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The Stanford Prison Experiment By Zimbardo And Stanford University

1086 Words5 Pages

University of Phoenix

PSYCH/599

Dr. John Ferreira

05-29-2023

Background Information

In August 1971 Zimbardo and his colleges decided to construct a prison environment in the basement of the psychology building in Stanford University to perform an experiment with a group of participants who were psychologically and physically stable. All the 24 participants were white college students and randomly assigned to a prisoner group or a guard group. (Cherry, 2023) The experiment was to last 14 days but due to the abusive and aggressive behavior by the guards towards the prisoners the experiment had to end earlier. (Cherry, 2023) Thus, demonstrating that human beings are unpredictable, they did not know how they were going …show more content…

Ethical issues that occurred in this experiment.

Two Ethical issues that occurred in this experiment were lack of fully informed consent, and not protecting the participants against harm. (Cherry, 2023) The researchers did not give details to the participants about the processes in conducting the experiment. The Participants have begun to be part of the experiment without fully informed about the experiment as well as not having signed their consent. The participants were unfamiliar regarding their rights and responsibilities during their participation …show more content…

Diversity was not taken into consideration in the study because was represented only with white males’ middle-class students. The effect of not having diversity in the experiment only presented the effect of how white males would be effect by prison life according to their role’s guards or prisoners. The experiment did not show a varied population sample which was unable to see the representation effects of a wider population.

I Would Have Done Differently

As a student of psychology there are some things that could have been done differently when conducting the Stanford Prison Experiment. I would have selected male participants from a varied races' representation to include diversity. I would have reviewed the Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct before starting the experiment. I would have explained to all the participants their rights as well as answering any questions related to the experiment confirming that all participants had signed the informed Consent before conducting the experiment. Hence, I would confirm that the guards understood their role. I would supervise and intervene in case of arise of any aggressive or violent behaviors during the

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