Question

The Stanford Prison Experiment was aborted because:

Answer 1

Answer:

The correct answer is D. The Stanford Prison Experiment was aborted because the principal researcher, Dr. Zimbardo, was able to determine that participants were being harmed because he was objectively monitoring the procedures.

Explanation:

The Stanford experiment is a study of social psychology conducted by Philip Zimbardo in 1971 on the effects of the prison situation, having had great social and media coverage.

It was carried out with students who played the roles of guards and prisoners. It aimed to study the behavior of ordinary people in such a context and had the effect of showing that it was the situation rather than the authoritarian personality of the participants that was at the origin of behaviors sometimes contrary to the values ​​professed by the participants before the start of the study. The 18 subjects had been selected for their stability and maturity, and their respective roles as guards or prisoners had been conspicuously assigned to them randomly. In other words, each participant knew that the assignment of roles was only the result of chance and not of any psychological or physical predispositions. A guard could very well have been a prisoner, and vice versa.

Prisoners and guards quickly adapted to the roles they had been assigned, going beyond what had been planned and leading to truly dangerous and psychologically damaging situations. One of the conclusions of the study is that a third of the guards displayed sadistic behavior, while many prisoners were emotionally traumatized, two of them even having to be withdrawn from the experiment before the end.

Despite the worsening of the conditions and the loss of control of the experiment, only one person (Christina Maslach) among the fifty direct and indirect participants in the study opposed the continuation of the experiment for moral reasons. It was thanks to this that Professor Zimbardo became aware of the situation and stopped the experiment after six days, instead of the two weeks initially planned.