09 November 2021 Tuesday
Does Power Turn into Evil?
Famous social psychologist Philip Zimbardo designed an experiment in 1971 to examine social roles. This experiment is still one of the most known and discussed experiments in psychology. In the experiment, the basement of the Psychology department was arranged like a real prison, and a group of 24 male students was divided into groups as guards and prisoners.
Does Power Turn into Evil?
Zimbardo's Prison Experiment
Famous social psychologist Philip Zimbardo designed an experiment in 1971 to examine social roles. This experiment is still one of the most known and discussed experiments in psychology. In the experiment, the basement of the Psychology department was arranged like a real prison, and a group of 24 male students was divided into groups as guards and prisoners. The guards' duty was to make the prisoners obey, without resorting to violence. Everything was as harmonious as possible with the real prison environment, with the prisoners and guards wearing their own clothes. The guards were given sticks and the prisoners were chained. But no one could have predicted that the results of the experiment would reach this level.
While things were going normally—for a short time—at the beginning, what happened after a while terrified Zimbardo and the other researchers. The guards started to use violence against the prisoners for no reason and they increased the dosage of this violence day by day. The guards were getting more and more brutal and the prisoners were getting more cowardly. Things got so messy that Zimbardo had to terminate the experiment within 6 days, before the appointed time expired.
This experiment, which is very controversial in terms of ethics, has been subjected to many criticisms. This experiment, which aims to show how seriously the roles imposed by the society are adopted and fulfilled, deviated from its purpose and reached the level of violence, and Zimbardo, who allowed violence in his role as the prison director and was the director of the experiment, received the harshest criticism. Today, such studies cannot be done because they are not ethically appropriate.
Research Assistant Merve Seven
References
Öztezcan, B. A. Bilimsel Yayin Etiği Ve Atif: Bilişim Teknolojilerinin Etkileriyle Ortaya Çikan Etik Sorunlar. International Journal of Information, Technology and Philosophy, 113.
Bakırcı, Ç. M. (2013, Ocak 29). Stanford hapishane deneyi. on October 12, 2021 received from https:// evrimagaci.org/stanford-hapishane-deneyi-944
