Stanford Prison Experiment

• Aim: To determine If the participants acted more on their individual personalities or by the role they were placed in (prisoner or guard); How quickly they would adapt to the roles (power or lack of power); To what extent they would take their power especially in terms of abuse as a guard.

• Method: Controlled method with participants placed into a mock prison at a basement on Stanford university with uniforms and specific roles.

• Results: The study had to be terminated because the participants went to the extreme of their roles, the guards became sadistic and abusive and the prisoners obedient and dehumanized.

• Conclusion: Human behavior can be quickly and significantly influenced by situational influence and can go to the extreme. Guards after only 6 days were cruel and dehumanizing and prisoners experienced strong emotional distress. so much so that the experiment was canceled.

• Ethics: The experiment was improperly conducted in terms of its limitations and stopping points. The participants experienced real emotional stress and while they were explained the over all concept of guard and prisoner they were not told of the possible deep emotions that may be experienced. Perhaps because it was unknown.

Milgram Expirement

• Aim: The experiment studied obedience to authority, exploring whether individuals would obey instructions to harm another person because an authority figure told them to.

• Method: Participants were instructed by an authority figure to administer increasingly intense electric shocks to a “learner” (an actor), who feigned pain and distress.

• Results: A significant percentage of participants obeyed the authority figure and administered the maximum level of shocks, despite their apparent discomfort.

• Conclusion: The study demonstrated that ordinary people are surprisingly likely to obey authority figures, even when those orders conflict with their own moral beliefs.

• Ethics:  Milgram’s use of deception raised serious questions about the ethics of psychological research. Participants believed they were causing real harm, leading to potential emotional distress.

·   Analyzing Psychological Experiments

o   Describe the major takeaways from the Milgram experiments.

The major take aways are that most people will inflict pain on another person if told to do so by an authority figure even if they are uncomfortable doing so. Additionally, these people will go home and lose no sleep over it because they were just following direction.

o   Describe the major takeaways from the Stanford prison experiment.

There were 2 things that really stood out to me in this experiment, the first was how quickly the student-guards became drunk with power and forced prisoners to sleep on floors and such when they could have just as easily been the prisoner on that coin flip. The second was that some of the prisoners remained strong, band together and presented demands and 1 even went on a hunger strike as a plea for better conditions (basically saying I’d rather die than keep putting up with this treatment.

o   Describe the ethical implications of these experiments.

When I look deep and I could be wrong or thinking to much into this but the implication is that some individuals given a certain amount of power or no responsibility have little to no ethics. Ethics are a code, not a law, so while we as a society, would like to think that individuals hang onto a good code of ethics in all facets of life. I think these experiments show that given the choice a person’s animalistic behavior may become more pronounced.