Zimbardo Experiment Ethics
Essay #4, Rough Draft #2
Imagine answering an ad, possibly because you need a little extra cash, or maybe because you were intrigued by the idea. Either way it was stated something like this, “Male college students needed for psychological study of prison life. $ 15 per day for 1-2 weeks.” ( Ratnesar 1). Zimbardo and his team selected 24 men, to participate in this study half of the men would randomly be selected to be prisoners and half of the men would be prison guards. The guards were given very specific directions to not harm the individuals, yet their intent was to make them feel powerless and ashamed. The guards were given very little restrictions, so that once shocking behavior was accepted they kept moving to more and …show more content…
By doing this it would allow the person, whether it had been Zimbardo himself or someone else to remain more objective by not being so emotionally and physically involved. Secondly he denied Richard Yacco the ability to leave. Whenever one conducts an experiment, all who are involved should have the right to end their involvement at anytime. Finally there was no proper debriefing, as well as it was argued that many left in a worse mental state then prior to the experiment. Now some may not be bothered by such an experiment in fact, we have seen other controversial studies such as Mailgrams’ study, where he was studying the conflict between personal conscious, and obedience to authority. Milgram had his subjects administer shocks at what they thought to be at a lethal level. In Milgram’s study, they found individuals who were instructed to give shocks based on how some one answered a question, if they got the question wrong, they were to shock the individual, raising the intensity of the shock, though it was actually a hoax. The person who they believed to be receiving the shocks, were actually acting. When one of the subjects would hesitate in fear of hurting or killing the other person , they would be encouraged to continue. What might be considered more alarming then his actual study, was that at least 65 percent actually administered what they thought to be at a lethal level. (
Imagine answering an ad, possibly because you need a little extra cash, or maybe because you were intrigued by the idea. Either way it was stated something like this, “Male college students needed for psychological study of prison life. $ 15 per day for 1-2 weeks.” ( Ratnesar 1). Zimbardo and his team selected 24 men, to participate in this study half of the men would randomly be selected to be prisoners and half of the men would be prison guards. The guards were given very specific directions to not harm the individuals, yet their intent was to make them feel powerless and ashamed. The guards were given very little restrictions, so that once shocking behavior was accepted they kept moving to more and …show more content…
By doing this it would allow the person, whether it had been Zimbardo himself or someone else to remain more objective by not being so emotionally and physically involved. Secondly he denied Richard Yacco the ability to leave. Whenever one conducts an experiment, all who are involved should have the right to end their involvement at anytime. Finally there was no proper debriefing, as well as it was argued that many left in a worse mental state then prior to the experiment. Now some may not be bothered by such an experiment in fact, we have seen other controversial studies such as Mailgrams’ study, where he was studying the conflict between personal conscious, and obedience to authority. Milgram had his subjects administer shocks at what they thought to be at a lethal level. In Milgram’s study, they found individuals who were instructed to give shocks based on how some one answered a question, if they got the question wrong, they were to shock the individual, raising the intensity of the shock, though it was actually a hoax. The person who they believed to be receiving the shocks, were actually acting. When one of the subjects would hesitate in fear of hurting or killing the other person , they would be encouraged to continue. What might be considered more alarming then his actual study, was that at least 65 percent actually administered what they thought to be at a lethal level. (