Chapter 13 - Kids working together

If you were put in a situation in which you had complete control over several other people, how would you behave? According to Philip Zimbardo's findings, you probably wouldn't act in a way that a mother typical mother would approve of. In his study, he randomly assigned 24 males to be either prisoners or guards. After some time, the people who were guards acted quite sadistically and prisoners showed varying signs of emotional disturbance. Even though this study was not carefully controlled, there have been many other times where similar results have been found. For example, the Robber's Cave Study caused two groups of youngsters, sorted by simple eye color, to very clearly become the groups that they were assigned into. I think that these studies show that behavior is definitely not based solely on the genetics of a person, or even their past behavior. Behavior is very reliant on the situation that the person is placed into.
This is definitely one of the principle ideas that I will remember from this class. I think that this serves as a very good reminder that children should be encouraged for personal and education growth from a very early age. It also shows that children should not be pitted against each other at early ages, rather they should be encouraged to work together on projects. This will increase productivity and decrease prejudice among their peers.