Stanford Prison Experiment

For my Sociology class, I've been asked to answer the following questions after viewing a couple of short videos provided by my professor:

"Do you think the Stanford Prison Experiment was ethical? Why or why not?"

First of all, though one of the links to the videos did not work, I got the gist of what what happening and thought I'd write a blog post about how the experiment was intially ethical because the scientists had no idea how out-of-hand things were going to get. Then, a classmate, Valerie, posted a link to a thorough and in-depth slideshow presentation about the experiment (www.Prisonexp.org/ ). I was blown away.

At first, I didn't think that the experiment was unethical at all, because I didn't understand how Dr. Zimbardo was involved in the experiment when it was underway, if at all. After watching the first video (that worked), with the clips from the experiment and the interviews with Zimbardo, I had the impression that he was just an observer - that the guards did everything on their own and he was just as amazed as everyone else as to what happened.

After I  went through the prisonexp.org document (thanks again, Valerie!), I was shocked to learn that Zimbardo was extremely involved in the experiment as a participant. He basically told the first prisoner that broke down that he couldn't leave. And he tried to change the course of the entire situation by attempting to foil a prison escape, for goodness sake! He admits that he became wrapped up in the whole thing and, without knowing it, changed from being a simple psychologist conducting an experiment to a "prison superintendent" intent on keeping the "prisoners" in their places.

Of course this experiment was unethical. To the nth degree. There has to be a better way.... How about ethnography? A researcher could pose as a prisoner and  experience what it's like to be a prisoner first-hand. Or a survey? A researcher could ask prisoners questions about how they are treated or how things work within the prison. Or, finally, what about life histories? Why not have prisoners write up their autobiographies and compile the information that way? Experiments should not be conducted on humans if there will be physical or psychological side-effects.

The problem is, Dr. Zimbardo has gotten a lot of fame, attention, and notoriety for conducting this experiment. And we've actually been able to learn a lot about why people do bad things and whether evil is inherent or not. Zimbardo has written about these topics for years. But was that what Zimbardo set out to learn about? I think he set out to learn about prison life. And he learned that environment has an effect on how people behave (which has thus shed light on what happened at Abu Ghraib), but at what cost?