Zimbardo provided wooden batons to them and asked them to not physically harm the prisoners or withhold food or drinks. He, however, asked the guards to apply psychological pressure by, “creating in the prisoners the feelings of boredom, a sense of fear to some degree, create a notion of arbitrariness that their life is totally controlled by us, by the system, you, me, and they’ll have no privacy … We’re going to take away their individuality in various ways. In general, what all this leads to is a sense of powerlessness. That is, in this situation, we’ll have all the power and they’ll have none.” Prisoners were “arrested” at their homes and “charged” with armed robbery. The local Palo Alto police department assisted Zimbardo with the arrests and conducted full booking procedures on the prisoners, which included fingerprinting and taking mug shots. They also transported the prisoners to the mock prison from the police station, where they were strip-searched and given their new identities.
The horrible results started showing from the second day onward. A few prisoners started refusing to follow guards’ instructions and one guard attacked prisoners with a fire extinguisher. Within 36 hours, one prisoner started acting crazy and started screaming, cursing, and going into a rage. It took the supervising team a while to realize the prisoner was really suffering psychologically. As time passed, the guards started harassing prisoners mentally and physically. The experiment was halted after only six days when several guards became increasingly cruel, and approximately one-third of the guards exhibited genuine sadistic tendencies. Most of the guards were upset when the experiment was halted after only six days.
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9. Milgram Experiment – This Yale University psychology experiment measured the willingness of a test subject to obey an authority figure. In the experiment, they separated two participants into two rooms where they could hear but not see each other. Then they asked the test subject to ask questions to the other and for each wrong answer, they would be punished with an electric shock. Contradictory to the researchers’ expectations, the experiment found that a very high proportion of people were prepared to obey, albeit unwillingly, even if apparently causing serious injury and distress.
Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University in 1961, began a series of social psychological experiments to measure the willingness of the study participants, men from a diverse range of occupations with varying level of education, to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts conflicting with their personal conscience. The experiment started three months after the start of the trial of German Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram developed this study to answer the hot topic question of the time: “Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?” This experiment was repeated many times over the years with consistent results around the globe.
In the experiment, they assigned roles of a teacher and a learner to the two participants. They chose an actor for the role of the learner and the test subject for the role of teacher. However, they kept it secret to the subject that the actor was also a teacher. They instead give the impression that the actor is. Milgram then placed both in an adjacent room and strapped the actor into an electric chair. Milgram also told the subject that the learner had a heart condition. They also gave the subject a sample electric shock to experience the pain the learner would experience. They gave the teacher a list of word pairs to teach the learner. The teacher would then read the first word of each pair and give the learner four option to choose the correct answer from. For every wrong answer, the teacher was to administer an electric shock to the learner with the voltage increasing in 15-volt increments for each wrong answer.
Some subjects stopped administrating electric shock to the learner after reaching 135 volts, however, most continued when they were assured that they would not be held responsible. Some, upon hearing the pain induced screams of the learners, started showing extreme stress signs such as nervous laughing. In the first set of experiments, 65 percent of experiment participants administered the experiment’s final massive 450-volt shock. In addition to the literal electric shock, the participants suffered extreme emotional stress and inflicted insights.
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10. Monster Study – This University of Iowa experiment involved orphan children from Davenport, Iowa. The supervisor divided these children into two groups and gave each group separate speech therapy. One group received positive and other received negatively. This study resulted in the children suffering lifelong negative psychological effects.
In 1939, Wendell Johnson, a University of Iowa professor with the help of his graduate student Mary Tudor, conducted an experiment involving 22 orphan children from Davenport, Iowa. They selected 22 subjects from a veterans’ orphanage in Iowa. They didn’t inform the intent of the research to the children and led them to believe that they were receiving speech therapy. Out of the 22 students, 10 students were stutterers, and the goal of the experiments was to try to induce stuttering in healthy children and to see whether telling stutterers that their speech was fine would produce a change.
This experiment created negative psychological effects on the orphans who were part of the negative therapy. Some of them retained speech problems for the rest of their lives. The experiment was called “Monster Study” as some of the Johnson peers were horrified that he would experiment on orphans to confirm a hypothesis. Johnson never published the results of the experiments in any peer-reviewed journals and Tudor’s thesis is the only official record of the details of the experiment. The experiment was kept hidden as it was feared to harm Johnson’s reputation in the wake of human experiments conducted by the Nazis during World War II.
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