Human Rights at Home and Abroad: Past, Present, and Future

people are thinking. Many experiments are performed for a psychologist‘s own purposes in helping
reduce their curiosity. Many psychology experiments are performed in the wake of natural and human-
made disasters. There were many experiments performed after the holocaust, Abu Ghraib, and 9/11 in
trying to figure out how people could do horrible crimes like that. After the holocaust psychologists were
looking at why multiple people would kill their friends, neighbors, and sometimes even their own family.
The people were said to have done this in order to save their own lives by conforming to peer and
government pressure. There are also experiments done after the natural disasters such as hurricanes and
earthquakes to find a way to best deal with the loss of loved ones and possessions. These experiments
were not always for the best for the subjects. Some were temporarily stressed and for some it changed
their lives forever.
In response to Abu Ghraib, Philip G. Zimbardo conducted an experiment called the Stanford
Prison experiment. This experiment had 24 male college students from North America who were living
around Stanford at the time of the experiment. The 24 males were split into two groups. One of these
groups was guards and the other was inmates. When the inmates first arrived they were stripped and
deloused. The men had to wear nylon stockings covering their hair and they wore smocks with only their
identification number on them. On the first day, the boys acted normally casually putting themselves into
the roles they were given. After that first day, the boys started to behave as though they were really
inmates. The guards started to give out punishments and sending them to solitary confinement. As the
days went on the prisoners rioted and the guards punished them by taking away their clothes and
mattresses. After the riot the guards became more brutal in their quest to assert their authority over the
prisoners. The first inmate was released less than 36 hours after the experiment had begun. He was said to
be showing slight emotional disturbances such as crying uncontrollably and severe rage (Zimbardo, 1999-
2009).
This experiment was supposed to last two weeks, but after the sixth day, the inmates became so
subservient and the guards had escalated to abusing the inmates in the middle of the night that the study
was ended early. It took so long for Zimbardo to end the experiment because he was drawn so far into it.
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