Phillip Zimbardo's Stanford Prison

Phillip Zimbardo's Stanford prison experiment is a very good example of what happens to good people when they are put in an evil place. Zimbardo made sure that all the students that he used in the experiment had psychological testing done before entering the prison to insure that they were all sane. During the first day the prison was not what Zimbardo had expected. There was not much tension and the guards and inmates seemed relaxed. After the first night, the guards and inmates decided to step it all up a notch and become more realistic. Sociologist William I. Thomas recognized that the "definition of a situation" could mold the personality of the individual. In other words people respond not only to the objective features of a person or situation but also to the meaning that person or situation has for them (Schaefer, 2011). For instance the guards acting like real guards and the prisoners acting like real prisoners. In the event of trying to be more realistic, the prison began to push the guard's buttons which lead to the guards being more stern and vulgar with the prisoners.

So what happens when you put good people in evil places? Well they react. Maybe not so much at first depending on the circumstances, but the more harsh and strenuous the situations become the more a person begins to lose reality and temporarily or permanently go into distress. Zimbardo discovered that when the first inmate wanted to leave and he talked the inmate into staying and becoming a nark, the inmate lost control, feeling he was trapped. Whether someone is truly evil or not, if you take them out of a sane, normal environment where they are use to their surroundings and you have them in imprisonment, they are going to react negatively.

Humanity does win over evil in situations were humanity and good exist. However, like in the Stanford experiment, if you take people out of there environment and stick them in situations were they have no control they soon will snap and feel like they are lost or selfless. So yes evil will triumph. When a person's environment, surroundings and social abilities change like those in the person the inmates have no choice but to adapt and become evil too. The most mind boggling thing that the guards could have done was not call the prisoners by their name but by the number they were checked in under. It was like loosing your identity. Many of the prisoners said they felt they had forgotten who they were. It is almost like a defense mechanism. Herbert Blumer, a sociologist stated, "that human beings interpret or 'define' each other's actions instead of merely reacting to each others actions (Schaefer, 2011)." In other words, inmates felt that if they did not fit the description of a prisoner they would seem weak and easier to attack. In normal situations the prisoner would not have reacted to situations the way they did, but they did to fit their