The Field Of Social Psychology - 1378 Words

In the field of Social Psychology, numerous studies have been made about different types of behavior and what causes humans to act a certain way. There are also different specific types of behavior that have been studied, such as aggression. One important study made about signs and effects of aggression would be Stanford University’s Dr. Philip Zimbardo’s study of prisoners and guards in a simulated prison. His research was conducted along with two of his graduate assistants by the name of Craig Haney and Curtis Banks. Their research was done in 1971. Zimbardo had selected a group of college students to perform the experiment on, half of the students were the â€Å"guards† where they would act and impersonate themselves as if they were actual†¦show more content†¦The main purpose of Philip Zimbardo’s experiment was to see if inborn personality traits of inmates and guards were the main reason of aggressive behaviors in prison. He wanted to study t he human response to captivity and find different effects of personality changes. This research was conducted in a makeshift jail in the school’s building of psychology basement of Stanford University in 1971 for a short period of days. Zimbardo wanted to make sure that the experiment was life-like and treated the assigned student â€Å"prisoners† and assigned â€Å"guards† as if those were their real-life roles. He wanted accurate results and effects from this experiment. The population being studied was a group of 24 students selected from a group of 75 volunteered students from Stanford University. They were all males as well and none of them had criminal records, psychological disorders, nor any medical conditions. At that time, they were paid fifteen dollars a day. Of those twenty-four students, twelve of them were to be the prisoners and the other twelve were to be the guards. Zimbardo expected the students to act their role. For example, he gave those who were the guards, sunglasses to avoid eye contact with the prisoners, whistles, and sticks; and those who were the