Do people have control over how they act or do the roles in which they are placed determine their behavior? Philip K. Zimbardo, professor of Psychology at Stanford University, began researching this question, by setting up a mock prison. To do this, he placed an advertisement in the Palo Alto City newspaper, stating that male college students were needed for a study of prison life paying fifteen dollars per day for one to two days. Of the seventy responses, twenty-one were selected, by the flip of a coin half of them were designated as "guards" and the other half as "prisoners." The goal of Philip Zimbardo's experiment was to find out when the guards become controlling or in the case of the prisoners unresponsive and detached from the experiment itself. The atmosphere of the experiment was achieved, by taking into account every detail down to the last stitch of clothing. All of the prisoners were assigned the same uniforms and cells, and used numbers instead of names. The guards were assigned uniforms and offices, with a couple perks like clubs, whistles, handcuffs, keys, and very importantly freedom. These conditions developed a setting similar real penetentaries, in which all prisoners were stripped of identifying characteristics, and the guards were given unconditional authority (Zimbardo 113). .
All of the prisoners were unexpectedly arrested, read their rights, and charged with a felony then they were taken down to the Palo Alto police station to be fingerprinted. After a while, they were blindfolded and transported to the Stanford County Prison. Here, they were stripped naked, deloused and given a uniform. In this "prison" prisoners lost their civil rights and privacy, while the guards gained social power by controlling the lives of their subservient peers. "In a few days, the role dominated the person, said Zimbardo (Zimbardo 113). After the experiment started the transformations was almost instantaneous.