The Stanford Prison Experiment Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

The Stanford Prison Experiment - Essay ExampleSuch a trend was mostly observed during the post war era, where researchers displayed a keen interest in deciphering human behaviour associated with the two traits mentioned in a higher place and understands the psychology of people who showed increased levels of conformity and obedience to their authorities. Such an observation was principally based on the Nazi concentration camps and the likes, where despite the immorality of the acts, people were seen to be submissive and obeying the orders given to them (Kassin, Fein, Markus, 2010 Smith, Mackie, 2000 Fiske, 2009). Zimbardos Stanford Prison experiment This experiment was conducted to examine the psychological impact of prison life on the prisoners. As a part of this experiment, continuous students were selected to perform the roles of prison guards and prisoners and were made to go by the circumstantial same routines, as is usually observed in prisons. Newspaper advertisements we re formally given out to invite participants to participate in the experiment, and those who responded were arrested without a prior model and made to go through a thorough physical examination, similar to one carried out on substantive criminals. Such sudden and unexpected arrests of the regular college going students, took them by surprise and the students were reported to experience mild shock, and humiliation due to the whole exercise (prisonexp.org, 2011). The experiment was deliberately designed to imitate the scenes from real prisons and steps were taken to disgrace the prisoners, thus resulting in a series of negative social, emotional, and psychological repercussions. The study, unlike other experiments followed all the major ethical considerations, and did not involve any kind of deception or tricks, it received widespread criticism for the unethical nature of the study. This was mainly because of reports of the participants being made to go through extreme social, psych ological and emotional turmoil and the fact that they were deliberately exposed to situations involving high amount of stress. The proponents have argued that the experiment conducted were ethical in nature, since the participants were clearly communicate about the type of study they have enrolled in. However, the opponents and critics have stated that the information provided to the participants was incomplete in nature, as their consent was taken based on deficient data. The participants of this study were arrested without a prior warning or information which was least expected leading to stress and emotional turmoil (Shaugnessy et al., 2006). There were widespread criticisms regarding the legitimacy and validity of the experiments conducted, especially with regard to the manner in which the study was replicated. It was argued that there is no way to replicate a real prison and hence extremely impossible to extract similar reactions from ordinary individuals, since there is a vast amount of difference between regular college going students and hardened criminals. Over and above the questions regarding the plausibility of the study, there were serious concerns regarding the credibility of the study as well, since critics argued that the study was highly generalized in nature and the observations could easily have been made by observing / studying the prisoners from Nazi concentration camps. Also, the study aimed to completely imitate the behaviour of prisoners from popular prison scenes and hence there was a