The film is about a collective psychological experiment held by Stanford University in the 1970s, and the film is adapted from the Stanford Prison Experiment. Psychologists turned a Stanford University basement into a prison, then advertised in newspapers for twenty male subjects for high pay. The psychologists divided them into two groups, one pretending to be a prison guard, and the other pretending to be a prisoner. The experimental time plan was two weeks. In the movie, as the experiment progresses, the atmosphere between the prisoners and the prison guards gradually becomes tense. They forget that what they are doing is an experiment, and they have a rather intense emotional confrontation with each other. On the one hand, the prison guards began to suppress the prisoners in order to be loyal to their duties; on the other hand, under the humiliation and extreme anger of the prisoners, the prisoners also began to constantly fight useless counterattacks, and finally lost control. In the experiment, prison guards also kept punishing prisoners for making them obey them, locking them into confinement in warehouses, making them poop in buckets, and so on. As a result, mistrust and persecution paranoia developed between prisoners and prison guards, and the way the prison guards punished prisoners continued to escalate and deteriorate. They force prisoners to clean toilets by hand and use violence against prisoners if they don't obey. The experiment caused one prisoner to become insane, and the other became hysterical and dropped out of the experiment. In the end, due to the intervention of lawyers, the experiment was forced to abort after only six days. Most people see this experiment as a prime example of the fact that social roles can go beyond individual character and feelings and govern individual behavior. Social psychology calls this phenomenon "impersonalization". Not only did the person playing the prison guard begin to strictly enforce the duties of the prison guard unknowingly, but the person playing the prisoner also began to act like a prisoner unknowingly. However, from another perspective, before seeing the two roles as social roles, the relationship can also be seen as the relationship between the dominant and the dominated. On the one hand, the prison guards are gradually indulging in the pleasure of dominating the prisoners; on the other hand, the prisoners are not so much controlled by their own social roles to do the prisoners’ actions as they are asked by the prison guards to do so. In the process of being forced to obey, he did what the prisoner should have done. Finally, it can be inferred from the objection of the prison guards against the suspension of the experiment that for the prison guards, continuing the experiment will not only bring them financial benefits, but also give them psychological pleasure. The Stanford Prison Experiment also shows that human beings have a strong urge to dominate others. If it is in a confined space, human beings can easily lose control. domestic violence, abuse or Violence also confirms this. The dominant party firmly believes that his behavior is out of a legitimate "duty" and requires the other party to obey him, and if there is resistance, he will be violent. The reason why this desire for domination will continue is because the domination of others by violence can make the dominator get pleasure, and as long as it is not made public, the actions of the domination do not bring harm or pain to themselves. People who sit on the throne of power do not want to give up their power, and it can be said that they are deeply attracted by the drug-like pleasure that power produces.
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