Psychological Effects

Psychological Effects

The Stanford Prison Experiment conducted by Philip Zimbardo and his colleagues was a social psychological study of college students in a simulated prison environment. The purpose of the experiment was to understand the effects of role-playing, development of norms, labeling, and social expectations on behavior. From the analysis, the take was that when you take any individual and dehumanize them, the results you get are inhumane. The long-term effect on the prisonerbsustaining mental traumas.

In cases whereby the corrections officers are cruel, as in the Stanford Prison Experiment, the prisoners can even forget their identity and associate themselves only by the prison identity number (Bartels 36). When in prison, prisoners lose control over the mundane aspects of their lives; do have not any identity to associate to, their daily schedule is dictated to them regarding what time to sleep and what time to eat. When as a prisoner, your rights, basic needs, and identity are taken, you become a shell of yourself, have a diminished sense of personal value and self-worth, thus becoming submissive to those of authority. When they returned to society, these people will tend to remain aloof, socially withdrawn, and seek to become invisible even in family gatherings. Due to what they have experienced in prisons, it is tough and will take some time to overcome the diminished sense of self-worth often instilled in jail.

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When you do something for a long time, it becomes a part of you. The guards used in the experiment, who were nice individuals in real life, transformed to be sadists. They were able to breakdown the prisoners in a state whereby they were crying, yet it was only a simulated experiment. Corrections officers get to have power over the prisoners and contribute to the psychological abuse of the prisoners. The effects include enjoying having the authority of another person, such as beatings with repercussions. As shown from the Stanford Prison Experiment, although the prisoners were happy it was over, the guards were disappointed at the premature termination of the study (Bartels 36). This is due to the power they got to exercise over the prisoners. The corrections officer will crave such authority and over extended periods become more sadist in the kind of punishment they inflict on prisoners, which can cause psychological abuse in the long run.

Work Cited

Bartels, Jared M. “The Stanford prison experiment in introductory psychology textbooks: A content analysis.” Psychology Learning & Teaching 14.1 (2015): 36-50.