The Stanford Prison Experiment. Zimbardo aimed to find out how quickly people would conform to roles and was researching whether this might be the case for the high level of verbal and physical abuse in the American prison system. Zimbardo was interested in finding out whether the behavior was due to personality traits or the environment. "That line between good and evil is permeable, each of us can cross it... I maintain that we all have the capacity for love and evil: to be Mother Teresa, to be Hitler or Saddam Hussein. It is the situation that brings it out ." This was known as the Lucifer effect, and Zimbardo firmly believed that it applied to everyone. Zimbardo's experiment also appeals to the theory of cognitive dissonance. This is the struggle people experience to maintain internal coherence. Our behavior seems to control our beliefs, attitudes and morals and when we are confronted with our actions we usually try to justify or change our mind to a more accepting manor. All patients in this experiment struggled to maintain it, they found it difficult to distinguish between reality and fiction. Zimbardo converted a university basement into a prison environment and involved 21 male students. All participants were screened by professionals and all deemed mentally stable. Each participant was assigned the role of a prison guard or prisoner and was provided with realistic props and clothing to match their character. To make everything as realistic as possible, without warning, the prisoners were arrested, fingerprinted and followed all the procedures of a real arrest. Both prisoners and guards assumed their roles easily and quickly, the guards tormented and degraded the prisoners and enjoyed doing so while the prisoners talked about prison life and in one case caused a riot. Many prisoners submitted and the more they did the more fun the guards had