Overview
The Stanford Prison Experiment was a social psychology study designed to investigate how people would react in an experiment designed to simulate prison life. The researchers were interested in finding out whether the violence reported among guards in American prisons was dispositional or situational. The brutality might be dispositional, meaning that prisoners and guards have clashing personality traits that make them predisposed to conflict, with prisoners lacking respect for authority and the guards being aggressive and overly assertive. On the other hand, the brutality might be caused by the situation, meaning prisoners and guards may behave in a hostile manner due to the rigid power structure of the social environment in prisons. While the experiment was intended to explore patterns of human behavior and find ways to improve society, it had to be ended abruptly and ultimately raised many ethical concerns (McLeod, 2008).