Ashley Ramos

Aisha Sidibe

English 21003

30 November 2018

 

Unethical Experiments: Are They Worth It?

 

     Psychology is well known for understanding how humans behave and how they have developed over time. There have been many mistakes when trying to understand why researchers truly do experimental studies on human subjects thus, creating unethical moral codes. These moral codes have been broken in psychological experiments like Zimbardo’s prison experiment. It should be noted that we saw more unethical experiments be conducted prior to the 21st century. This is mainly because stricter limitations and boundaries to experimentation were created after experiments like Zimbardo’s.  It is important to consider that during psychological experiments (which involve humans) can “pose ethical dilemmas” and psychologists have to be aware of risks that participants may face due to the type of research. To change these unethical codes the  American Psychological Association was created to provide a code of conduct for psychologist to follow when conducting human experiments. When conducting scientific research, scientists believe that there are no boundaries on how far one can torture their test subjects for the advancement of science, however many experiments have gone too far exceeding ethic codes and the social dogma.       

    One well-known unethical experiment is Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Study. Because Zimbardo has an interest in human behavior, he chose to study the behaviors of people in certain situations when given certain roles. This led to the creation of the Stanford prison simulation experiment in 1971 at Stanford University in California. In his experiment he decided to have his participants play one of two separate roles; either the prisoner or the guard. The participants who were given the role as prisoners were held captive in the mock prison setting with guards who worked 8-hour shifts. Each prisoner was picked up by the Palo Alto City police who took them to the prison to serve their respective roles. They were fingerprinted, handcuffed, and searched just like a real prisoner and then blindfolded and taken to the mock prison at Stanford. On the other hand, the participants who were given the role as the guards had to treat prisoners like actual incarcerated individuals and they also wore reflective sunglasses so that the prisoners could not see their eyes. The guards had the impression that they had to be hostile, negative and superior to the prisoners. After defining each role, Zimbardo recruited 21 psychologically healthy male college students who were randomly assigned to either role. 10 were prisoners and 11 were guards. He assigned himself a role in this experiment as a prison warden which was a mistake seen later. Results showed that the participants did act like their roles even if they were not given any directions to how they should act. Seen in this link is the full experiment and how those who participated were affected negatively.

Link explaining Zimbardo’s Experiment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUZpB57PfHs

    After analyzing the simulation, it is evident that several ethical principles were violated, especially towards the prisoners. Zimbardo even had to cut his experiment short because things were getting out of hand. It was revealed that the prisoners suffered emotional abuse due to the treatment they received from the guards. It was considered unethical on many points. Prescott a new reporter asked Zimbardo what he did to the guards, he told the prisoner guards, “ We cannot physically abuse or torture them, We can create boredom, we can create fear in them to some degree. We can create notion of the arbitrariness that governs their lives.” This was not supposed to be said to the guards. If the experiment was to observe how they would act in a specific setting why was Zimbardo telling the guards what to do? It was very clear that he was interfering with the experiment. It was also known that five prisoners began to experience negative emotions, including crying and acute anxiety and had to be released from the study early. One of the guards in the experiment states, “During the day shift, when I worked, no one did anything that was beyond what you’d expect in a situation like that. But Zimbardo went out of his wake to create tension. Things like forced sleep deprivation-he was really pushing the envelope.” This was where Zimbardo as a psychologist failed to play his role as a psychologist who should have been observing but on the other hand involved himself as the prison’s warden

    ( For my last paragraph I would like to state why some thought that the experiments were ethical and useful or talk about some way to have changed the experiment to make it more ethical.) And then finally add a conclusion. I would like some feedback on what to write because I am not too sure whether to make it arguable and give both sides or make it more as an informative with more facts. Also can I add pictures? I can’t seem to find any graphs about these experiments although they probably do exist i’m just not tech savvy enough to find them.

Prisoners on the first day of the experiment

Prisoners being abused by the mock guards

 

Works Cited

 

[1]“Experimental Psychology Studies Humans and Animals.” American Psychological Association, American Psychological Association.

[2]McLeod, Saul A. Zimbardo – Stanford prison experiment (2018, Sept 16)

[3]Peter Gray (1st edition, 1991; 6th edition, 2011) Psychology. Worth Publishers.

 

[4]Prescott, C. (April 28, 2005). The lie of the Stanford Prison Experiment. Stanford Daily in News

section.

 

[5]“20 Most Unethical Experiments in Psychology.” Online Psychology Degree Guide,