This Blog has also been published on www.heavenartery.com.

I read about a famous psychology test recently, namely “Stanford Prison Experiment”. Just like its name, the experiment is operated in a prison, where a number of selected volunteers are grouped and played the roles of “Prisoners” and “Prison Guard”.

Then, an interesting thing happened that the “Prison Guard” started to threat, assult, despice and violate the “Prisoners” with an increasing extent, while the “Prisoners” did not revenge and even obeyed the experiment rules to play “Prisoners” continuously although both groups knew they are in a role-play experiment. The experiment is stopped forcedly in the midway due to the escalating violence from “Prison Guard”.

Several conclusions could be acquired from the above experiment, and an acknowledged result is that an innocent individual might abuse the given right which surpasses others in some specific circumstances.

I am not familiar with the psychological theories, and I think the imperative research should be taken on why these “Prison Guard” abused their given rights.

Some people probably reckon that the potential reason why these false “Prison Guards” punched these false “Prisoners” and the false “Prisoners” did not resist is that an individual’s performance is closely associated with his or her position.

In the experiment, the volunteer who was asked to play “Prison Guard” threatened and violated other innocent “Prisoners” is not because being attempted to play vividly as a “Prison Guard” or “Prison” but because he or she regarded him or herself as a “Prison Guard” or “Prisoner”. In his or her mind, the prison guard’s job incorporates threatening and fighting prisoners, while prisoners are always beaten by prison guards.

In this sense, the above conclusion about “Abusing Rights” cannot be evident since the “Prison Guards” didn’t abuse their “Rights” and moreover, there is a common sense that the prison guards have the recessive right to threat or fight the prisoners in order to maintain the order of the prison.

However, I would like to consider the underlying reason of the abnormal behaviors taken by both “Prison Guards” and “Prisoners” more deeply.

In my viewpoint, the reason why these false “Prison guard” and “Prisoner” pretended to be “True” prison guard and prisoner could be ascribed to “Inertia Thinking”. That is, for a given position, an individual is likely to do what he or she think that should be done based on his or her cognitive “Inertia Thinking”.

Since there is a lack of consideration about why people in this position do these things and how to improve the approaches in doing these things, the result of this experiment is expectable and obvious that all the volunteers did their job regularly and rigidly, and no creative improvement has been implemented in the test.

Actually, prison guards could consider some solutions to both reduce the violence and maintain the order in the prison rather than arouse conflicts and increase the level of violence. The volunteers of “Prison Guards” are doing all these things according to what prison guard do in their cognition.

For an individual, to do something according to a given position following the inertia thinking is not incorrect, but it reduces the potential of people’s capability and the chance to high-level achievement.

Rethinking how good you did your job in the company, did you always follow the rules and “Inertia Thinking” according to your position? Or did you ever have a try to do some creative improvements?

To sum up, “Inertia Thinking” is neither negative nor harmful, at least it could make you adapt your position in a relative short time. However, it might be ineffective if you keep depending on “Inertia Thinking” and give up “Creative Thinking”.