i’m putting a great deal of thought into this thread, so i would appreciate some mature responses; whether or not you agree or disagree screw that, but mature responses would be highly appreciated.
This must be very well-known but unfortunately i wasn’t aware of it until very recently. In the early 1970s, there was a social experiment carried out at Stanford. They wanted to scientifically study how human beings would exhibit patterns of behavioural changes under - i’ll call it difficult - circumstances where some students were given more power over others, and the second group was placed in an ‘inferior’ position in terms of power structures. This is the ad they placed; sorry the image is so small; it’s from their own website, i don’t have a better one:
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They chose about 20 college students and randomly assigned them positions of being a “guard” or a “prisoner”. Everything was done to simulate real prison conditions - the students who were “prisoners” were actually arrested at their homes, read their Miranda rights, taken in a real police car, fingerprinted, deloused, stripped, given prison uniforms, and then taken to their “cells”. (The basement of the psych department at Stanford was turned into a makeshift prison for the purposes of the experiment). The same things were done with the students who were randomly chosen to be “guards” - they were given guard uniforms and told the rules and regulations of how to supervise ‘their’ “prisoners”.
The entire social experiment is explained in detail here: http://www.prisonexp.org It has become a classic psychological study case for the fields of social behaviour and psychology.
The supervisors of the experiment intended for it to take two weeks. Instead, they had to end the experiment after only six days. The students who were assigned to be “guards” had started to engage in what one person has described (during the experiment itself) as sadistic behaviour towards the “prisoners”. Some of the students who were assigned to be “prisoners” had started to exhibit symptoms of depression and rage. You have to click through the screenshow on the URL above and it explains, almost day by day, of what was happening inside the mock prison set-up.
From a psychological point of view, the positions and boundaries between the 20 “healthy male college students” versus “prisoners and guards” were becoming very very blurry. Each of the 20 started to internalize the role that they KNEW had been a fake one from the very beginning; yet they internalized it to such a degree that the guards started using excessive physical force on the prisoners… and the prisoners could have left the social experiment at any time but they chose not to because, to them, they had started to actually believe that they were in a genuine prison. Remember, these were 20 emotionally and physically healthy adult males - they had been strictly selected to ensure their positive health indicators prior to entering the experiment.
Anyways… what the experiment shows is that even normal human beings - in that case, it was 20 healthy, by all accounts completely normal young males - can resort to extremely violent and bordering-on-evil acts of behaviour when they are placed in circumstances where they are given undue levels of power. You HAVE to read through the website above in order to see their transformation. It is almost frightening in a way to realize that every human being has the potential for so much ‘evil’.
What do you guys think about this? If you have read through the link above, i would really like to know what you guys feel about this experiment. i found it fascinating… imagine if you were in that situation… i wonder how all of us would react… even those guppies amongst us whom we consider to be the pretty ‘passive’ and ‘polite’ ones… Would we remain that way if we were given that much power over someone else? Or would we allow the power to corrupt us internally and, just as the mock “guards” had illustrated in this experiment, would we assert our superiority over others and try our best to remain “in control” at all times ? What does that say, really, about the essence of humanity - from a religious and cultural-psychological point of view?
alhamdulillah…if we stick to its teachings then power wont corrupt us…but we have to be alert all the time and make sure we’re doing the right thing
Irem, Allah gave us Islam but doesn’t that kind of scare you… i mean in terms of - all the obligations we have that we are not fulfilling vis-a-vis religion. Being a Muslim isn’t just about reading the Quran and picking it off the cupboard shelf, and taking out the janamaaz five times a day… it’s surrendering your whole will to Allah. And that, i know for a fact, i have not done. So that’s the part that freaks me out. Do i make sense ? Let me know when my babbling starts. 
the title of the thread is such a fabulous lure in for people . there’s been 249 viewings looking for males college students