Zimbardo's Prison Experiment

334 Words2 Pages
The research ethics was violated many times during the Stanford county experiment. Any researcher, who is going to do an experiment, must make sure that the experiment is safe and does not cause any harm to the participants, but Zimbardo experiment he did not take this into consideration. Unfortunately the participants were psychologically and physically harmed. Also, they were not fully aware of the extant of the experiment and what devastating results will hold for them personally. Most of them only engage in the experiment for the money, none of them new exactly what was actually going to happen. It was supposed to be a safe environment to study weather the violent in prison was due to the prison setting, or is it due to the personalities of the prisoner and guards that causes the violence. One of the biggest mistakes that were done in this experiment was that Zimbardo himself was one of the participants of his own experiment, which I think had a huge effect on the course of the events. Since He was the superintendent he was on the guards’ side instead of just observing without any influence of the direction of the experiment. Another ethical problem accrue when there is an invasion of privacy of the participants, like when the prisoners were stripped naked. Zimbardo concluded that the power of an environmental setting or situational circumstances are strong forces in shaping participants' behavior in the experiment, no matter what their personalities or behavioral habits in real life are. All participants acted in the experiment as if was a real prison, they disassociated them selves from the reality, that this is just a research, and their personalities just dissolved in the new role either as a prisoner or a guard. They defined themselves based on how others saw them. I think the stereotype about how a prison life should be and how a prisoner or a
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