The paragraph below comes from Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point. Assume that you want to use the material in this paragraph in a paper on the Stanford prison experiment. Under the paragraph is an excerpt from an annotated bibliography for this assignment. Read the annotated bibliography, and then create your own entry for the Gladwell source. Fill in the textbox by summarizing the content and highlighting the information that you might use in a paper. Don’t forget to evaluate the source, and include your reaction and analysis of the paragraph. If one particular sentence stands out as a valuable quote, you can include that—in quotation marks—as well.
Gladwell, Malcolm. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. Little, Brown and Company, 2013, pp. 152–153.
In the early 1970s, a group of social scientists at Stanford University, led by Philip Zimbardo, decided to create a mock prison in the basement of the university’s psychology building. They took a thirty-five-foot section of corridor and created a cell block with a prefabricated wall. Three small, six- by nine-foot cells were created from laboratory rooms and given steel-barred, black-painted doors. A closet was turned into a solitary confinement cell. The group then advertised in the local papers for volunteers, men who would agree to participate in the experiment. Seventy-five people applied, and from those Zimbardo and his colleagues picked the 21 who appeared the most normal and healthy on psychological tests. Half of the group were chosen, at random, to be guards and were given uniforms and dark glasses and told that their responsibility was to keep order in the prison. The other half were told that they were to be prisoners. Zimbardo got the Palo Alto Police Department to “arrest” the prisoners in their homes, cuff them, bring them to the station, charge them with a fictitious crime, fingerprint them, then blindfold them and bring them to the prison in the Psychology Department basement. Then they were stripped and give a prison uniform to wear, with a number on the front and back that was to serve as their only means of identification for the duration of their incarceration.
Annotated Bibliography
Dunning, B. (2008, May 27). What you didn’t know about the Stanford prison experiment. Skeptoid. Retrieved from skeptoid.com/episodes/4102.
This source is both an article and a podcast, and it addresses scientific problems with Zimbardo’s findings. I will use this to help refute one of the sources that disagrees with my thesis. There are several strong potential quotes in this source.
Konnikova, M. (2015, June 12). The real lesson of the Stanford prison experiment. The New Yorker. Retrieved from www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/the-real-lesson-of-the-stanford-prison-experiment.
This article examines a new film about the prison experiment. I’ll use it to support my discussion of the long-term cultural impact of the experiment.
Gladwell, Malcolm. (2013). The tipping point: How little things can make a big difference. Little, Brown and Company, pp. 152–153.