{"id":5350,"date":"2020-03-31T11:59:29","date_gmt":"2020-03-31T15:59:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/?p=5350"},"modified":"2020-03-31T11:59:29","modified_gmt":"2020-03-31T15:59:29","slug":"designing-villains","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/2020\/03\/31\/designing-villains\/","title":{"rendered":"Designing Villains"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">I read the Stanford Prison Experiment as a cautionary tale more than anything else. Average \u201cboys\u201d when placed into either situations of previously unknown power or lack thereof for no reason other than random assortment, completely fall into their role of either a power-hungry prison guard or a prisoner with few human rights that trusts no one. They perform these roles so well the experiment had to be stopped early. If this is what can happen in a psychology department basement within 5 days using college students with no criminal past or previous exposure to the US correctional system, imagine what a real US prison would be like. Like many actual prison guards, these \u201cguards\u201d had no formal training and simply relied on their own instincts and turned the prisoners against each other to deflect the anger the prisoners felt from their inhumane conditions.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">I am particularly fascinated by the guards in this experiment and how readily they embraced their role. Goethals and Allison state how \u201cdepending on context, mystery can arouse either thoughts of frightening danger and villains, or positive, hopeful expectations and images of wonder, awe and heroic leadership\u201d (3). By giving the guards mirrored sunglasses that prevented the prisoners from seeing their eyes and providing them all with the same uniform &#8211; both of which added an air of mystery to the guards\u2019 identity &#8211; the experimenters were able to make villains out of randomly assorted college students using the fear-inducing context of a prison. The researchers were so successful in constructing these villains that the guards began to view themselves as actual prison guards, not just students participating in a study. This makes me wonder how much the context of the world around us\/what is placed on us by people around us influences our identities, how we present ourselves to the world, and how we see ourselves. It makes me think that our environment has the ability to completely change our behavior and attitudes, which is part of why I believe that by continuing to treat prisoners this way instead of focusing on actual rehabilitation the US justice system is merely perpetuating a vicious cycle of crime and incarceration.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I read the Stanford Prison Experiment as a cautionary tale more than anything else. Average \u201cboys\u201d when placed into either situations of previously unknown power or lack thereof for no reason other than random assortment, completely fall into their role of either a power-hungry prison guard or a prisoner with few human rights that trusts [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4446,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5350","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading-responses"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5350","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4446"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5350"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5350\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}