Assignment: Sychological experiments on Prison

Assignment: Prison psychological experiments Study

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Please Answer the Following Questions 300 words or more NO COPY and Past

One of the most  sychological experiments of all time, was 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. Take some time to watch the video on the Zimbardo Prison Experiment by clicking here. After reading about the experiment, exploring the website and watching the video, 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.

2. What social psychological constructs did the study reveal? Would the same information have been learned if the study had been conducted differently? If yes, how might you adapt the study to address ethical concerns and still obtain results relevant to our understanding of behavior in social settings?
3. 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?

The Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) was a social psychology experiment that attempted to investigate the psychological effects of perceived power, focusing on the struggle between prisoners and prison officers. It was conducted at Stanford University on the days of August 14–20, 1971, by a research group led by psychology professor Philip Zimbardo using college students.^[1] In the study, volunteers were randomly assigned to be either “guards” or “prisoners” in a mock prison, with Zimbardo himself serving as the superintendent. Several “prisoners” left mid-experiment, and the whole experiment was abandoned after six days. Early reports on experimental results claimed that students quickly embraced their assigned roles, with some guards enforcing authoritarian measures and ultimately subjecting some prisoners to psychological torture, while many prisoners passively accepted psychological abuse and, by the officers’ request, actively harassed other prisoners who tried to stop it. The experiment has been described in many introductory social psychology textbooks,^[2]although some have chosen to exclude it because its methodology is sometimes questioned.^[3]

The U.S. Office of Naval Research^[4] funded the experiment as an investigation into the causes of difficulties between guards and prisoners in the United States Navy and United States Marine Corps. Certain portions of it were filmed, and excerpts of footage are publicly available.

Some of the experiment’s findings have been called into question, and the experiment has been criticized for unscientific methodology and possible fraud.^[5][6] Critics have noted that Zimbardo instructed the “guards” to exert psychological control over the “prisoners”. Critics also noted that some of the participants behaved in a way that would help the study, so that, as one “guard” later put it, “the researchers would have something to work with,” which is known as demand characteristics. Variants of the experiment have been performed by other researchers, but none of these attempts have replicated the results of the SPE.