Introduction
The first video named the Stanford Prison Experiment presents a real socio-psychological experiment held in 1971. The US Navy sponsored the study as they had intentions to reveal the reasons for severe conflicts between the guards and the prisoners in the prisons (Vsauce, 2018). Phillip Zimbardo, the lead researcher, used situational attribution, which means he believed social roles influence the conflict’s nature.
Main body
The study can be described as an experiment that includes independent variables – people who were allocated to be either a guard or a prisoner. The dependent variable was represented in the form of a resulting behavior. Zimbardo converted a regular basement into prison-like surroundings as a setting for the experiment (Haslam et al., 2019). Only 24 mentally and physically stable young men out of 75 tested were chosen to participate. There was no control group in the study, which would have helped to study several variables. Zimbardo did not have any other prison with different conditions, so he could not measure any other results.
The experiment had seriously violated the ethical considerations that caused repercussions. Firstly, the entire study lacked informativeness, which means it did not provide specific details on how the experiment would go. All the events that could have occurred were not thoroughly reviewed, and there was no plan for avoiding them. Secondly, the participants signed consent forms that protected them from physical violations. However, during the trial, the subjects were physically abused, and the guards trespassed the rules.
Conclusion
The videos represent the experiments, and they include different tools for conducting research. Moreover, these videos are presented as socio-psychological experiments; the lead researchers try to establish the connection between social roles and behavior. In general, a viewer can observe that people are subjected to behavior and opinion change when affected by others.
References
Haslam, S. A., Reicher, S. D., & Van Bavel, J. J. (2019). Rethinking the nature of cruelty: The role of identity leadership in the Stanford Prison Experiment. American Psychologist, 74(7), 809–822.
Vsauce. (2018). The Stanford prison experiment [Video]. YouTube. Web.