From Darkness to Light: The Stanford Prison Experiment and the Ethical Evolution of Modern Clinical Trials
Once upon a time, in the early 1970s, a young psychologist named Philip Zimbardo embarked on a groundbreaking experiment at Standford university that would forever change the way we look at human behavior and research ethics. It began with an ad in the classifieds. Male college students needed for psychological study of prison life. $15 per day for 1–2 weeks. More than 70 people volunteered to take part in the study, to be conducted in a fake prison housed inside Jordan Hall, on Stanford’s Main Quad. The leader of the study was 38-year-old psychology professor Philip Zimbardo. He and his fellow researchers selected 24 applicants and randomly assigned each to be a prisoner or a guard. Zimbardo encouraged the guards to think of themselves as actual guards in a real prison. He made clear that prisoners could not be physically harmed, but said the guards should try to create an atmosphere in which the prisoners felt “powerless.” The study began on Sunday, August 17, 1971. But no one knew