Was The Stanford Prison Experiment Ethical?

The SPE was ethical because it met every standard of ethics in place at the time. The experiment was approved by Stanford's Human Subjects Research Committee, which was basically the only guideline in place to determine if the experiment should happen. It also completely followed the Nuremberg Code and was approved by an Institutional Review Board. After the experiment ended, the American Psychological Association conducted an investigation and concluded that it followed all existing ethical standards. Unfortunately, those were the only conditions that an experiment involving human subjects was required to pass, so the Stanford Prison Experiment was technically ethical.

Throughout the experiment, the “prisoners” were treated inhumanely to the extent that several of them had breakdowns. The "prisoners'" sleep was disrupted, as directed by the researchers,

Zimbardo was the head researcher, but he transformed into the “prison warden” and lost his perspective on how bad the conditions for the experiment had become, as he admits. He said, “by the third day I was sleeping in my office. I had become the superintendent of the Stanford county jail. That was who I was: I'm not the researcher at all. Even my posture changes—when I walk through the prison yard, I'm walking with my hands behind my back, which I never in my life do, the way generals walk when they're inspecting troops,” (Ratnesar). Researchers didn’t have time to reflect on the conditions because they had to feed the “prisoners,” deal with parents of those involved, run a “parole board,” and “deal with” “prisoner” breakdowns. The experiment only ended after Christina Maslach, who married Zimbardo in 1972, saw the experiment and argued with Zimbardo to end it. In order for an experiment to be ethical, it needs unoccupied people to watch the experiment and call out anything wrong with it, which the SPE did not