Good Example Of Potential Problems With The Guidelines Of Ethics Essay

Psychology

Zimbardo Followed All The Guidelines Of Ethics, Why We Still Consider It Unethical. What Are The Potential Problems Of The Guidelines Of Ethics?
The Stanford Prison Experiment was a simulation study of the imprisonment psychology. In the experiment, healthy college students were transformed into brutal prison guards and unstable prisoners within days through the power of the state and situation in which these individuals found themselves. Dr Zimbardo followed all the ethical guidelines in performing the experiment. However, many people still consider the experiment unethical.
The primal reason why individuals still hold that the experiment was unethical is the fact that the individuals who were captured as prisoners were taken through harsh conditions and humiliations, yet they had done nothing wrong to deserve the treatment. Dr. Zimbardo arranged with the police department to make mock arrests. Individuals consider it unethical because it transformed the individuals arrested into other personalities and was unfair to them as well.

There are various potential problems of the guidelines of ethics that sometimes make experiments or studies deemed as unethical despite the following of proper and outlined ethical guidelines. One of the potential problems is the failure to anticipate harms. Individuals that carry out experiments or studies have to sensitive to the potential effects of their work and have to endeavor to protect or prevent the predictable harmful effects. In the experiment, there was no proper prediction of harm because some of the prisoners experienced emotional breakdown, which also makes individuals deem the study as unethical.
Failure to protect the research participants is another possible problem of ethical guidelines. Individuals set out for experiments have to protect the social, psychological and physical well-being of those they study. However, it was not the case in the experiment, especially the prisoners who suffered humiliation and mistreatment.