The Stanford Prison Experiment, conducted by Philip Zimbardo in 1973 at Stanford University, was intended to demonstrate whether the brutality in prisons was due to specific, sadistic personality types evident in prison guards or due to prison environments. In order to study this, Zimbardo randomly assigned 21 pre-screened college males as either guards or prisoners in a Stanford University laboratory basement. Over the six day timespan of the experiment, the simulated prison seemed to have a strong effect on both the “guards” and the “prisoners”-guards became increasingly sadistic, intentionally humiliating and torturing inmates in order to gain obedience, while inmates’ obedience grew, along with some symptoms of mental instability and withdrawal. Even Zimbardo, who was acting as the prison “warden”, began to exhibit signs of cruelty and an intensely controlling behavior. Due to the level of cruelty and its effects on the inmates, the study was shut down after six days despite Zimbardo’s original plan for it to run for two weeks. The results of the study, even after a mere six days, were shocking: People’s environments, even when simulated, greatly impact their roles and thus, by extension, their behaviors and attitudes (McLeod, 2008).
