Elias’ article, “Do We All Have a Dark Side?”, is based on the Stanford experiment which seeks to prove the idea that when people are subjected to certain conditions in an environment, they behave differently. Zimbardo, the psychologist who initiates this test, assigned a group of 24 male college students the duty of being guards or prisoners in a study that took two weeks. However, trouble commenced immediately as the guards started striking the captives with their fists on the second day. Also, they stepped on the prisoners’ backs and awakened them during the night and took their blankets away. In another few days, they forced partially nude captives to simulate sex acts. Following the events, Zimbardo halted the experiments six days later where half of the prisoners had already been discharged because of stress characterized by incessant crying, screaming, and trembling.
Zimbardo makes his arguments in the book, “The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil”, expressing that almost everyone would turn vicious or have a different perspective of abuse in a specific environment. Again, he argues that the inner character of a person seldom survives on the condition that the familiar guideposts such as everyday routines fade away. Most people are not willing to challenge a broadly accepted injustice.
Americans have a vulnerability to social influences since they believe in individualism, which ultimately results in conformity. The most convenient way of overcoming dehumanization of the prisoners is the implementation of rules and regulations which determine the conduct of the guards, but the primary challenge is that people can be very creative. Zimbardo documents that people may be heavily swayed in embarrassing situations, but they will return to their normal decent lives once they return to their daily routines.
Relation to the Course Concepts
The primary objective of Zimbardo’s experiment focused on personality and whether external environments influence it. The course discusses personality explaining it as the consistent behavior patterns, conduct, and thoughts which are different in distinct situations. Before the experiment, as Elias notes, the guards were warm people before commencing the test. But they later changed their personality and turned brutal, with no remorse for their friends who were prisoners. Consequently, this proves the concept that mannerisms, thoughts, and behavior patterns change based on environmental conditions.
During the course, Sigmund Freud’s theories of psychoanalysis were highlighted. Freud expressed that it is possible to cure people by making conscious their unconscious motivations and thoughts (VanPatten and Williams 49), which ultimately helps them gain more insight. Psychoanalysis asserts that behavior is usually a result of something internal. In the article, the author observes that the Stanford experiment ended after six days out of the consequences. The prisoners suffered mental torture characterized by repressed memories originating from the harsh experiences.
Behaviorism is a theory of learning which contends that people acquire certain habits through conditioning (VanPatten and Williams 20). Conditioning is an outcome of environment interaction which implies that the stimuli in an environment shape a person’s actions. In the article, the guards suddenly became hostile as they were in a situation which motivated them to become aggressive. Similarly, the prisoners conformed to this treatment as they were supposed to act as slaves of the guards.
Works Cited
Elias, Marilyn. Do we all have a dark side? 14 March 2007. 07 November 2018.
VanPatten, Bill and Jessica Williams. Theories in Second Language Acquisition: An Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2014.
