It was early Sunday morning on August 17, 1971 when the Stanford Study Experiment first began. A college student was confused when he heard sirens blaring and a police officer arrested him and took him to Stanford University. The “prison” made him give his fingerprint and entered it into the system while they registered him. They forced him to strip off his clothes, sprayed him with disinfectant to prevent lice and disease, and gave him a cap made from women's stockings to emulate the act of shaving his head. Then he was given a beige apron and forced to wear it with nothing underneath. This was just the beginning of the embarrassment. When he got up that day he had no idea that he would go down in history along with one of psychology's most famous and unethical experiments. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Chief scientist Philip Zimbardo, who also served as a prison guard, said that the purpose of the Stanford prison experiment was to determine whether a person chooses a certain job or role that may seem evil because they too are evil, or if they are influenced to be evil because of the role they play. They say that power corrupts, and by giving power to the prison guards in the experiment, he was essentially trying to prove that this was correct. It gave prison guards the freedom to make whatever rules they felt were necessary to do their jobs. He also studied how after a certain period of time the prisoners began to forget that they were in an experiment and began to think that they could not leave, even though their contract stated that they could leave the simulation whenever they felt like it. The results of the experiment showed that during the simulation the students acting as guards did bad things that were apparently out of the norm for their personalities. It also showed that those acting as prisoners likely suffered the abuse because they began to feel as if they had done something to deserve the cruel treatment they had received. Even though Zimbardo proved his hypothesis correct, there are still some other variables we need to consider. take into consideration. One of the main problems is the fact that there is no clear independent variable. If we look at the mechanics of the experiment, nothing was changed or manipulated to try to influence the results. Even Phillip Zimbardo agreed that this was a major flaw in his experiment. On the website Zimbardo created for the experiment, he says: “Gordon had heard we were doing an experiment and came to see what was happening. I briefly described what we were doing, and Gordon asked me a very simple question: "What is the independent variable in this study?" To my surprise, I got really mad at him and now had to deal with this soft-hearted, liberal, academic, effeminate dingdong who was worried about the independent variable! This also highlights another flaw in the experiment. Zimbardo himself acted as a prison guard and this got him involved in the experiment. Putting yourself in this position distorts the results with potential and unavoidable biases, but also exposes you to the potential effects of the experiment. The very behavioral effects he was trying to study! Of course it would make sense for his hypothesis to prove correct because he was involved in the experiment that affected the results. Some participants even said they behaved as expected just so they could go home or quit?