Stanford Prison Experiment Ethical Issues Are Always Essay

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Stanford Prison Experiment

Ethical issues are always first and foremost a subject of ambiguous grounds when it comes to experiments that are hinged on human behavior. Whether this is because of the short- and long-term consequences of psychological and physical harm, ethical questions are raised with regards to how much scientific benefit can be accrued from conducting such an experiment. This question remains heavily controversial especially in the Stanford Prison Experiment, conducted in 1971 at Stanford University. The idea in question was whether the social and physical behaviors in prison life was conducted because of the people in the environment or whether the situation in itself applies a general stress of how to react to such an environment.

"What happens when you put good people in an evil place?" (Zimbardo, 1999) and "Does humanity win over evil, or does evil triumph?" (Zimbardo, 1999) are only the starting points of this rather famous experiment. The Stanford Prison Experiment was originally set up to last two weeks, during a summer research experiment conducted at the university. In this experiment, the data to be examined would be the general behaviors exhibited by "guards" and "prisoners" when placed in a prison simulation. Prior to the experiment, volunteers were chosen from a pool of applicants, the volunteers being 24 students with no priors of medical conditions and history of crime. All in all, the experiment to be conducted would be involving college students who were all "psychologically sound" (Zimbardo, 1999).

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The explanatory study that is the Stanford Prison Experiment would then go about in determining why people acted in a particular role when put in a specific situation. The experiment itself had many conditions for which there was no determining how the students would react. For instance, it was recorded that guards furthered their roles by becoming more sadistic than what the "warden" or Zimbardo instructed them with. Additionally, prisoners succumbed to a feeling of personal identity loss and humiliation, playing their parts as prisoners to an overwhelming realism that would shock the very ethical issues that should have been regarded since the beginning of the experiment.

The Stanford Prison Experiment was discontinued after a total of six days due to an alarming increase of issues regarding ethical standards. At the beginning of the experiment, the students were reassured that no physical harm would result in the outcomes of the simulation being conducted (Zimbardo, 1999). However, as the days and hours grew on, it became evident that the guards -- who had almost limitless decisions when it came to handling prisoners, save physically harming them -- were determined to further humiliate and debase the prisoners through borderline violent means. "Guards were granted power to make up and modify rules as they progressed" (Maxfield, 2010), and once the….....

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