Watch the film: Stanford Prison Experiment

After viewing the film please respond to your choice of 5 of the following questions:

1. If you were a guard, what type of guard would you have become? How sure are you?

2.What prevented “good guards” from objecting or countermanding the orders from tough or bad guards?

3. If you were a prisoner, would you have been able to endure the experience? What would you have done differently than those subjects did? If you were imprisoned in a “real” prison for five years or more, could you take it?

4. What is identity? Is there a core to your self-identity independent of how others define you? How difficult would it be to remake any given person into someone with a new identity?

5.Do you think that kids from an urban working class environment would have broken down emotionally in the same way as did our middle-class prisoners? Why? What about women?

6.How do the ethical dilemmas in this research compare with the ethical issues raised by Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments? Would it be better if these studies had never been done?