During the broadcast, the friends who watched it unanimously agreed with Prof. Zimbardo's kind of selfishness and contempt for the kind of derailment that they turned a blind eye to. This point is undoubtedly one of the points of increasing tension in the film, but I personally think that if you are too obsessed with it, you will ignore many topics that are very discussed and exploratory in this experiment. Obviously, what this film (or experiment) is trying to bring out is not a black-and-white ideology. In 122 minutes, it was more like throwing out "possibilities" and thinking spaces on the never-ending topic of "human nature". The word "possibility" is used here because the interpretation of experimental results is not absolute and varies from person to person. In reality, in 1971, even Prof. Zimbardo's conclusions about his own Stanford Prison Experiment were questioned and denied several times (including the selection bias of the experimental sample [sample size] and the students who participated in the experiment made comments on the purpose of the experiment. The demand characteristics, etc. revealed after the interpretation, will not be explored in depth here). It can be seen that the information about human nature brought out by this experiment can only be used for reference and thinking, and cannot be concluded. Similarly, what I wrote below is just my thoughts and thoughts after watching the movie (plus some related reading materials), and it does not mean that human nature must be like this.
(Begin to get to the point...)
The first thing to notice is what happens when we are granted a fixed role. This is a topic that arises from the beginning of assigning prison guards and prisoners. In the film Prof. Zimbardo told the prison guards that they were picked because they performed well in the interview process, but in reality the roles were just randomly created by a coin toss. Although there is no further explanation for this in the movie, I believe this move more or less makes the prison guards subconsciously determine the "superiority" of their characters, which directly affects their subsequent behavior. There was an experiment in which the teacher asked the whole class to do an ability assessment at the beginning of the semester, and then randomly selected a number of students and told them privately that their scores on the ability assessment were the highest in the class. At the end of the semester, these students were among the best in their grades! This shows that when we enter (*it doesn't matter how) certain roles and believe them completely, we will behave differently! That's why at the beginning of the movie, it takes a lot of trouble to dispatch real police to arrest the classmates who play the priester, so that they can be more confident in their roles. It is worth noting that when we fully assume the role, our behavior may be completely unacceptable to the "self before the substitution". Just like at the end of the film, one of the students who played the prison guard claimed after "returning" to reality that he did not understand why he did so many bullying behaviors during the experiment, and now whenever he recalls these behaviors, he is very disappointed and ashamed . From a macro perspective, we sometimes do not understand why, in the man-made tragedies and massacres over and over again in history, tens of millions of people have participated in evil deeds and committed some of the most ruthless persecutions of their fellow human beings. Many of these people grew up in normal circumstances, were educated, and knew good and evil. But when we understand that our roles and values can be completely subverted and changed by external factors, including the environment and what other people say to us, we can seem to understand that these things are not happening as Phil thinks. But what the prison experiment tells us about role assignments is not the ones listed above, since these points have been made before, the prison experiment at best reaffirms these observations. If The Prison Experiment
(to be continued...)
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