Prison Experiment

I believe that the experiment started ethical but by the end of it I would have to say it changed to unethical. How could you have known that this was going to be the results of the study? Studies and experiments occur all the time with surprising results. This result, I believe, was not one that was expected. In a prison setting there needs to be a clear cut line of who is in charge or else there is chaos and danger for the guards and the inmates. I believe that this is the line that the student guards were trying to create because they knew what needed to be accomplished. Placing a student into any of these roles will change there actions and personalities to match these roles. Like I said before, you never know how something will turn out until you try it. I think it would have been more ethical to follow a first time offender in the prison system to see the social interactions between guards and current inmates. This would not involve innocent people trying to play roles that they are not use to.

While viewing the video I was thinking was this a sociological or psychological experiment. After watching the comments by the professor I think this was mainly a psychological experiment that also has sociological results. Like I had said above, a clear line of authority needs to be established and human nature is to push those boundaries and they were pushed on both sides. The players in the experiment had to place themselves into what they believed the roles encompassed. This portion I think is the psychological part. Seeing what fellow students were doing and following would be the sociological part.

The last comment of the student prisoner I find was incredibly interesting. When the student guard asked him what would you have done if you were in my position. I believe his response was extremely accurate. I don’t know.

As a little bonus I will let you know what I was thinking while watching this video piece about the prisons. I was a Military Police Officer in the army for 7 ½ years. I was trained in the basics of prison set ups and operations. More in depth training was given to the corrections personnel. Looking at the sequence of events, the “prison punishment”, looked more like a basic training situation then a prison scenario. In basic training you try to break a recruit down and rebuild them into what you want them to be. A prisoner is a totally different entity. If you have a prisoner that is misbehaving you don’t punish by having them do pushups. You place them into isolation to remove the problem from infecting the rest of the population. This punishment could relate directly to sociology. The general population will feed on the prisoner’s misbehavior and spread like wild fire. Before you know it a whole cell block is out of control.