Consciousness, Conformity and Psychology
The study of stimuli on the brain
By
David R. Shiveley
A Study
Presented to
Mr. Aaron L. Ahn, General Psychology Professor
In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Course
General Psychology
March, 2008
Psychology. By Websters definition its “The science which studies the functions of the mind, such as sensation, perception, memory, through, and, more broadly, the behavior of an organism in relation to its environment.” By common definition its what effects people mentally. So what happens when a person or a group of people are put into a situation that is not apart of their normal everyday life? How does it effect the way they act and think? The Stanford Prison Experiment and Gangland: Race Wars are two examples of how, under certain circumstances a regular person can become something completely different just because of the situation or area they are in.
The Stanford prison experiment was a psychological study of human responses to captivity and its behavioral effects on both authorities and inmates in prison. The experiment was conducted in 1971 by a team of researchers led by psychologist Phillip Zimbardo at Stanford University. Undergraduate volunteers played the roles of both guards and prisoners living in a mock prison in the basement of the Stanford psychology building. Zimbardo and his team intended to test the hypothesis that prison guards and convicts were self-selecting of a certain disposition that would naturally lead to poor conditions. Participants were recruited via a newspaper ad and offered $15 a day to participate in a two-week "prison simulation." Prisoners were forced to wear degrading outfits and they were referred to by assigned numbers instead of by their name and were put into little offices that were converted into makeshift cells. While the Guards were given wooden batons and a military-style uniform. They were also given mirrored sunglasses to prevent eye...