Stanford Prison Experiment, Paid Volunteers

Stanford Prison experiment, paid volunteers were assigned to be prisoners or guards for the duration of the study. The issues to be studied included the development of norms within this situation, and the perception of the prison experience from those who are initially within the same group but then arbitrarily assigned different roles.

The results of the study are questionable. From a scientific perspective, the study fails to meet several elements required for legitimacy. As a field experiment, there was no way to implement scientific controls. Phil Zimbardo, the study director, lacked objectivity in that he was not a neutral observer of the events, but participated playing the superintendent of the prison. The conclusions drawn by observers to the study were largely subjective and anecdotal, and the study was used to generalize behavior patterns to larger populations, giving evidence of a lack of tentativeness. The study had problems with determinism, as evidenced by participant's stereotypical behavior patterns. There are reports that one of the worst guard participants mimicked behaviors he had seen in movies. The testing done in the study was on a very small population and it is difficult in the research publication to find the theory upon which the experiment was originally based. Even the data in the publication is vague. It is unclear if the study contains validity, in that it can be applied to current conditions in prisons in the United States.

Ethically, the study is also suspect. Participants were allowed to review a description of the study before volunteering. Volunteers were recruited from an ad placed in the "Stanford Daily." The informed consent was less than one page long and simply stated that the individual's selected to be "prisoners" would suffer a lack of privacy. This is in contrast to the application for human subject study which Zimbardo was made to provide to Stanford before the experiment could be started. The written procedures and the actual procedures used differed significantly in that the "guards" used severe humiliation and degradation techniques. The participation of the principal investigator in the experiment also impacts of impartiality as to the evaluation of data. Some investigators have speculated (Carnahan & McFarland, 2007) that there was some deception involved in the research, not only because of the vague consent, but also because it was believed that some student volunteers had personalities which were associated with abuse. Participants in the study did receive a psychological testing battery but in the study it is reported that scores were not known until the close of the experiment. This may mean that the aggressive behavior seen in the experiment was not due to the effect of the situation on the person, but rather the interaction of the person in the situation. Members of the study staff (minus Dr. Zimbardo, who has made a closet enterprise of his study) have attempted either to distance themselves from the experiment. The chief consultant on the project, Carlo Prescott, recently wrote to the Stanford Daily describing the shame he felt over his participation in the project, describing it as a "theatrical exercise." Other elements of concern in the study include the method of experimentation on human subjects. As we have previously noted, informed consent was inadequate for the degree of abuse and harassment the participants experienced. While the study only had a minimal risk involved, its outcomes were a part of the move toward investigational review board approval for all human subject experiments. The Stanford study appears to have been only minimally compliant in requirement for the assessment of risk-benefit criteria, the development of guidelines for selection of subjects, and of course, the adherence to a clear informed consent.