Open Your Doors Say Hi : Students’ social lives depend on their own initiative, not their residence halls |

I’ve grown increasingly tired of hearing people say that our college’s social scene is irrefutably synonymous with heavy drinking in rooms and heavy petting at dances. In my frustration with drinking-based theories of socialization, I’ve spent some time trying to suss out what really lies at the bottom of these self-imposed strictures we tend to adhere to, such as our beloved Thursday/Saturday night schedule. This led me, like any Psychology Major, to re-examine Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment in which a bunch of college students are placed into the roles of prisoners and guards and end up so psychologically and dangerously invested in their roles that the experiment had to be shut down. The basic premise is that we college students are inherently amorphous blobs that want nothing more than to fit the shape of our container.

Open Your Doors Say Hi : Students’ social lives depend on their own initiative, not their residence halls | The College Voice