In the Stanford Prison Experiment, what prevented the good guards from countermanding the orders from bad ones

Question

I am studiying Correctional Ethics. I have read the study but I don't see why the guards did not report each other. And I don't see why this information would encourage or reward whistle blowing by actual correctional officers

Answer 1

Essentially, the guards were told they could run the prison in any way they wished. By doing so, the experiment left the guards with no chain of command above themselves - leaving no one to report guards to and no one to blow a whistle to.

The entire point of the experiment was to see how people would handle having essentially unlimited authority with no external checks. In a real prison, there is a warden, who is in turn held accountable to someone outside the prison, and there are also external monitoring agencies.

Answer 2

Some of the experiment's critics argued that participants based their behavior on how they were expected to behave, or modeled it after stereotypes they already had about the behavior of prisoners and guards. In other words, the participants were merely engaging in role-playing.

The guards were hand chosen. None of which were less unethic than the other.

Answer 3

I do not know, but good question, i am going to check out the anwers