Question

Explain the Zimbardo Study? What do we learn from this pioneer study? What are the ethical concerns?

Answer 1

• Philip Zimbardo is perhaps best known for the Stanford Prison Experiment, conducted in the basement of the Stanford University psychology department in 1971.
• The participants in the study were 24 male college students who were randomly assigned to act either as "guards" or "prisoners" in the mock prison.
• The study was initially slated to last two weeks but had to be terminated after just six days because of the extreme reactions and behaviors of the participants.
• The guards began displaying cruel and sadistic behavior toward the prisoners, while the prisoners became depressed and hopeless.
• While the prisoners and guards were allowed to interact in any way they wanted, the interactions were hostile or even dehumanizing.
• The guards began to behave in ways that were aggressive and abusive toward the prisoners while the prisoners became passive and depressed.
• Five of the prisoners began to experience severe negative emotions, including crying and acute anxiety and had to be released from the study early.
• According to Zimbardo and his colleagues, the Stanford Prison Experiment demonstrates the powerful role that the situation can play in human behavior.
• Because the guards were placed in a position of power, they began to behave in ways they would not usually act in their everyday lives or other situations. The prisoners, placed in a situation where they had no real control, became passive and depressed.
• People will readily conform to the social roles they are expected to play, especially if the roles are as strongly stereotyped as those of the prison guards.
• The “prison” environment was an important factor in creating the guards’ brutal behavior (none of the participants who acted as guards showed sadistic tendencies before the study).
• Therefore, the findings support the situational explanation of behavior rather than the dispositional one.
• Deindividuation may explain the behavior of the participants; especially the guards. This is a state when you become so immersed in the norms of the group that you lose your sense of identity and personal responsibility.
• Also, learned helplessness could explain the prisoner's submission to the guards. The prisoners learned that whatever they did had little effect on what happened to them. In the mock prison the unpredictable decisions of the guards led the prisoners to give up responding.
• Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment remains an important study in our understanding of how situational forces can influence human behavior.
• The study became a topic of interest recently after the reports of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuses in Iraq became public knowledge.
• Many people, Zimbardo included, suggested that the abuses at Abu Ghraib might be real-world examples of the same results observed in Zimbardo's experiment.
• The Stanford Prison Experiment is frequently cited as an example of unethical research. The experiment could not be replicated by researchers today because it fails to meet the standards established by numerous ethical codes, including the Ethics Code of the American Psychological Association.
• The study has received many ethical criticisms, including lack of fully informed consent by participants as Zimbardo himself did not know what would happen in the experiment (it was unpredictable). Also, the prisoners did not consent to being 'arrested' at home..
• Also, participants playing the role of prisoners were not protected from psychological harm, experiencing incidents of humiliation and distress. For example, one prisoner had to be released after 36 hours because of uncontrollable bursts of screaming, crying and anger.