• Question: what are your views on the ethical issues surrounding Zimbardo's prison experiment? Was it worth it for the data found?

    Asked by Maddie19 to Jack, Gem, Jermaine, Michelle, Steve on 12 Jun 2017.
    • Photo: Jermaine Ravalier

      Jermaine Ravalier answered on 12 Jun 2017:

      I think it was – the ‘prisoners’ didn’t have any long-lasting effects and we got to learn a lot about human behaviour, so worth it in my opinion…

    • Photo: Michelle Jamieson

      Michelle Jamieson answered on 12 Jun 2017:

      Zimbardo’s experiment is a prime example of how unethical, and dangerous psychology experiments could be before codes of practice were introduced. As expected the ‘prisoners’ suffered a great deal mentally, and the experiment was cut short. Although the experiment was ‘normal’ for the time, I believe Zimbardo’s prison experiment was unethical due to its poor informative material, lack of protection to the participants (the prisoners/guards), poor debriefing of the prisoners and poor training, and also Zimbardo (the lead experimenter) being a large influencing role in the experiment. Results are not worth the mental suffering of others in order to get them. The Zimbardo experiment would not be approved nowadays.

    • Photo: Steven Brown

      Steven Brown answered on 13 Jun 2017:

      It would not happen in 2017.

      I believe some of the findings have been flagged up as suspicious, with important information that you should really always make sure everyone knows about being kept hidden. This is very unethical. And some recent work aiming to do the same sort of thing came to completely different conclusions.

      In psychology, we only really say that a particular finding is ‘true’ after it has been repeatedly demonstrated from different studies. If I found something out, then that’s interesting. But it could have been a one-off, a happy accident. So I sort of need lots of other researchers to do the same thing and reach the same conclusions and if so, we can have more confidence that the findings are in fact true. But given the Zimbardo research was so unique, and not really carried out again – aside from the one I mentioned above – it is hard to know if the findings check out.

      I am not a big fan of it.

    • Photo: Jack barton

      Jack barton answered on 13 Jun 2017:

      The study was an interesting case study of unethical research and how not to run a study as a researcher. Zimbardo’s role meant that he did not pay enough attention to the suffering of participants, specifically the prisoners (e.g. hunger strikes, humiliation and violence). Although it was stopped early, it wasn’t until his girlfriend, Christina Maslach, intervened and brought Zimbardo’s attention to all of this that he felt it was time to finish the experiment.

      Also, the BBC prison study which employed a similar design to Zimbardo’s found completely the opposite findings (you can find videos of most of it for free on YouTube). The findings about conformity to social roles are interesting but they do not stand up to replication in quite the same way that Zimbardo interpreted them. It is also important to note that very few guards actually fully conformed to their role in authority – many felt uncomfortable about the power given to them by chance. This was similar to what was found in the BBC prison study.

      The study was far from useless but not for what it tells us about conformity to social roles per se.

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