... aim of Zimbardo's experiment was to see how well the participants would conform to their given roles over a period of two weeks. However, Zimbardo's experiment was cut short in half that amount of time when the "guards" became overly abusive and the "prisoners" got too distraught to reasonably continue the experiment. While this experiment left many people in need of counselling for many years it did little more than prove the old saying that power corrupts and Zimbardo was fortunate that his experiment was carried out at a time when there were no set ethical guidelines for physiatrists to abide by. While Zimbardo's experiment is a very extreme example of a fairly unethical experiment, there have been many other experiments in which nobody has come to any real harm. Asch, who recruited a number of participants to judge the length of lines, tried such an experiment on conformity. Within ...

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