Introduction
Personality is a rather complex feature that can be affected by the situation and system one is placed in. In chapters 8 and 9 of the book The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, Zimbardo depicts the final days of an experiment he conducted, where college students were assigned to play the roles of prisoners and guards in Stanford Prison and its aftermath. It has introduced some interesting and ominous facts about individuals’ behavior changing under the influence of their environment.
Discussion
In the process of explaining the results of the experiment, Zimbardo criticizes himself for being silent when some of the guards exhibited psychologically abusive behavior towards the prisoners and states the following: “the System includes the Situation, but it is more enduring, more widespread, involving extensive networks of people, their expectations, norms, policies, and, perhaps, laws. Over time, Systems come to have a historical foundation and sometimes also a political and economic power structure that governs and directs the behavior of many people within its sphere of influence. Systems are the engines that run situations that create behavioral contexts that influence the human action of those under their control. At some point, the System may become an autonomous entity, independent of those who initially started it or even those in apparent authority within its power structure. Each System comes to develop a culture of its own, as many Systems collectively come to contribute to the culture of a society” (Zimbardo 179-180) This quote implies that while their experiment was an important counterpart of the system, the overall results and impact were more complicated.
Despite some of the respondents claiming to be opposed to abuse and oppression, the delinquent nature of the aforementioned system still took over, as some pacifistic individuals became allured by violence, and certain prisoners became zombified. Even the writer himself had to remind the guards after the experiment that the aggressive behavior they had exhibited was not their fault, as it was caused by the overall environment of prisons. The prisoners experienced distrust and repulsion towards one of the newcomers for causing havoc, as they had already dealt with multiple punishments by then and did not want to face the same aftermath again. It is important to note that the captive individuals recognized that the guards were in a prison of their own, as both sides were confined to the same building and the same atrocious and harmful system of the prison.
I agree with Zimbardo’s analysis of the experiment and the system that drove the situation. In the process of depicting the aftermath, while he was happy that he could make people relieved by ending the experiment, he acknowledged that there were multiple negative side effects and events. First, he was ignorant of the atrocious nature of the ongoing abuse before he discussed it with Christina Maslach, who was appalled by the writer contributing to the issue because of his silence. Second, as stated earlier, the experiment revealed the worst sides of the guards’ personalities, as they were developing sadistic tendencies. Third, the environment resulted in emotional breakdowns, making some of the prisoners leave early. Fourth, Guard Varnish stated the following in an interview conducted after the experiment: “The idea that two roughly identical groups of college students each in only a week evolved into two disparate social groups with one group having and utilizing total power over the other to their detriment is chilling.” (Zimbardo 187) While the participants of the experiment were all college students, it developed new identities for them.
Conclusion
Some of the guards enjoyed the violence they exhibited or contributed to it by being inactive and some prisoners either were more rebellious and stressed or silently obeyed the most irrational and inhumane orders assigned to them by the other side. Surprisingly, one of the guards, Hellman was conducting his experiment within the one performed by the writer. He would test the capabilities of the prisoners, pushing them to their limits. The prison experiment exposed the negative personality traits that he mentioned. Fortunately, he acknowledged the harm he had caused to the participants. In conclusion, the experiment has shown that even the most strong-willed and pacifist individuals may develop a sadistic or zombified personality under the pressure of an abusive system. The ones who rebel against it are usually a minority, while the others contribute to the issue by not reporting the cases of abuse.
Work Cited
Zimbardo, P. G. The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. Random House, 2007.