Question

How does Zimbardos The stanford Prison Study shape up as an IRB might judge it today? What changes do we have to do to the study in order to make it ethical?

Answer 1

• The study was approved by the Stanford Human Subjects Review Committee, the Stanford Psychology Department, and the Group Effectiveness Branch of the Office of Naval Research. In addition, the Student Health Department was alerted to the study and prior arrangements were made for any medical care the participants might need.
• Zimbardo did submit his experiment to IRB for reviewing of ethical standards which met the criteria at that time.At the time this experiment was normal and didn’t violate any laws because there were none , or those that were in place were minimal. But ,today if IRB reviews it again they will find some issues with the study.One violation is that the consent form lacked a full description of the events that could take place, and this shows that Zimbardo didn’t take the full time to review all the events that could occur, or that he thought might occur and didn’t carefully plan to avoid them.
• Another violation was that the prisoner’s agreed to a consent form that confirmed they wouldn’t be physically harmed, but later in the experiment the guards started to hit the prisoners, and physically abuse them. This supports how the prisoner’s were lied to and how their consent form was broken, and that should have ended the experiment.
• The experiment was unpredictable and improperly setup. Zimbardo was too involved in the experiment and couldn’t make decisions.
• Zimbardo didn’t take steps to avoid the harm of his volunteers.His authenticity as the experiment leader was compromised. They didn’t explain the experiments possible dangers, outcomes, or procedures to the full extent needed.
• Proper informed consent is needed for the participants regarding the psychological stress they might go through. It needs to be a more controlled experiment.  
• And it including only males so there is a gender bias which could be overcome by randomly selecting female participants as well.
• Better safeguards should be used to protect the participants from potential risks.
• Neutral observers should be used at all times to prevent the experiment from getting out of hand.