by Ulla Sarja

Created on: August 07, 2008

How we see a human being is the main thing when deciding how we act in different situations. If you see a human being as a fundamentally egoistic and evil, is it going to influence your attitudes and decisions? Human beings however use to have empathy and that is why we can understand when another person is suffering.
But is there a common principle to tell what is right and what is wrong?

How long can you go when studying human being in research? Where is the limit or is there any limit?
In this essay I am going to discuss some studies done in psychological research and the ethical aspect of these studies. I a first going to present Stanford Prison Experiment and Miltons experiment and then discuss these from the ethical point of wiew.

Stanford Prison Experiment
Stanford Prison Experiment was as study led by Philip Zimbardo at Stanford University 1971.
Tventy four students participated playing roles of guards and prisoners. The students playing prisoners were paid 15 dollars a day as incentive for participating the study.
The participants were carefully chosen after tests and interviews. Just the most stabile persons with no involvment to anti-social behavior were chosen. There were 24 participants and it was randomly decided who was going to play a role as a prisoner or a guard.
The amazing thing was that both the prisoners and the guards adapted their roles very soon and the whole situation became dangerous because most of the guards soon exhibited sadistic tendencies and the prisoners began to get mental problems. The experiment was terminated by Zimbardo after six days after realizing the experiment was unethical (Zimbardo, 2008).

The Milgram Experiment
The Milgram experiment was a series of socialpsychology experiments led by Stanley Milgram 1960s. In this study one of the participants was a teacher and the other one was a learner. In fact the learner was trained to act for the role but this was something the teacher didnt know. Initially the teacher was given a 45 volt electric shock to demonstrate how the learner is going to feel. The teacher was told by the experiment leader to give an electric shock every time the learner gave a wrong answer to a question asked by the teacher. The voltal level was increased after every wrong answer. In reality there were no chocks.
When the learner began to show pain reactions some participant of the study began to ask if they really should continue to give electric shocks. They were told to continue and they were assured they

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