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Compare And Contrast Zimbardo And The Stanford Prison Experiment

Decent Essays

1. Drs. Milgram and Zimbardo both made groundbreaking discoveries in their field and led people forward based on this knowledge. Both studies originally, in thought, started out to be ethical but the way the experimenters went about the treatment of those being tested was unethical due to the mental stresses put on by both experiments. The physical humiliation the participants were put through in the Stanford Prison experiment was uncalled for. It was not right to trade the suffering experienced by participants for knowledge gained because these people are left with physiological damage because of how they were treated. In Milgram’s experiment they all believed they were shocking a man with a heart condition which brought undue stress to the teacher, but they weren’t doing any actual damage to him. In the Stanford Prison experiment the prisoners were belittled and shamed and made to feel like actual prisoners. One prisoner went on hunger strike and refused to eat unless released. The hunger strike and most of the guard’s emotional attacks caused major psychological scars and emotional damage. This is what many people actually experience when they come out of prison. 2. The ethical dilemmas were the same in both experiments they were just presented differently. Both had the person in control experiencing the dilemma and deciding whether to continue or not. In the obedience experiment it was the teachers who were pressed with an ethical dilemma of shocking a man with a

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