First published through The Paris News on July 17, 2017. The article can be found on their website at http://theparisnews.com/opinion/article_2c6979d6-6b0c-11e7-ae51-6f144bfd222d.html

Sometimes people who are in a position of power, shouldn’t have the authority they’re granted, because they misuse it by doing things they probably shouldn’t do, because they feel like they can get away with it.

I recently watched “The Stanford Experiment,” a dramatized explanation of the well-known psychological experiment by the same name, which demonstrated how people in a position of power can, and possibly will, misuse the power granted to them.

The experiment, conducted by professor Philip Zimbardo and his team, used college students in the place of prisoners and prison guards. With no extra background about who should be a prisoner and who should have been a guard, the psychologists flipped a coin to decide who was going to be in what position.

Within just days of starting the experiment, the guards had taken on the role so extensively that they were already punishing the prisoners by taking away their mattresses, forcing them to sleep on the concrete, use a tin pail as a restroom and sometimes not allowing the prisoners to empty the pail. The guards would degrade and humiliate the prisoners.

The experiment was scheduled for two weeks, but was called off within only six days, because of how cruel the guards became to the prisoners.

With his team, the psychologist’s goal was to test a hypothesis that the main reason there’s abuse in prison is because of inherent personality traits of prisoners and guards.

The experiment pointed more toward situational attribution, instead of dispositional. In other words, because the participants were put into this situation, they acted the way they thought they should — something a lot of people tend to do, even if they’ve never acted like that before.

Similar to the coin toss determining the roles of guards versus prisoners, in a lot of jobs, there are quite a few people who have been promoted to a position of power, but they don’t really deserve the position. I’ve worked with a few people who went from the hourly position to a salary position, watching over a group of associates and have misused their power just because they could — or at least, felt like they could.

In “Psychology Today,” Zimbardo said, “We want to believe our decisions are wisely informed, that our actions are rational, that our personal conscience buffers us against tyrannical authorities and also in the dominating influence of our character despite social circumstances.”

At the end of the experiment one of the guard characters said no one knows what they would have done in their position, which is true. We don’t know what we’d do until we were put in the same situation, ourselves.

Even though the idea of the Stanford Experiment is kind of scary, the results do show how different people can act in different situations.