class today

Today's class was another intriguing one. We watched a video about the Stanford Prison experiment, that famous experiment about abuse of authority done by Philip Zimbardo at Stanford in the early 70s. I have not studied this myself, but know of it, and decided it fit into our topic, so am asking the students to apply Foucault's idea of the Panopticon to that experiment. They could also choose to apply it to the film A Clockwork Orange or Migram's obedience experiment, which preceded this one by a decade.
The discussion was impassioned. The majority of students, I am sure, will write about the Stanford Experiment. They were interested in the whole power dynamic, how the prisoners so soon turned against each other and granted the abusive guards full allegiance, denigrating each other and themselves; how the guards escalated their abusive behavior, encouraged by the fact that their authority was evidently so highly regarded, believing in the power they held; and, perhaps most interestingly, how the scientist in charge forgot that this was an experiment and bought into the role of prison guard he had adopted for the occasion.
Though I am not a psychologist, and not in a position to put this into a neat context and categorize it, it does relate clearly to the model of the panopticon, the all-seeing system of power Foucault discusses in his book Discipline and Punish, in that the prisoners were essentially prisoners of their own minds. For that matter, the other parties in the system were also held captive by the dynamic the system set up. They stopped seeing themselves as human beings and became the roles they were playing. Shades of Orwell!