How Did Zimbardo Contribute To The Stanford Prison Experiment

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Synthesis The original goal of Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment was to “investigate how readily people would conform to the roles of guard and prisoner in a role-playing exercise that simulated prison life” (Source A). The 1973 experiment remains among the most notorious to date; featured in films and textbooks worldwide. Despite the acclaim, the ordeal does not constitute as a true experiment. What Zimbardo conducted was no more than a simulation with results achieved by unethical means. First of all, the data was skewed from the start of the operation. Zimbardo was guilty of selection bias. As the newspaper advertisement provided in Source A suggests, Zimbardo sought male students to participate in his “psychological study of prison life”. This advertisement contributed to the experiment’s invalidity by disclosing …show more content…

(Selection Bias) (Source A) He included the topic of the experiment in the ad and skewed the data. Involvement in the experiment
Because of his active participation in the experiment, the participants behaved as they thought he wanted them to. He even told guards how to treat the prisoners so his argument that the environment and the power given to guards caused the behavior is invalid.
He literally told the guards to find ways to torture the prisoners without physically touching them
According to Dunning, “many designers of such experiments would summarily throw out such a study based on this alone”.
The Hawthorne Effect is a phenomenon in which subjects alter their normal behavior to give results that they think would please the experimenter. Not only did Zimbardo actively participate in the experiment, he also told the guards exactly how to behave. The guards were only behaving as they did not because of their own personalities, but because they were told to.
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