and harsher. By the guard ordering the prisoner to perform any task, in the later stages of the experiment, it would be viewed as degrading and harsh, thus making the prisoner want to retaliate and the guard want to implement it further.
4. It is truly difficult to image our own reaction in harsh situations and environments such as these. Although I would like to believe that I would be able to maintain my sanity and individuality by remembering it is simply an experiment, in all honesty I can not say. More likely than not I would also fall deeply into the role of prisoner, as did the actual volunteers, and do anything and everything I could to survive. For this reason, I probably would accept the privileges and work with the guards in order to be able to maintain some form of humane treatment.
5. What could have caused this misconception is the shear mistreatment of the prisoners. They signed up to be part of an experiment and were put on the loosing side of it, the side that was tormented the most. It is only natural that they would believe some form of discrimination existed when choosing the role of eave volunteer. Also, because the guards used physical force with the prisoners, and the prisoners had a sense of hopelessness and los of identity, they felt they were actually physically incapable of competing with the guards physically.
6. Their behavior showed an exceptional amount of commonalities to what civilians normally would react like in the same environment of a real prison. They were dehumanized, forced to do hard labor, mentally and physically abused which caused them to lose sleep. It’s not surprising that they were mentally giving up considering the abuse which they believed to be real. They lost their identity and would know themselves as a number which is a loss of identity seen in actual prisoners.
7. The problem with the study is that the investigator also held a role which introduced bias. Its understood he wanted to control the outcome and make sure that the prison was stimulated completely but the result of that was to basically manipulate every part of the “game” that they set up and it may have trigged him to not notice the kind of the abuse if it wasn’t for an outside source telling him about the cruelty that was forced on these boys. The data they would collect is the number of incidents on prisoners vs guards and the number of attempts to escape. Also, they would need to identify and record every instance of resilience and see if it correlates with the personality tests that were recorded initially (which they did).
8. The Stanford Prison Experiment had a similar abuse of sexually humiliating the boys by making them more feminine with the dresses and such. However, the Abu Ghraib incident could be seen as a much higher level of abuse. Even the guards who forced push ups, etc never did anything like sexually humiliate and take photographs (which I guess didn’t exist on phones like they would have in 2003 so it may have happened in modern days). The abuse is common enough to show that people in power feel the same level of evil that dictators do when given real and total authority over others.
9. He never became such a guard outside the study. He was given power to which he violently held onto it. I’m not sure why some men such as John Wayne took his role as much more brutal than others did however people in power want to hold the biggest slice of the “power pie” as other management classes have taught. In this instance, he felt that he could easily gain the most from having the most power and enforced it in the only way he thought worked.
10. It’s possible that the power may have gone to the guard’s heads and they felt that they enjoyed over taking total authority over others. They weren’t ready to transition into their normal lives again and instead felt that by inhibiting others, they were feeling important. They lost that feeling of power and this could cause immature emotions to show like anger.
