Ashley Ramos

Aisha Sidibe

English 21003

14 December 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

Though these experiments have changed our ethical codes today just because these experiments were done does not mean they have helped us learn. The results gained from this experiment could have been discovered in a different manner. Does more ethical experiments help us more than unethical ones? The answer is yes. Ethical experiments could have been formed and gotten the same results. For example in the Milgrams experiment we could have stopped the experimenter from delivering more shocks when the got uncomfortable with the situation. Also I believe that they should have seen the learner although he was not really being shocked. This could have given us more useful results and to see how far the obedience would go. For the Stanford Prison Experiment the abusive roles should have been stopped as the warden saw the behavior happening. The unethical codes caused the experiment to have to be cut short which if ethical could have produced better results. The patients in both experiments should have been more informed helping the results be more helpful. The unethical experiments lost control of what they really wanted to accomplish which is why ethical experiments will help us gain more information in the future to come.

 

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

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