The Prison Study Was a Prison of the Mind

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Wenyo: Humans must have underlying psychological machinery, functional machinery designed to respond to specific situations. In this case, i can well invision that putting people in positions of power, for example, guards, trickers adaptations to exploit those situations and sometimes to abuse them. Had there been women prisoners in your stanford prison experiment, my guess is that some of the exploitation would have been sexual as happen in real prisons. And again, if there were female prisoners, one can imagine women using sexual resources to obtain special favors or to prevent being punished. So what i'm saying is the prison was really a prison of the mind. Wenyo: The whole theory is a, it's

August 15 marks the 50th anniversary of day one of the Stanford Prison Experiment — one of the most controversial studies in the history of social psychology. In this conversation, Michael Shermer speaks with renowned social psychologist and creator of the Stanford Prison Experiment Philip Zimbardo, exploring the mechanisms that make good people do bad things, how moral people can be seduced into acting immorally, and what this says about the line separating good from evil. His book, The Lucifer Effect, explains why we are all susceptible to the lure of “the dark side.” and how situational forces and group dynamics can work in concert to make monsters out of decent men and women. Shermer and Zimbardo discuss: Zimbardo’s life mission to understand the nature of evil, the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) and its critics, the nature of human nature, The Dark Triad that leads to violence, obedience to authority, free will/determinism, and how we can teach ourselves to act heroically.