Unethical Research: The Stanford Prison Experiment

Resources

scoring guide icon Discussion and Participation Scoring Guide.

Read the Discussion Participation Scoring Guide (linked in the Resources) prior to completing your initial discussion post. Unless otherwise indicated, these grading criteria apply to all of your discussion activities throughout the course. Before you complete each post, refer to the Discussion Participation Scoring Guide to ensure that you have met all discussion evaluation criteria.

Complete your initial discussion post based on the following prompts. Then respond to the initial posts written by your peers, according to the response guidelines in this discussion.

After reading about the Stanford prison experiment in Chapter 2 of your Basics of Research Methods for Criminal Justice and Criminology text, and viewing the Quiet Rage: The Stanford Prison Experiment video, address the following:

•Was it ethical to conduct this study? Explain your answer.

•Was it right to trade the suffering experienced by participants for the knowledge gained by the research? Explain.

•Describe what you think was the worst part of this study.

•Could the study have been conducted without causing harm? If so, describe how. If not, explain why not.