Example research essay topic: Psychological Effects Of Zimbardo Prison Experiment - 1,349 words

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... r job more easily. The researchers soon began to learn that there were three types of guards. The first type were the tough but fair guards. They were the ones who followed the prison rules. The second type were the good guards.

They did the prisoners little favors and never punished them. The third type of guards were sadistic and enjoyed the power that they had over the prisoners. Prisoners now had no power at all. They showed their frustration in different ways. Some prisoners broke down emotionally, in order to escape the situation. Another prisoner developed a psychosomatic rash over his whole body when he realized that his parole request had been turned down.

The rest of the prisoners coped by becoming good prisoners, doing everything that the prison guards told them to do. Towards the end of the study, prisoners disintegrated, both as a group and individuals. Group unity no longer existed. Instead, it was just a bunch of isolated teens hanging on. The guards had won total control of the prison, and they commanded the blind obedience of each prisoner. The prison had become internalized that prisoners believed that they could not escape.

A particular prisoner # 416 went the extent of going on a hunger strike. After many unsuccessful attempts the guards threw him into solitary confinement. He was kept here for three hours. In the fifth night, Zimbardo realized that the experiment had to be ended. He had created an overwhelmingly powerful situation. Prisoners were withdrawing and behaving in pathological ways.

Guards had now become so sadistic. The study was ended prematurely due to the researchers learning through videotapes that the guards were abusing the prisoners more pornographically. The study was also ended by a PhD, Christina Maslach. After seeing the prisoners being marched on toilet runs, bags over their heads and legs chained together.

By this time everyone had realized that the study should be ended. Therefore after six days, the two week planned prison simulation was called off. Discussion of the ethics of Zimbardo study Zimbardo still has mixed emotions about the ethics of his experiment. His experiment has been criticized by some social scientists for its treatment of human research subjects. When Zimbardo was asked about the ethics of his experiment, he said that the ethical point is legitimate insofar as who are you, as an experimenter, to give a person that kind of information about oneself. But my feeling is that that's the most valuable kind of information that you can have and that certainly a society needs it. " He told Stanford Report that he believes the pendulum now has swung too far toward protecting research subjects at the expense of new knowledge that could help society. "Our study went though the human subjects committee then because they didn't know in advance, nor did we, that anything would happen.

Now [review committees] assume everybody is so fragile, that if you propose to tell a research subject he failed a test, it will damage his self-esteem forever. So most research now is paper and pencil tests. We ask people things like 'Imagine you were a guard, how would you behave?' He told the Toronto symposium audience last summer that the prison experiment was both ethical and unethical. It was ethical, he said, because "it followed the guidelines of the Stanford human subjects ethics committee that approved it.

There was no deception; all subjects were told in advance that if prisoners, many of their usual rights would be suspended and they would have only minimally adequate diet and health care during the study, " which was planned to last two weeks. It was also ethical for him to continue, he said, in that more than 50 people came to look at the study in progress and did not register any objections before Maslach registered hers. Among those who did not intervene were parents and friends of the students who came to see them on the prison's visiting nights, a Catholic priest, a public defender, and "professional psychologists, graduate students and staff of the psychology department who watched on-line videos of part of the study unfold or took part in parole board hearings or spoke to [the study subjects] and looked at them. " But it was unethical, he said, "because people suffered and others were allowed to inflict pain and humiliation on their fellows over an extended period of time. "And yes, although we ended the study a week earlier than planned, we did not end it soon enough. " The carrying out of this experiment broke the ethical guidelines outlined by the BPS. The main guidelines broken were the following: Deception, Consent, Withdrawal from the experiment and Protection of participants. After having considered both sides of the argument, I feel that the psychologists involved in the experiment should not be barred from practising as psychologists. They provided an interesting insight into what can happen to humans when faced up against a situation where they end up acting inhumane.

Discussion on the implications for Prisons today The experiment has not had many implications into real prisons in this day in age. In fact, prisons have been radically transformed in the United States in the last 25 years to make them less humane, Haney told the Toronto symposium audience. Voters have increasingly voted for politicians who take a tough public stance in favour of prisons as places for punishment, rather than for reforming social deviants. Long, determinate sentences are part of the new trend in policy, he said, as are an increasing number of prisons, like California's Pelican Bay, that put prisoners in long-term isolation. "Psychology and other social science disciplines have been moved out of any kind of meaningful participation in debates over criminal justice policy, " he said, urging the academics in his audience to "figure out ways in which we can re-involve ourselves in this debate. " In Zimbardo's view, prisons are "failed social-political experiments" that continue to bring out the worst in relations between people "because the public is indifferent to what takes place in secret there, and politicians use them, fill them up as much as they can, to demonstrate only that they are tough on crime. They are as bad for the guards as the prisoners in terms of their destructive impact on self-esteem, sense of justice and human compassion. " Haney listed a number of lessons from the study that he said are largely ignored in American prisons as well as in other institutions of power today. The study demonstrated, for example, that "good people are not enough" to prevent abusive excess, he said. "Individual differences matter very little in the face of an extreme situation.

Institutional settings develop a life of their own independent of the wishes and intentions and purposes of those who run them. " Advantages and limitations of different sources of information In order to plan this into a successful project, I used various different sources of information. The first source of information I used were Internet sites, where I found some were more helpful and useful than others. The following screenshot shows how I found sites relating to the project I used other sources of information too, such as the psychology intranet site, which had a useful section on Social Psychology, Ethics. This also proved to be useful, as did many textbooks that I also referred to for information. These were the current textbook, which we are using for our course, Introducing Psychological Research by Banyard and Grayson. I also used other textbooks but they were not as useful as the one I am using for my course currently.

References Author URL or details of source Evaluation Banyard and Grayson Introducing Psychological Research A good textbook. Useful points Nicky Hayes Foundations of Psychology A good textbook but not detailed enough Michael Eysenck Psychology- Students Handbook Ok textbook. Could have included pictures web Excellent site. Coloured pictures and detailed explanation of the experiment web Brief explanation of experiment, not as good as the above web Good website for ethics question

Research essay sample on Psychological Effects Of Zimbardo Prison Experiment