Zimbardo's Psychological Experiment and the Fromm CorrelationMore than 40 years ago, a Stanford psychology professor, Phillip G. Zimbardo, administered an experiment that recreated a prison environment. The purpose of the experiment was simply to study the process by which prisoners and guards “learn” to become docile and authoritarian, respectively (Zimbardo 732). What would emerge from the “Stanford Prison Experiment” article went far beyond mere conformity and authority. The experience gave rise to the nature of evil and obedience in human beings. Thus, like Zimbardo's experiment, Stanley Milgram's "The Peril of Obedience" revealed that under certain circumstances and conditions, human beings were also capable of being extremely submissive to authority and obedient when asked to shock the student. But beyond that, there is a bigger picture that Zimbardo and Milgram present in different ways. Although both experiments were psychologically cruel, Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment and Milgram's The Peril of Obedience present an organized evil in nature with which most humans are subjected to the voice of a other person. Human obedience changes from autonomous to heteronomous and consciousness changes from humanistic to authoritarian without a person even knowing it consciously. Phillip Zimbardo began setting up the Stanford Prison Experiment by placing an ad in a local newspaper calling for male students for a psychological study. of prison life. Volunteers received $15 per day for one to two weeks. The ad elicited up to 75 responses and out of the 75, Zimbardo and his group of researchers selected 21 of the participants who were mentally stable, healthy, law-abiding citizens to play the roles of guards and prison. ..... middle of paper ... it is an organized evil in nature by which most humans are subjected to the voice of another person. Good people become heteronomous, authoritarian, and begin to commit bad deeds whenever they neglect their conscience in obeying the evil and cruel demands of an authority figure. As in Zimbardo's case, he himself allowed himself to be drawn into the sadistic experiment he created and became this authority figure. Work Cited Quiet Rage: The Stanford Prison Study. Real. Ken Musen. Stanford University, 2004. DVD. Zimbardo, Phillip. “The Stanford Experiment.” Writing and reading throughout the program. Ed. Laurence Behrens and Leonard J. Rosen. 11th ed. Boston: Longman, 2011. 732-743. Print.Milgram, Stanley. “The Perils of Obedience.” Writing and reading throughout the program. Ed. Laurence Behrens and Leonard J. Rosen. 11th ed. Boston: Longman, 2011. 692-704. Print.