Reading about the Stanford Prison Experiment was an interesting experience for me. This is not the first time I\u2019ve heard of or researched this experiment. We also covered it in my Leadership and Social Sciences course, and I watched the drama of it on Netflix. I find experiments of this sort interesting as they reveal something a lot of people prefer not to admit that power corrupts easily and that it isn\u2019t hard to corrupt people.<\/p>\n
Something the article doesn\u2019t really touch on that we looked at in my previous class is the role responsibility plays. A huge factor all these studies reveal is that for a person, such as one of guards, to descend into the barbarism they end up committing, responsibility has to be removed. In another study where participates thought they were shocking test subjects with ever higher shocks, if the scientist also in the room said they would take responsibility for whatever happened, the majority of participates administered increasingly high, even lethal shocks. However, when told they would be responsible, over 90% of participates refused to continue. This reveals that responsibility plays a massive factor in how far most people are prepared to go. Sadly, the article describing the experiment never really touches on this, and it would have been interesting to see if the guards\u2019 actions would have changed if told they were responsible for the safety and well-being of the prisoners.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Reading about the Stanford Prison Experiment was an interesting experience for me. This is not the first time I\u2019ve heard of or researched this experiment. We also covered it in my Leadership and Social Sciences course, and I watched the drama of it on Netflix. I find experiments of this sort interesting as they reveal […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4687,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5398","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\/5398","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\/4687"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5398"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5398\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}