Below are the Week 7 Forum Topic instructions. General posting requirements can be viewed by
clicking the Week 7 Forum “View Full Description” link on the Forums
screen under the heading “Forum General Posting Requirements”.
Before responding to the questions below, click on the
“Lessons” link on the left and complete the Week 7: Topic 1 – Social
Psychology lesson. After completing the lesson, return to the forum here, click
the “Post New Conversation” link at the top Week 7 Forum screen, and respond to
the following questions.
One of the most famous psychological experiments of all
time, was conducted by Dr. Philip Zimbardo and his colleagues at Stanford
University. To read more of the details of this experiment, visit
http://www.prisonexp.org. Take some time to watch the video on the Zimbardo
Prison Experiment by clicking here. After reading about the experiment,
exploring the website and watching the video, answer the following:
1. Was it ethical to do the prison study in the way that
Zimbardo conducted it? Why or why
not? Explain your position
substantively.
2. What social psychological constructs did the study
reveal? Would the same information have been learned if the study had been
conducted differently? If yes, how might you adapt the study to address ethical
concerns and still obtain results relevant to our understanding of behavior in
social settings?
3. How do the social psychology concepts of conformity and
the power of the social situation that we are studying this week relate to what
happened during the brief period of time that the prison study ran. Where in the description of how the study
unfolded did we see evidence of these concepts?
