Watch the entire film from the incredible start to the utter shock at the end.
Philip Zimbardo, a professor of psychology at Stanford University and a former president of the American Psychological Association, designed a mock prison experiment in which college student volunteers were required to spend time in it.
Zimbardo used a coin toss to assign some students to be jailers. He handed them uniforms, batons and whistles, and ordered them to play by the rules. The other half of the students posed as prisoners, dressed in shameful clothes and locked up in solitary cells.
After an enjoyable day of role-playing, the guards and inmates, and even the researchers, entered the situation. Jailers began to demean prisoners, and some began to make cruel and insulting rules. The prisoners collapsed, rebelled, and even became indifferent. Zimbardo then discovered that sociopathological symptoms were emerging, and he had to abandon the planned two-week experiment on the sixth day.
I see a lot of people who think this movie is talking about "human nature", the good and evil of human nature. Quite the contrary, the film has absolutely nothing to do with human nature. So what exactly drives the behavior of jailers and prisoners?
A word that Zimbardo keeps emphasising in The Lucifer Effect, situation.
"Individual behavior in a mock prison is not spontaneous, nor 'natural', nor 'necessary', it is the result of choice."
"Individual behavior in a mock prison should be seen as an individual-situation interaction rather than strictly situational coercion."
The Stanford experiment is also cited in Myers's "Social Psychology" explaining that behavior affects attitudes.
Situation and obedience cause guards and prisoners to perform behaviors that they would not otherwise do, and these behaviors in turn affect their own attitudes. The interaction of attitudes and behaviors makes behaviors more and more intensified, and their identities become unclear.
Zimbardo once said in the report that "people are increasingly indistinguishable between reality and illusion, their roles and their identities... This created prison... is assimilating us and making us its puppets."
After thinking about it, people grow up in society and play various roles and identities. Is all this really controlled and determined by us, and what we do is really what we want?
Everyone has a specific growth environment and living environment. We who are restricted from the beginning will become what society expects us to be. We are just living in a huge "Stanford Prison", and people are just subjects of society. That's it.
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