Stanford Prison Experiment

The roles we take on in our everyday lives are dictated by several factors. Whether it's the role of mother, son, student, cashier, accountant, boyfriend, wife, or teacher, the roles that make up our identities are varied and we slip into and out of them without any conscious thought. These roles are adopted by us based on expectations and assumptions prescribed to us by ourselves and others. The extent to which we take on a role indicates how thoroughly this component of our experience has been integrated into out identities.

The Stanford Experiment sought to explore exactly how social roles are assumed and executed among groups of people. The context for this study was a simulated prison environment set-up in the basement of the psychology department at Stanford. Male student volunteers were randomly assigned to be either a "prisoner" or a "guard." The researchers then observed how...
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