Stanford Prison Experiment Essay Assignment

Stanford Prison Experiment Essay Assignment

Stanford Prison Experiment Essay Assignment

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The Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) is one of psychology’s most famous studies. It has been criticized on many grounds, and yet a majority of textbook authors have ignored these criticisms in their discussions of the SPE, thereby misleading both students and the general public about the study’s questionable scientific validity. Data collected from a thorough investigation of the SPE archives and interviews with 15 of the participants in the experiment further question the study’s scientific merit. These data are not only supportive of previous criticisms of the SPE, such as the presence of demand characteristics, but provide new criticisms of the SPE based on heretofore unknown information. These new criticisms include the biased and incomplete collection of data, the extent to which the SPE drew on a prison experiment devised and conducted by students in one of Zimbardo’s classes 3 months earlier, the fact that the guards received precise instructions regarding the treatment of the prisoners, the fact that the guards were not told they were subjects, and the fact that participants were almost never completely immersed by the situation. Possible explanations of the inaccurate textbook portrayal and general misperception of the SPE’s scientific validity over the past 5 decades, in spite of its flaws and shortcomings, are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)

The Assignment

Chapter 10 of our textbook discusses one of the most famous psychological experiments of all time, conducted by Dr. Philip Zimbardo and his colleagues at Stanford University. To read more of the details of this experiment, visit http://www.prisonexp.org. After reading about the experiment and exploring the website, answer the following:

1. Was it ethical to do the prison study in the way that Zimbardo conducted it?  Why or why not?  Explain your position substantively.

 In responding to the above, keep in mind that morals and ethics aren’t the same thing.  Morals are right vs. wrong behavior internal compasses that guide personal life decisions and are grounded in family beliefs, faith traditions, etc.  Ethics are standards of behavior established by a professional organization, such as the American Psychological Association.  You may have very strong feelings about whether the Zimbardo study was moral, but here we are discussing ethics.

2. How do the social psychology concepts of conformity and the power of the social situation that we are studying this week relate to what happened during the brief period of time that the prison study ran.  Where in the description of how the study unfolded did we see evidence of these concepts?

Ground your answer to the questions in #2 in our assigned readings for this week and think social psychology.  For example, the guards were given power over the prisoners and having power  may affect others’ obedience to one’s rules, but one can affect obedience one-on-one as we see in the Milgram study.  What we mean when we say “the power of the social situation” is the impact that being with others in a group setting, whether public or private, has on people’s behavior, such as the degree to which they conform to perceived norms).