Criticism
The guards and prisoners adapted to their roles more than they were expected, stepping beyond the boundaries of what had been predicted, leading to dangerous and psychologically damaging situations. One-third of the guards were judged to have exhibited "genuine sadistic tendencies", while many prisoners were emotionally traumatized, as two of them had to be removed from the experiment early. After Maslach confronted him and forced him to realize that he had been passively allowing unethical acts to be performed under his supervision, Zimbardo concluded that both prisoners and guards had become grossly absorbed in their roles and realized that he had likewise become as grossly absorbed in his own, and he terminated the experiment. Ethical concerns surrounding the experiment often draw comparisons to the Milgram experiment, which was conducted in 1961 at Yale University by Stanley Milgram, Zimbardo's former high school friend. Tom Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Jr. wrote in 1981 that the Milgram experiment and the Stanford prison experiment were frightening in their implications about the danger which lurks in the darker side of human nature.
Read more about this topic: Stanford Prison Experiment
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)
“A friend of mine spoke of books that are dedicated like this: “To my wife, by whose helpful criticism ...” and so on. He said the dedication should really read: “To my wife. If it had not been for her continual criticism and persistent nagging doubt as to my ability, this book would have appeared in Harper’s instead of The Hardware Age.””
—Brenda Ueland (1891–1985)