The Zimbardo Prison Experiment
Ryan Iden
IPFW

The Zimbardo Prison Experiment

Professor Philip Zimbardo was a professor at Stanford University and he wanted to do an experiment on how students “inmates” would react to the power of the guards and how they would respond to being a prisoner for 14 days. This prison was a mock prison in the basement of Stanford University and the experiment only lasted 6 days because the voluntary students started to get stressed out and feeling demoralized by the guards. The guards were starting to act aggressive and abusive to the students. The guards would strip them of their clothes, yell at them and make them submit to their authority. The guards and the inmates were actually starting to act as though they were in prison.
This experiment to me is not unethical. The students volunteered and they also knew that this was just an experiment. I do agree that some of the guard’s motives were a little too extreme for the experiment, but al-in all the students knew what they were getting into. Some people would say that this is to extreme putting these students through all the stress and torment just for an experiment. If this was real I would say yes that this is unethical.
The issue that was the most problematic to was the fact that the professor actually wanted to do this experiment and did not stop the guards from treating the students the way they did. When the prisoners started to get stressed out they should have stopped the experiment right then. The whole thing was a bit too extreme for an experiment. In 2003 in Abu Ghraib, Iraq, Iraqie detainee were being roughed up and being tortured by the American military. No one should treat another human being like this; I don’t care where you are in the world. This was definitely unethical. The military guards would demoralize the detainees by stripping them, beating them, and