The Stanford Prison Experiment. Zimbardo sought to discover how quickly people would conform to their roles and investigated whether this might be the case for the high level of verbal and physical abuse in the American prison system. Zimbardo wanted to know whether the behavior was due to personality traits or the environment. "This boundary between good and evil is permeable, each of us can cross it...I argue that we all have the capacity to love and to do evil - to be Mother Theresa, to be Hitler or Saddam Hussein. It's the situation that brings him out." This was known as the Lucifer effect and Zimbardo firmly believed that it applied to everyone. Zimbardo's experience is also associated with the theory of. Cognitive dissonance is the struggle people have to maintain internal consistency. Our behavior seems to control our beliefs, attitudes, and morality, and when we are confronted with our actions, we usually try to justify or change them. 'opinion to adopt a more tolerant attitude All the patients in this experiment had difficulty maintaining this, they had difficulty differentiating between realities and pretending. university in a prison environment and involved 21 male students. All participants were examined by professionals and all were found to be mentally stable. Each participant was assigned the role of a prison guard or prisoners and given realistic accessories and outfits tailored to their character. To make everything as realistic as possible, without prior warning, the prisoners were arrested, fingerprinted and followed all the procedures of a real arrest. The prisoners and guards assumed their roles easily and quickly, the guards tormented and degraded the prisoners and took pleasure in doing so while the prisoners talked about prison life and, in one case, caused a riot. Many prisoners became submissive and the more they did it, the more the guards appreciated