Week #2 Blog Entry - Stanford Prison Experiment

Do you think the Stanford Prison Experiment was ethical? Why or why not? (Feel free to also write about any other aspects of the experiment that you find interesting or noteworthy.)

In its assumptions, the experiment was ethical, as the people conducting the experiment expected the subjects to know what their roles were, but to not get far into them.  However, some of the results were not foreseen by the investigators.  The study became unethical by the way it was executed by the researchers.  In my opinion, any study carries risk of developing into a situation that comes out of control.  The researcher’s responsibility is to recognize hazardous situations/behaviors and terminate the experiment immediately.  The problem is, the researcher connected to his work in a personal way, and it isn’t of a researcher’s interest to terminate his own work prematurely, even more so when there was o supervision by independent bodies (IRBs, for example).  A good example of that rule, is that after the prison experiment, new guidelines were approved in order to protect human subject in research, so that no other future study would get out of control as the Prison Experiment did.  Additionally, that experiment created guidelines to performing similar studies with minimal risk to the subjects. 

            The question is:  what was the benefit from that research.  By law, the benefits (direct or indirect) should outweigh the risk in any given human subject research, and in this case, the risk to benefit ration seemed to not have been assessed properly beforehand.  There should have been procedures to continuously monitor the research as is the case now days.  When looking at it from a modern point of view, the study was unethical.  By our standards, there should have been more ways to minimize the physical and psychological distress endured by the subjects.  However, when thinking in a broader point of view, we have to take into consideration that at that time, what we would consider “unethical research” was common, as there were little constrains to what a researcher could do, and researchers weren’t properly educated as to how to protect the subjects’ well being.