Stanford Prison Experiment - Assignment Example

Initial Post I believe that it was ethical to do the Stanford Prison Experiment, because Philip G. Zimbardo and his co-researchers did not predict the problematic ethical issues that would arise from their experiment and they also followed measures that would enhance the ethical validity of their study. In order to develop the ethical rigor of the experiment, the researchers “followed the guidelines of the Stanford human subjects ethics committee that approved” the experiment (O’Toole, 1997).

This means that an independent board reviewed the goals and conditions of the experiment and did not anticipate any harm that would occur to the participants. The researchers also informed the participants that they could quit the experiment anytime they want. The participants were empowered to make independent decisions, since they were not real prisoners but only participants of a psychological study. Furthermore, the researchers performed diagnostic interviews and personality tests to remove candidates with psychological problems, medical disabilities, and histories of crime and/or drug abuse (Zimbardo, 2011).

They made sure that there were no participants who could not take the experiment emotionally and physically. In addition, the researchers arbitrarily divided the sampling into prisoners and guards, so there was no reason to think that any of them would “change,” as a result of their role playing and prison situation. Clearly, Zimbardo and his colleagues took all precautions to ensure that they would not violate basic ethical principles. I believe that the only ethical issue was that they stopped the experiment too late.

They lacked establishing other “controls” or people, who would assess the ethics of their study as it progressed. The study was supposed to last for two weeks but was ended after only six days, particularly after Christina Maslach, another psychologist and Zimbardo’s girlfriend then, directly pointed out the immorality of the experiment. For me, the experiment should have already been concluded when the researchers discovered that the guards heightened the brutality on their prisoners, when they thought that the researchers were not observing them.

Apparently, they were already too embedded into their roles that they no longer considered the morality of their actions. The experimenters should have also provided limits on role playing, including on themselves. These limits would have warned them that their experiment was going to extreme, inhumane measures. The researchers already considered the ethical implications of the experiment, but Zimbardo underscored the importance of trading some suffering of the participants, in order to gain knowledge about the impact of social roles and environment on human behavior.

For me, it was not right to trade the suffering of these participants to test if and how far an environment or situation can change human behavior. It was wrong to allow the mock guards to physically and psychologically harass the prisoners to the extent that the latter started believing that they were real prisoners. Zimbardo himself agreed that the study was unethical, because “because people suffered and others were allowed to inflict pain and humiliation on their fellows over an extended period of time” (O’Toole, 1997).

The development of human knowledge can never justify inhumane actions. The main importance of this experiment is that it proved Stanley Milgram’s previous conclusions that people have a tendency to obey people in power by showing obedience, compliance, and conformity, and that the environment can strongly change human behavior (Cole, 2006, p.187). The participants were all well-to-do college students with no criminal records and yet they completely submitted to their roles. Some prisoners followed the guards obediently, while others acted as snitches to protect their privileged status.

Caldero and Crank (2011) underscored that prisoners and guards “adapted to roles completely inconsistent with the college experience” (p.38). In addition, the prison environment enhanced the level of compliance among the prisoners. Though some prisoners rebelled against the guards, many of them complied with the rules and coped silently with the constraints of prison life. Furthermore, the environment can result to conformity, where “conformity assumes a more central role than authority” (Browning, 2001, p.

175 as cited in Cole, 2006, p. 187). Zimbardo (2011) analyzed compliance in terms of the deindividualization of the prisoners: “By the end of the study, the prisoners were disintegrated, both as a group and as individuals. There was no longer any group unity; just a bunch of isolated individuals hanging on, much like prisoners of war or hospitalized mental patients.” The study proved that the environment can significantly impact human behavior, and even personality, to the extent that good people can be pushed to do bad actions.

Response to Craig Campomizzi (Oct 10, 2011 4:40 PM) I agree with my classmate that “the idea of this experiment was a good one, but it was too difficult to control and it taught us a valuable lesson about the effects of something so extreme.” It was a good idea to test human behavior in a real setting, other than just depending on pencil-and-paper tests to understand human thinking and behavior. Zimbardo and his colleagues had good intentions. As psychologists, they did not intend to hurt their subjects, although they wanted to simulate the prison environment as realistically as possible, so that they could get valid and reliable information.

The simulation, however, “influenced” the participants, and even the researchers, to take their roles too seriously enough to go beyond ethical behaviors. I believe that the humiliation and physical hardships can be accommodated as part of the prison environment, but it made me weary to know that some guards seemed to enjoy brutalizing the prisoners already. They were abusing the “power” of authority given to them, especially when they saw that the prisoners were obeying them and generally became passive to their actions.

Still, when do we know that something is already “extreme”, as my classmate pointed out? Zimbardo had numerous visitors, including a priest, graduate professors and students, parents and loved ones of the prisoners, and even a lawyer, and yet none of them saw something wrong with this experiment. It would be interesting to define what is extreme in these kinds of human experiments and who can and should draw the line between ethical and unethical experiments. If the stakeholders can define and provide indicators of what an “extreme” action or result is, future human experiments can be stopped before their processes and results spiral into something unethical and inhumane.

Response to another classmate I agree with my classmate that there was nothing originally unethical with the experiment, although the results became unethical. Zimbardo and his colleagues designed the experiment carefully. In order to develop the ethical rigor of the experiment, the researchers “followed the guidelines of the Stanford human subjects ethics committee that approved” the experiment (O’Toole, 1997). This means that an independent board reviewed the goals and conditions of the experiment and did not expect any harm that would occur to the participants.

At the same time, numerous people visited the experiment and no one suggested that the experiment had turned ethically unacceptable. They must have been all immersed into the situation and role playing that each of them forgot to assess the morality of the experiment. In a way, they also complied with the experiment and like the mock prisoners, “they felt powerless to resist” (Zimbardo, 2011). Zimbardo (2011) noted that for the experiments’ participants: “Their sense of reality had shifted, and they no longer perceived their imprisonment as an experiment.

” The same shift in reality must have affected these supposedly third-party people, who could have stopped the experiment earlier. Nevertheless, it is hard to define “ethics” for an ongoing human experiment. Zimbardo and his colleagues had objective and ethical goals, but somehow along the experiment, something went wrong. I would say that they lacked ethical lamp posts or indicators for their experiment, which would indicate when they were already going to extreme measures that violated ethical principles and values.

Future human studies should consider and establish these ethical indicators, so that they can constantly monitor and assess the ethical nature of their studies as they progress. References Caldero, Michael A. and John P. Crank. Police Ethics: The Corruption of Noble Cause. 3rd ed. Washington: Elsevier, 2011. Print. Cole, Phillip. The Myth of Evil: Demonizing the Enemy. Connecticut: Praeger Publishers, 2006. Print. O’Toole, Kathleen. “The Stanford Prison Experiment: Still Powerful After All These Years.

” Stanford News Service (8 Jan. 1997). Web. 12 Oct. 2011 . Zimbardo, Philip G. Stanford Prison Experiment. 2011. Web. 12 Oct. 2011 .