Zimbardo - conforming to Social Roles

• Who conducted the prison study?

  Zimbardo
• What was zimbardo’s aim of the study?


  to see whether people would conform to social roles that were given to them
• An evaluation of Zimbardo's prison experiment


  weakness

  -> study lacks internal validity because Zimbardo put himself in the study when he is only mean to be observing the experiment

  -> also he exaggerated the roles and power of the guards as only 1/3 of the guards were brutal and another third were fair with the rules and the last 1/3 were sympathetic towards the prisoners

  • this minimises the influence of dispositional factors
• another evaluation of SPE


  weakness: replicated research -> research based on Zimbardo saying that 'participants conformed naturally'.

  • Reicher and Haslam 2006
  • used 15 men who were randomly assigned a role of prisoner or guard
  • the participants were relucent to conform to their roles and ended in a power shift, so that the prisoners were in charge

  this clearly contradicts zimbardo's research
• another evaluation of zimbardo's prison experiment

  weakness: ethical issues->

  • deception - not a real prison although people thought it was (prisoners)
  • privacy was not upheld - as prisoners were 'arrested' at home with family present
  • lack of right to withdraw
  • psychologically harmed participants
• evaluation of SPE


  strength: control over individual differences -> participants were randomly assigned to their roles, and were emotionally stable coming into the observation. behaviour would have been determined by chance if they conformed to their roles or not

  increased internal validity
• evaluation of SPE


  weakness: lack of realism- > Banuazizi & Movahedi 1975 said that the participants were play acting as they knew it was a mock prison. had an artificial task as they were stereotyping prisoner & guard behaviour

  • findings show reduced accuracy of study
• counterpoint of lack of realism evaluation

  strength/counterpoint -> participants behaved realistically as the prisoners thought/believed they were in a real prison 90% of conversations were about prison life

  • increases internal validity, suggested by replicating the social role of a prisoner