Zimbardo AO3

• What were the ethical issues of the Stanford Prison Experiment?

  Participants experienced psychological harm. They were not protected from stress, anxiety, emotional distress and embarrassment.
• Informed consent was not obtained by the participants
• The experiment may lack realism. Some argued that the participants were merely play-acting rather than genuinely conforming to a role. Their performances were based on their stereotypes of how prisoners and guards are supposed to behave. One of the guards claimed he had based his role on a brutal character from a film.
• Selection of participants who were emotionally stable and randomly assigned to roles was a way for researchers to rule out individual personality differences as an explanation. This would increase the internal validity of the study.
• Lacks population validity – The sample only consisted of American male students and so the findings cannot be generalised to other genders and cultures