The Stanford Prison Experiment Sought To Recreate A Prison

The Stanford Prison Experiment sought to recreate a prison experience to study behaviors of prisoners and guards. The authors were seeking answers to the question of dispositional hypothesis which states â€Å"that the state of the social institution of prison is due to the â€Å"nature† of the people who administer it, or the â€Å"nature† of the people who populate it, or both† (A Study of Prisoners and Guards in a Stimulated Prison, 1971, pg. 2). In other words, they were studying whether the prisoners and guards behaviors changed due to their personalities or was it the prison environment that caused these changes. The authors considered the recidivism rate that was 75 percent at the time, conditions in prisons, and the belief that prisons†¦show more content†¦The researchers observed the behaviors and mentalities of both guards and prisoners by naturalistic observation. What the researchers found during this study was that both the behaviors an d mentalities of guards and prisoners changed. Guards became more aggressive and prisoners became passive. A group of five prisoners had to actually be released from the study because of physical and emotional changes they were experiencing. Those prisoners remaining actually began acting as if they were truly incarcerated. By the behaviors they exhibited they had all but forgotten that they were free to leave at any time and not forfeit the money they had already earned. Guards, on the other hand, actually stayed at the prison longer than they were scheduled and were actually disappointed when the study came to a close while prisoners were very happy and expressed their luck at getting released early. These results clearly demonstrate that it is the environment that contributes to the behaviors observed. Those who were given the role of guard expressed the power and control they had over the prisoners. The prisoners began to become hopeless and bend to the power of the gua rds. The researchers came to the conclusion that training of guards should be changed along with the way the prisons are operated (A Study of Prisoners and Guards in aShow MoreRelatedStrategy Safari by Mintzberg71628 Words   |  287 Pagesorganizational failure. . . . Deliberate building in of strategy absence may promote flexibility in an organization. . . . Organizations with tight controls, high reliance on formalized procedures, and a passion for consistency may lose the ability to experiment and innovate. †¢ Management may use the absence of strategy to send unequivocal signals to both internal and external stakeholders of its preference not to engage in resource-consuming ceremony.... For example, various articles have described NucorRead MoreStephen P. Robbins Timothy A. Judge (2011) Organizational Behaviour 15th Edition New Jersey: Prentice Hall393164 Words   |  1573 Pagesmistakes than from our successes. So, we need to realize that while we don’t want to f ail, it does have a hidden gift if we’re willing to receive—a chance to learn something important. Eli Lilly holds â€Å"failure parties† to honor drug trials and experiments that fail to achieve the desired results. The rationale for these parties is to recognize that when little is ventured, little is lost, but little is gained too. Procter Gamble CEO A. G. Lafley argues that very high success rates show incrementalRead MoreOrganisational Theory230255 Words   |  922 Pageswho investigate the behaviour of physical, nonsentient phenomena, their relationship with those phenomena is not problematic in these respects. For example, physicists and chemists who conduct experiments investigating the behaviour of water do not have to worry whether or not the results of their experiments will affect the subsequent behaviour of that water; they seem to deal with a world that does not answer back. As far as we know, water does not have a self-conscious understanding of its own behaviour