I first learned about the Stanford Prison Experiment in a criminal justice class during my senior year of high school. One of the main things I took away from that experiment is the idea of groupthink, and how we prefer to stick to the perceived status quo. In addition, the process of human conditioning is something I find very interesting, and this experiment is a prime example of that. Through the multiple examples of degradation and humiliation, the participants who were assigned the role of prisoners were reduced to their prison number. The most interesting part was that their number became not only their identity to the guards and researchers, but also to themselves. Their identity had been stripped in the experiment, but that degradation had bled into their internal identities. One of the participants said, “I began to feel that that identity, the person that I was that had decided to go to prison was distant from me – was remote until finally I wasn’t that, I was 416. I was really my number”. Despite knowing that this was just an experiment, the prisoners were pushed to a level of psychological distress that they assumed their role of prisoner and guard. They felt powerless to stand up to the guards, and some of the “nicer” guards felt powerless to stand up to other abusive guards or the researchers in general. This experiment of human condition showed us just how quickly we are able to assume roles of powerful/powerless when assigned by an outside influence. I think it’s scary to see concrete evidence of how susceptible we are able to conform to these types of power roles, and genuinely believe that we don’t have the power to stand up to authority.

In the Goethals and Allison reading, one sentence that stood out to me was, “Resolving mystery through meaning making is, of course, one facet of the more general human tendency to take small bits of information and engage in some kind of cognitive construction that feels as if it makes sense or meaning out of what is known or perceived” (4). This idea of using current information to try and piece together the larger meaning reminded me of our discussion in class yesterday. This may not be the best comparison, but I think it related to ad hoc responsiveness, and how we want “quick fixes” to larger problems. By using what is in front of us and making a larger conclusion from it, we may be missing larger crucial elements to that problem. I think it also relates to charisma, and how we have shifted to an individualistic society that values charisma in a leader. If we take that limited information and make a decision based on only that, we could be missing a lot of important information that makes that leader who they are, if that makes sense…