Critque Paper - People Go Sadistic

People Go Sadistic

Obedience is complying with a command or wish that is asked of something. The two articles, "Stanford Prison Experience" and "The Abu Ghraib Prison Scandal: Sources of Sadism" explain in detail, the two different occasions that occurred of mistreatment and dehumanization being created by our American people. In "The Stanford Prison Experiment", Phillip G. Zimbardo put together an experiment, examining how easily people can slip into a role and become sadistic to the people who surround them, even going as far as developing a sense of control. He demonstrates this by explaining how life of imprisonment can affect those involved and how the setting or environment affects the ones in command. In "The Abu Ghraib Prison Scandal: Sources of Sadism" article, Marianne Szegedy-Maszak goes into detail explaining the reasoning why "average" people evolved into sadists and committed unlawful abuse on their prisoners at the Abu Ghraib Prison. She presents this by combining several people's ideas on the answer, "Why?" Every human being has the potential to be a sadist when given permission to.

Phillip G. Zimbardo created "The Stanford Prison Experiment", to show how the influence of the "mock" prison and the roles of each participant could have an effect on their human behavior. While conducting his experiment, he saw a degree of dehumanization occur that was astounding for the short period of time that the study was carried out. Each volunteer participant had no set role; they were allowed to act how they wanted. The guards began to behave in ways that were aggressive and abusive toward the prisoners, while the prisoners became passive and depressed. The experiment could have resulted differently had Zimbardo not just subjected Caucasian, young males. This is where he fell at fault, letting the young men do and act however they wanted, under law and order where they eventually fell themselves and went under this "mock" reality.

"The Abu Ghraib Prison Scandal: Sources of Sadism" article written by Marianne Szegedy-Maszak, she informs us of the tragic events that occurred at the Abu Ghraib Prison involving our American soldiers. Szegedy-Maszak doesn't directly blame anyone for what happened. She gives possible explaination to why or what caused the soldiers to do what they did, causing the huge controversy across the world. The guards would disguise the prisoners to detach any empathic connections with them. Szegedy-Maszak quotes the professor, Robert Okin of University of California-San Fransisco, he blames the soldier's poor choices on the abuse they have endured from being over there to begin with, saying it is a way of fighting off their rage (Szegedy-Maszak 211). She also throws in Herbert Kelman's 3 traits that was necessary for torture that was found