Stanford Prison Experiment and Milgrams Shock Study - Essay Example

Psychology Within the psychoanalytic theory, Freud outlines three major components of an individual’s psyche – the id, the ego and the superego. Freud defines the id as completely unconscious, consisting mainly of instincts and impulses. The ego is that conscious part of the psyche that develops as one experiences the rules and requirements of reality and the superego is that part that deals with morality and ethics. It is the conflict between doing what we want to do, doing what we need to do and doing what we feel is right and moral that leads to the development of defense mechanisms. Repression is an unconscious reaction to a traumatic event or threatening feelings that enables a child who suffered abuse, for example, to completely block all memory of the event out of their mind. Denial is somewhat similar to repression in that the mind works to ignore a situation, threatening impulse or other unpleasant idea, but in this case, there is some conscious understanding of what has taken place yet the individual denies to themselves that the event occurred the way it did or that it had an effect on them. Displacement allows an individual to transfer negative feelings to a less threatening target as a means of relieving tension. In this case, an individual who has a difficult relationship with their boss might come home from work and be mean to their pet or roommate or drive home aggressively, cutting people off in traffic and yelling at people passing by (Just, n.d.). In addition to the development of the mind, Freud identified several psychosexual stages of development through which a child must pass to become a healthy adult. These begin with the oral stage in which all pleasure comes to the infant through the mouth. The next stage is the anal stage in conjunction with toilet training and represents the child’s first battle between the id and the ego and superego and can shape personality into anal retentive or anal expulsive characters. The phallic stage is when the child becomes aware of his or her genitals and begins to identify with either the mother or the father and results in the child wishing to possess the parent of the opposite sex. Once these stages are navigated, the child enters a latency period in which the sexual drive is dormant, but it reemerges with adolescence in the genital stage as individuals begin focusing their attention on heterosexual relationships in the teenage years. External/Internal attributions Attributions are basically the human need to offer an explanation for a variety of events. External attributions explain the reasons for things based upon external factors, such as gravity caused the soda can to fall from my hand onto my foot. Internal attributions explain motivations as individual internal reactions, such as dropping the soda can in order to injure the foot so that I don’t have to march today in the hot sun. Self-serving bias is the tendency for people to claim their successes and ignore or downplay their failures. In addition, they will frequently work to phrase any ambiguous situation to their own benefit, making them seem good, heroic or otherwise positive. Fundamental attribution error is when people over-emphasize another person’s actions as being based on the kind of person they are rather than on any external forces that might have contributed. This relates to attribution theory in that self-serving bias will often lead to the actor-observer effect in which personal actions are explained in terms of external factors rather than internal personality traits, reversing the fundamental attribution error applied to others. Stanford Prison Experiment / Milgram’s Shock Study The Stanford Prison experiment was an experiment in which some people were selected to be guards and some were selected to be prisoners. The ‘guards’ were told to behave like true prison guards and the ‘prisoners’ were subjected to absolutely bestial treatment as a result. Although all of the men selected to participate in the experiment were normal, middle-class people of roughly the same experience level, social class and morality base, the way in which they differed by the end of the experiment was tremendous. The ‘guards’ demonstrated increasingly abusive behavior in dishing out punishments which led to humiliating the prisoners just because they were in a position that allowed them to. The prisoners’ action to revolt did not seem unduly out of line. When the experiment was halted early because one researcher felt it had gone too far, the other researchers ridiculed her to the point where she began to doubt even her own reaction. This speaks eloquently about the power of the human mind to not only coerce others into doing what they want as in the case of the researchers telling the guards to behave like real prison guards, but also in the capacity of individuals to completely subdue their ‘normal’ personalities in order to meet with an expected or perceived societal norm, regardless of how that might disagree with their own ethical and moralistic code. In another study, the Milgram Shock Study, the teacher instructed student examiners to buzz their test subject with increasing levels of electric shock whenever they got an answer wrong. Rather than being an experiment on the test subjects, this was an experiment on the testers themselves to see how far adherence to authority would lead them away from their own sense of right and wrong by making them believe they were administering shocks up to 450 volts and causing tremendous pain yet still encouraging them to continue with the experiment. Through this study, it was found that people were more willing to inflict harm without provocation when they believed they were acting on the authority of another – in other words, when they didn’t have to take responsibility for any damage caused. Dissociative Identity Disorder, Schizophrenia, Bipolar Disorder, and Major depression. Dissociative Identity Disorder is the condition once referred to as multiple personality disorder and is characterized by the presence of two or more personalities that take turns being in control of the same body. One of the major symptoms is a period of lost time or acute amnesia in which the patient is not aware of what she was doing. Other symptoms can include depression, anxiety, phobias, panic attacks and post traumatic stress. Schizophrenia is different from DID in that it is an imbalance in the way in which the individual perceives the world around them, most often occurring as auditory hallucinations or strange delusions. These are both different from bipolar disorder, which is characterized by significant and sudden fluctuations in mood, ranging from being almost euphoric to being deeply depressed. While depression is often a symptom of these disorders, major depression is altogether different from the above in that it is typically associated with long term depressed mood which can be debilitating to leading a normal life. It is difficult to diagnose among these various illnesses because diagnosis of all are typically based on the patient’s self-reporting. Depression is a common feature of many, but the length and depth of depression can indicate a different disorder. In addition, some of the conditions found in schizophrenia, for example, can also manifest in major depression. Read More