Questions:
1. Activity from Cozby and Bates text?
2. Stanford Prison Experiment?
3. Review of Journal?
Answers:
1. Activity from Cozby and Bates text
1a) Ethical issues raised by experiment:
According to the Nuremberg Code, the subject of the experiment should give their consent for the experiment voluntarily, and the experiment should be conducted in such a way so that the subject does not suffer any physical or mental agony (Gilbert, 2013). In this experiment, the subject is feeling distressed by the sudden unexpected news of the death of an acquaintance, and this is violating a very important guideline of the Nuremberg Code. However, this violation is justified because the results obtained from this study will prove beneficial for the society at large. This study is not random, and this exact result could not have been obtained by any other way.
1b) The guidelines articulated in APA Ethical Standard 8 dealing with research with human participants
According to the APA Ethical Standard 8.07, psychologists can conduct deceptive experiments when such techniques are justified by the scientific, applied or educational value of the results yielded by such experiments (www.apa.org, 2010). Therefore, this deceptive and distressing study involving human participants is justified because there is no other way of obtaining similar results.
1c) Alternative methods for studying this problem:
To conduct this experiment in a safe way, the participants have to be chosen carefully. Proper background checks on family and medical history should be done to ascertain that they can handle the distress caused by sudden death.
1d) Whether it would be different if the participants had played with an infant and then later been told that the infant had died or not:
The death of an infant can lead to a severe painful feeling, depression and despair.
2. Stanford Prison Experiment
2[a] The Stanford Prison Experiment was done to analyse the psychological reaction of imprisoned inmates and the guards stationed in correctional homes (Zimbardo, 2016). The volunteers were made to suffer in a way similar to that of real jailed criminals. The criminals have committed some crime, and that is why they are punished in a way that the law finds effective, but the volunteers for this experiment did not commit any such crime, they only wanted to earn some extra money. These innocent volunteers were not as mentally hardened as convicted criminals, and that is why it was unethical to do this study. The way innocent people would react to such extreme situations could not be in any way similar to what actual criminals would do. There was not much point in making innocent participants suffer to conduct this research.
2[b] Milgram’s obedience experiment gave some concrete evidence for the fact that ordinary people can forget morality under orders of higher authority (Gibson, 2013). This finding can only be beneficial for the greater good. So the suffering of a few volunteers can be justified if we look at the broader picture. This particular study was important to understand the psychology of ordinary people because this can help in properly training and educating armies before wars.
On the other hand, the Stanford prison experiment could not have been accurate because of the reason explained above so the suffering and mental trauma that the volunteers had to face were in no way justified (Griggs & Whitehead, 2014). This study should not have been done with normal people at all.
2[c] An experiment similar to SPE could have been done in a real correctional home, with real criminals and real authority figures (Haslam & Reicher, 2012). The government’s co-operation could have been sought for this sort of a study as that would have given a real idea about the psychological impact of correctional homes on prisoners.
2[d] The SPE leads to the conclusion that the practices prevalent in correctional homes need to be modified (Cherry, 2012). Criminals are people who have lost sight of the right path, and correctional homes should be places where they can find the right path. These criminals should be psychologically mentored to find better futures. Instead, these criminals are being shown that the world is harsh, and they need to become even more brutal to counter all the negativity around them. Methods and tactics to modify the thinking pattern of these criminals should be studied.
3. Review of Journal
Computer games, music, television and the lack of proper role models can be cited as major factors for an increase in the tendency towards violent behaviour. In the 60s, there was a lot of discussion about the factors contributing to a child’s development, like genes, environmental factors and social learning (Bornstein & Bradley, 2014).
Bandura created the Bobo doll experiment to prove that the children emulate the behaviour of adult models. He tried to use aggressive and non-aggressive actors whom children tend to emulate. Children were used as subjects for this study as they are less socially conditioned.
The results of this experiment show that children subjected to aggressive role models had greater tendencies to exhibit violent behaviour. Also, boys were found to be thrice more likely aggressive than girls.
Even verbal aggression led children to demonstrate verbal aggression and the levels of such aggression is the same in both boys and girls. These results are important because in schools bullying by boys tend to be of the physical nature while girls try to dominate verbally.
However, male children subjected to non-aggressive male models showed less aggression towards the Bobo doll. But, when male children when subjected to female non-aggressive models they showed more aggressive behaviour than the control group.
The results shown by this experiment are slightly inconclusive as the results fail to prove fully all the predictions. It could not be proved with certainty that children learn socially, but it can be said that children seeing their adults behaving in a violent manner will think that violence is normal (Rubin & Pepler, 2013). They may themselves start being violent in similar situations.
References
Bornstein, M. H., & Bradley, R. H. (Eds.). (2014). Socioeconomic status, parenting, and child development. Routledge.
Cherry, K. (2012). The Stanford Prison Experiment.
Gibson, S. (2013). Milgram’s obedience experiments A rhetorical analysis.British Journal of Social Psychology, 52(2), 290-309.
Gilbert, M. W. (2013). Never Again?: Nazi Medical Experimentation, the Nuremberg Code, and the Foundations of Modern Medical Research Ethics(Doctoral dissertation, Amherst College).
Griggs, R. A., & Whitehead, G. I. (2014). Coverage of the Stanford Prison Experiments in introductory social psychology textbooks. The Teaching of Psychology, 41(4), 318-324.
Haslam, S. A., & Reicher, S. (2012). Revisiting Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment. Social psychology: Revisiting the classic studies, 126.
http://www.apa.org, (2010). Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct. [online] Available at: http://www.apa.org/ethics/code/ [Accessed 15 Jan. 2016].
Rubin, K. H., & Pepler, D. J. (Eds.). (2013). The development and treatment of childhood aggression. Psychology Press.
Zimbardo, P. (2016). 2. Setting Up. [online] Stanford Prison Experiment. Available at: http://www.prisonexp.org/setting-up [Accessed 15 Jan. 2016].
