STANFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT

On April 11, 2007, a Waxahachie high school near Dallas, Texas, was questioned on the effectiveness of its teaching method concerning the Holocaust. The Advanced Placement Geography lesson lasted one week and it was called “Bystanders in the Holocaust.” Its purpose was to stimulate the prejudice at the time of World War II. About 100 freshmen participated in this lesson. The students had to wear the stars of David on their clothing and had to endure mild mistreatment from teachers, who acted as the Germans. Things got out of control when the participants, or “Jews”, were spit on, pushed, and tripped in the hallways by other students. This was not the first time that “Bystanders in the Holocaust” was used at that school; this lesson has been in use for the previous five years.
The purpose of Stanford prison experiment was to see the psychological effects on the prison guards and the prisoners. To conduct this experiment, Philip Zimbardo randomly assigned 24 undergraduate students to be either guards or prisoners and to live in a mock prison for the next two weeks. After six days, however, the experiment had to be terminated. The students, who were assigned to be guards, started to mistreat the “prisoners” by calling them names, threatening to beat them, or forcing them to commit humiliating acts. Also the students, who were selected to be prisoners, showed signs of depression, low self-esteem, and other signs of emotional disturbances.
The event that occurred at Waxahachie high school can be explained by the Stanford prison experiment. Because the participants of the lesson were considered to be “Jews”, the other students, based on stereotyping of how Jews were treated during the WWII, began to mistreat participants. This also happened during Zimbardo’s mock prison; the “guards” reacted to the stereotypes that prisoners are low-lives that deserved to be abused. Without the experiment, it would be impossible to explain why the other students reacted to the participants as they did.

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