Stanford prison experiment The study has received many ethical criticisms, including lack of fully informed consent by participants as Zimbardo himself did not know what would happen in the experiment (it was unpredictable). Also, the prisoners did not consent to being 'arrested' at home. BOBO DOLL EXPERIMENT Albert Bandura OC ( born December 4, 1925) is a psychologist who is the David Starr Jordan Professor Emeritus of Social Science in Psychology at Stanford University. For almost six decades, he has been responsible for contributions to the field of education and to many fields of psychology, including social cognitive theory, therapy and personality psychology, and was also influential in the transition between behaviorism and cognitive psychology. He is known as the originator of social learning theory and the theoretical construct of self -efficacy, and is also responsible for the influential 1961 Bobo doll experiment. The Bobo doll experiment was the collective name of experiments conducted by Albert Bandura in 1961 and 1963 when he studied children's behavior after watching an adult model act aggressively towards a Bobo doll. There are different variations of the experiment. The most notable experiment measured the children's behavior after seeing the model get rewarded, get punished, or experience no consequence for beating up the bobo doll. The experiments are empirical approaches to test Bandura's social learning theory. The social learning theory claims that people learn through observing, imita ting, and modeling. It shows that people not only learn by being rewarded or punished (behaviorism), but they can also learn from watching somebody else being rewarded or punished (observational learning). These experiments are important because they sparked many more studies on the effects of observational learning. The studies not only give us new data, but this data has practical implications, e.g. how children can be influenced from watching violent media. Ethical issues of Bobo doll experiment As it has been mentioned before, one of the outcomes of the Bobo doll experiment was the children's reproduction of aggressive behavior. As a result, it presents an ethical issue of permissibility of involving children in such study. The issue is exacerbated by the young age of participants (3-6 years). Is Bandura Bobo doll experiment ethical or unethical? Some critics argue that the study itself was unethical. By manipulating the children into behaving aggressively, they argue, the experimenters were essentially teaching the children to be aggressive. The study might suffer from selection bias. LITTLE ALBERT EXPERIMENT Is Bandura Bobo doll experiment ethical or unethical? Some critics argue that the study itself was unethical. By manipulating the children into behaving aggressively, they argue, the experimenters were essentially teaching the children to be aggressive. The study might suffer from selection bias. How could the Little Albert experiment be ethical? according to today's ethical standards, the nature of the study itself would be considered unethical, as it did not protect Albert from psychological harm, because its purpose was to induce a state of fear. Many sources claim that Little Albert was used as a subject in the study without the permission of his mother. ASCH CONFORMITY STUDY What was the ethical issue in the Asch study on conformity? Finally, Asch's research is ethically questionable. He broke several ethical guidelines, including: deception and protection from harm. Asch deliberately deceived his participants, saying that they were taking part in a vision test and not an experiment on conformity. MILGRAM EXPERIMENT The Milgram study had several ethical issues. ... The second ethical issue was the right to withdraw consent. Participants were not allowed to discontinue their participation at any time. Even after asking to stop the study, they were urged to continue by the experimenter. What were the ethical issues in Milgram's study? The ethical issues involved with the Milgram experiment are as follows: deception, protection of participants involved, and the right to withdrawal. The experiment was deemed unethical, because the participants were led to believe that they were administering shocks to real people. LEARNED HELPLESNESS EXPERIMENT The learned helplessness experiment of 1965 conducted by psychologist Martin Seligman is considered unethical. This experiment was unethical because it was cruel and afflicted painful testing on animals.
