Can you share a moment in life where you felt you acted like the “prison guard” in the Stanford Prison Experiment?

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  • #28656

    KabU
    Participant

    Can you share a moment in life where you felt you acted like the “prison guard” in the Stanford Prison Experiment?

Viewing 6 posts - 7 through 12 (of 14 total)
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    • #286509
      Catherine
      Participant

      As far as perpetrating physical violence, I have not. There are times when I question my personal integrity in my role as special education teacher. In my heart of hearts there is no iron clad work ethic that seems to be the driving force behind many of the things I am expected to do with my students each day.

    • #284002
      Richard Lively
      Participant

      Being a parent gives this effect.  It indeed empowers one over another person.  And one has to clearly be fair and its not always easy to be.  Eventually there is a pecking order where the child is simply a child and what the parent says go.  It doesnt always stay this way but it can morph this way rapidly based on any discrepancies of disagreement especially when there is a dominance issue being challenged from one who is maturing.

    • #187262
      zohreh
      Participant

      In all life scenes, such as type of family upbringing, choice of field of study, type of marriage, choice of university field, choice of job, time of childbearing, type and level of family and social life, time of retirement

    • #184548
      Jan Koons
      Participant

      I can

    • #184538
      Tracey
      Participant

      I, too, am a teacher. In my undergraduate classes, I always feel as though I am trying to strike a balance – if I am too soft, then students do not complete their assigned tasks or do as well; if I am too tough, I start to feel like a guard in the SPE. One can never go too far in one direction or the other, else we risk getting out of balance. One thing we learn from the SPE is that we need oversight from many different persons with different points of view. It was only when ‘outsiders’ came and had a look at what was going on at Stanford, that Phil Zimbardo realized that he had gone too far and that he needed to stop the experiment. These are two good lessons we can learn form the SPE: always be seeking balance, and always seek out and value different – even opposing – points of view.

    • #58151
      Seraphim
      Participant

      Multiple times throughout my career as an elementary and high school teachers, and as a school principal.

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