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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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Within 24 hours of the experiment, the prison guards began to humiliate and mentally abuse the prisoners. The prison guards were given little instructions about how to treat the prisoners, except that there was not to be any physical force used on the prisoners. The lack of instructions that

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In summary, the purpose of the Stanford Prison Experiment was supposed to demonstrate that powerful situational forces, much like Abu Ghraib, could over-ride individual dispositions and choices, leading good people to do bad things simply because of the role they found themselves

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The Stanford Prison Experiment was a research study administered by Philip Zimbardo in 1971, which gathered twenty-four men to be put into a pseudo-jail to see the impacts of prison on the guards and inmates. Twelve of these volunteers were randomly selected to be inmates and the other twelve became guards. Not surprisingly, the inmates endured incredible torment and a few of them had psychological collapses due to severe emotional distress. The guards were consumed with their own power and felt little sympathy for the inmates that were under their care and stripped them, whipped them, dehumanized them. The research was expected to keep going for two weeks; however it went on for only six days due to the inmates encountering damaging levels

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Before the experiment began, all participants went through a psychological evaluation to make sure they were of sound mind (Onishi & Herbert, 2016). Once the experiment began the “prisoners” were arrested and taken to a simulated prison where they were stripped searched and demoralized. During the 6 days that the study lasted, conduct between both sides, prisoners and guards, was less than expectable. Both sides “acted as though a punishment was justified as an acceptable response to a breach of the rules” (Onishi & Herbert, 2016), rules that were vaguely explained.

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The guards were instructed to maintain order anyway they wanted without using physical violence. Zimbardo wanted the guards to seem intimidating while the prisoners were made to look inferior and were to be referred to with their ID number only. After the prisoners were assigned their roles and the guards took their post was the effect of the experiment finally setting in. On the morning of the second day the prisoners began to rebel against the guards by ripping off their ID numbers and barring the doors while taunting the guards. This event was the first step down the slippery slope that would follow.

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In 1971 Professor Phillip Zimbardo was interested in finding out what would happen if you put a good person in an evil place. Would the institution control their behavior or would a person attitude, values, morality raise about the negative environment? First, Zimbardo converted a basement of Stanford University into a mock prison, Next, Zimbardo recruiter 24 male college students who were paid $15 per day to take part in the experiment. Finally, the recruiters were randomly assigned to either prisoner or guard with Zimbardo being the make shift prison warden. I believe the prison study was unethical, clearly young men suffered physically, mentally.

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This experiment fits into Kidder’s ethical dilemma paradigms of short-term vs long-term. In fact, Zimbardo choose the long term effects of his experiment over the short term effects of it. The Stanford prison experiment had a short-term effect on the university students that could not bear the prison life for long and the prison was ended after 6 days only. The long hours of imprisonment revealed that the students had become depressed while the guards had already become cruel at their maximum. The prisoners were humiliated and embarrassed by the guards.

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This experiment basically let boys run wild and humiliate each other. Sadism and degradation play a big role in this study unintentionally. Understanding how good people turn evil may be hard to do before hearing about this experiment, but afterwards you won’t have to ask that question anymore. The Stanford Prison Experiment highlights what happens when humans get

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Perhaps he should have revised the experiment to create a more controlled environment. The guards were given two rules: do not hit the prisoners, and do not keep them in the hole for longer than an

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They had to stop the experiment by the sixth day because the guards started to abuse the prisoners and some of the prisoners were showing signs of emotional

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Instead when they were asked who they were they simply answered with ID numbers that were assigned to them. As the experiment went on the guards beat the prisoners, sprayed them with fire extinguishers, and striped the prisoners naked and harassed them. They were not being told to do this, but within the seven days of the experiment they began to abuse their power and inflict evil upon the prisoners. A member of the experiment says, “It’s easy for you to say, 'Oh, I wouldn't have acted that way, but you don't know. That's - that's the truth.

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Stanford Experiment: Unethical or Not Stanford Prison Experiment is a popular experiment among social science researchers. In 1973, a psychologist named Dr. Philip Zimbardo wants to find out what are the factors that cause reported brutalities among guards in American prisons. His aim was to know whether those reported brutalities were because of the personalities of the guards or the prison environment. However, during the experiment, things get muddled unexpectedly. The experiment became controversial since it violates some ethical standards while doing the research.

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While the test subjects did in fact consent to the experiment via documents, they developed this false understanding through the experiment that they could not leave at any time, that “there was no way out”. During this time period, there were no existing laws that this experiment violated but it did pave the way for several to be introduced. For example, in the consent form it stated that the prisoners would not experience physical harm, but several days later they were brutally beaten by the guards. A few scenarios such as this one would be considered illegal with today’s legal system. One law that was created after this required federal prisons to separate minors awaiting trial from adults to avoid them suffering from abuse.

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