The Cedarville Review 2018

58 THE CEDARVILLE REVIEW HOW DID YOU GET THE IDEA FOR YOUR RECENT PROJECT 819 ? I had been searching for a longform concept for my senior recital when it struck me how relevant the current presidential election was. It was aggravating how dehumanizing both political sides were towards each other. Both politically and interpersonally, it was the death of dialogue. People on the right condemned those on the left, and the people on the left patronized people on the right in a never-ending cycle. This back and forth was entirely unproductive and emotionally explosive. To me, it resonated strongly with concepts in the Stanford Prison Experiment, something I was already familiar with at that point. The SPE is a fascinating exploration of how we treat one another as humans, how we dehumanize each other. To treat each other in a certain way—badly, I mean—you have to view them as somehow less than yourself. That seems to be a foundational operating principle for why anyone mistreats anyone else. In my mind, there are strong parallels between the assigned roles in the SPE [prisoner and guard] and political ideologies, or rather ideologies in general. Specifically, how we react to other people who do not share our role/ideology. TELL US MORE ABOUT THE STANFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT AND HOW IT RELATES TO 819 . In August 1971, Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo conducted this experiment with volunteer male college students who were local over the summer. He intended to diprove common prison research at the time known as the “dispositional hypothesis,” which suggesed that “you are what you are and you can’t change.” He wanted to show the impact that roles have on human social behavior and interaction. All subjects chosen were statisticaly average and essentially the same at the outset. Zimbardo randomly assigned the roles of prisoner and guard to these students and put them in a simulated prison environment (cont.)