Zimbardos Psychological Experiment and Fromms Correlation

Zimbardo’s Psychological Experiment and Fromm’s Correlation Over 4 decades ago, a Stanford psychology professor named Phillip G. Zimbardo administered an experiment that re-created a prison environment. The goal of the experiment was to simply study the process by which prisoners and guards â€Å"learn† to become compliant and authoritarian, respectively (Zimbardo 732). What would emerge from the â€Å"Stanford Prison Experiment† article were more than just compliance and authority. The experiment gave rise to the nature of evil and obedience in human beings. Thus like Zimbardo’s experiment, Stanley Milgram’s â€Å"The Peril of Obedience† found that under certain circumstances and conditions, human beings were also capable of being immensely subdued to†¦show more content†¦One guard’s conscience took the role of an authoritarian who resembled a Cool Hand Luke. Not only did this guard accept the role, he fell into submis sion and loss focus of his immoral obedience as he was highly abusive and cruel to the inmates (Zimbardo 735-739). The right to be brutal and assert power was inherent in the role of the guard. This power and authority relates directly to how Mr. Braverman reacted with his new found power. The guards of Phillip Zimbardo’s experiment and the participants of shocking in Stanley Milgram’s study all lost focus of their own reason, conscience, and intuitive behavior. This correlates to good people carrying out evil deeds. Additionally, Zimbardo, the warden, mistakenly thought that he could not recreate feelings of powerlessness, dehumanization, and etc. in the inmates. However, Zimbardo did in fact create these feelings as his conscience became no longer humanistic. Rather Zimbardo resembled the guards and the participants in Milgram’s experiment. Prisoners started to become actual inmates to Zimbardo. No longer was Zimbardo a psychology professor, but rather an institutional authority figure who lost sight of the bigger picture. The experiment did not take a turn for the better until an outside source in Zimbardo’s girlfriend saw how un-humanistic and cruel things were. This took a good voice to remind Zimbardo on what was autonomous and not evil in nature and this