Write A Term Paper On Zimbardo

The Zimbardo prison experiment is one of the most well-known experiments due to the controversies that took place during the experiment. This study was found to be incredibly problematic and was meant to be a two week long experiment however it only lasted just six days. Only two days into the experiment, chaos erupted as the subjects, prisoners, began to rebel and the hierarchy broke down. The main goal of the experiment was to see if people would conform to social roles and adjust to align with societal norms when in prison. The question of how a simple experiment turned into one that led to the breakdown of prisoners is one worth exploring. One quote to support this thesis is, “Social scientists that challenge ethics review vociferously,

Ethical conduct is there for a reason; if this is violated, the experiment is simply not worthwhile. An important ethical guideline is that the researcher cannot engage in any of the torture roles in their own experiment because it can interfere with the results. A quote to support this is, “Second, PENS (The Psychological Ethics and National Security) makes explicit a central ethical issue regarding the role of psychologists in torture and related interrogation activities. Its overview states that, “the Task Force was unambiguous that psychologists do not engage in, direct, support, facilitate, or offer training in torture or other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment” (Zimbardo, 2007, p.65). One of the most controversial aspects of this experiment is the level of torture that Zimbardo inflicted on his subjects. He tortured his subjects both physically and mentally, and essentially bullied the subjects into obeying the guards in the experiment. It is incredibly important that these psychologists are not involved in the torture of the subjects, and torture of this kind is extremely

The experiment took place at Stanford University. To illustrate this point, Haslam says, “In 1971, 24 college students who had volunteered to take part in a ‘psychological study of prison life’ were randomly assigned to roles as guards and prisoners within a ‘prison’ that had been specially constructed in the basement of the Stanford University psychology department” (2017, p.134). This invalidates results because it is a specially made environment; it is not realistic because they do not have many of the factors that play into the environment of a real prison. For example, in a real prison they would have access to a prison yard or prison gym which could change some of the results in the experiment like the fact that they could have more emotional control due to regular exercise. In conclusion, this Zimbardo Prison Experiment was not worthwhile considering the amount of manipulation that took place which essentially invalidates the study as well as the studies results. To review, in this essay the main contributions making this study negligible are the ethical conduct, the role Zimbardo played in the experiment, the manipulation tactics, the time period the study was conducted, and the unrealistic environmental