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Phillip Zimbardo's Prison Experiment

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In 1971 Phillip Zimbardo conducted a prison experiment to see how people will conform to the roles they were assigned in a prison environment. Zimbardo wanted to study how people reacted in this environment and what would happen when people were assigned to be put in power, while the others had no power at all. Very early on into this experiment many ethical issues arose. The first ethical issue was that participants were not given all of the information about what was going to happen when they were signing the consent forms. Another ethical issue was avoiding harm. The guards were told they could not physically harm the inmates, but were allowed to do other things. The inmates were harms psychologically. An inmate had to be released 36 hours …show more content…

These ethical issues talked about above could have been easily avoided and could have impacted the experiment drastically. If Zimbardo only had the role to oversee the experiment, the experiment could have ended a lot sooner and could have protected a lot of the inmates. Since Zimbardo was serving as warden, he ultimately had the final decision of what goes on. He wanted to see the experiment out, so made decisions that allowed the experiment to go on when in reality it should have been stopped. Very early on in the experiment, the guards needed to take charge and show that they are the ones to obey and listen too. Since the guards were not able to commit any physical harm, they decided to do psychological and emotional harm. This experiment could have gone much better and more fluid if they didn’t allow the guards to humiliate and break the inmates down. The guards had all the power they wanted because the warden was on their side. I honestly believe that the benefits of this experiment outweighed the costs. We learned from this experiment how to not treat people during

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