The Stanford Prison Experiment: Ethics and Issues

    The Stanford Prison experiment was not your everyday average experiment. This was a realistic, intensive experiment done in the basement of a university. Basicly what the psychologist and  psychology professor Philip Zimbardo was trying to find out was the psychological effects of becoming a prisoner or prison guard were. Little did he know that he was about to violate

and expose his volunteers to harsh punishments, crossing the line of many boundaries that psychologists deemed inappropriate to put them through. 

   Zimbardos procedure to make this a reality was to first arrest, realistically, each of them. They then striped them and replaced their clothing with tattered uniforms. They were to stay there for 2 weeks but because of the unethical conditions, was short. 

   Observers said that the prison had "dangerous and psychologically damaging situations". The volunteers got so engrossed with their roles that they went over board; abusing the "prisoners" to the point where 5 dropped out early, pleading and crying to get out. They hardly realized that they were just college students, involved in an experiment. Some, protesting the situation, started "to act crazy, to scream, to curse, to go into a rage that seemed out of control" said Zimbardo. They felt that they needed to stick with their fellow prisoners and guards, taking sides and ganging up on one another. Eventually, an outside physiologist saw the situation and convinced Zimbardo that it was completely unethical and stopped the operation. 

   Other issues involved after the experiment. Will the guards and prisoners have hatred toward each other, even though they know it was just an experiment? These students have to shared the same school, will it cause conflicts? Also, what are the lasting affects? No one knows how serious the lasting affects could be but its sure that they all were exposed to physiologically damaging situations during the experiment.