Reviewing Zimbardo’s Experiment

“The Stanford Prison Experiment” by Philip G. Zimbardo was written to explain the results of the Stanford prison experiment. Zimbardo while trying to gain support for his conclusions of the experiment, demonstrated many errors in his writing, and in his own experiment. The errors that Zimbardo commits call into question the validity of his argument, and the experiment. The goal explained by Zimbardo was “to understand more about the process by such people called “prisoners” lose their liberty, civil rights, independence, and privacy, while those called “guards” gain social power by accepting the responsibility for controlling and managing the lives of their dependent charges” (Zimbardo 733).

Zimbardo starts his paper with a storybook intro “The quiet of a summer morning” he then goes into the process by which the subjects were taken into the prison (732). This is an odd way to start a scientific paper, even if it was published in the New York Journal. He then switches between scientific, and novelistic language. In one sentence Zimbardo compares real prisons to “machines for playing tricks with the human conception of time” how does relating a prison to a machine validate his point? It seems as if Zimbardo is using his language to draw the reader into his paper so that they will sympathize with him.

While Zimbardo was careful to select his prisoners from anyone who had previously been to jail, he did not select a diverse group of subjects; he states that the group consisted of all Caucasians and one Oriental student, and were all of college age. He does not defend why he chose this uniform group of subjects, and it only makes one wonder how the experiment would have carried out if there was a more diverse grouping of both a...

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...idelines were followed, was it really ethical to allow his subjects to be treated in such a way. His conclusions and writing methods also take away from his purpose, making the reader question his scientific findings.

Works Cited

APA. American Psychological Association, February 23, 2010.

Lurigio, Arthur J. "The Rotten Barrel Spoils the Apples: How Situational Factors Contribute to Detention Officer Abuse Toward Inmates." The Prison Journal. Mar. 2009. Web

Mertens, Donna M. Research and Evaluation in Education and Psychology: Integrating Diversity with Quantitative, Qualitative, and Mixed Methods. Los Angeles: Sage, 2010. Print. Research and Evaluation in Education and Psychology Donna M. Mertens c 2010 Sage

Zimbardo, Philip G. "The Stanford Prison Experiment." Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum. 11th ed. New York: Longman, 2010. 732-43. Print.