Video: The Stanford prison experiment

One of my favorite quotes in social psychology is from Stanley Milgram's seminal Obedience to Authority (1974): "The social psychology of this century reveals a major lesson: often it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act." Two classic experiments illustrate this view perfectly: Milgram's own obedience studies and Philip Zimbardo's Stanford prison experiment. The following video contains (inter alia) extremely interesting - and poignant - reflections on this view by an ex-guard and an ex-prisoner in Zimbardo's experiment. (Click here to go directly to the video).



Links

• Official website of the Stanford Prison Experiment
• Zimbardo interviewed on All in the Mind
• Psyblog's excellent entry on the Milgram obedience studies
  

Bibliography

Milgram, S. (1974) Obedience to Authority (New York: Harper & Row).