Evals of conformity to social roles

• Strength: Control

  • For example, Zimbardo controlled for emotional stability because all participants were rated as emotionally stable before the experiment and randomly assigned to either the prisoner or guard group.
  • This helped to rule out individual differences as an explanation of group differences. Thus, any differences in behaviour are due to social roles, not individual differences such as emotional instability.
  • This increases the validity of the study as it increases our confidence in the cause and effect relationship between social roles and behaviour
• Weakness: Population Validity

  • Zimbardo's study used only male participants from the USA.
  • This means his sample was gender biased and unrepresentative of the general population as it consisted of only males which mean it cannot be applied to females. Additionally, the study was only included people from America so it wasn't representative of other collectivistic cultures
  • Therefore, Zimbardo's study lacks population validity and we cannot apply his findings of conformity to social roles to everyone, reducing the validity of his findings
• Weakness: Ethical issues

  • Zimbardo's dual role of being the researcher and the supervisor interfered with the psychological protection of some of the volunteers, one prisoner was released after 36 hours as he had signs of psychological disturbances.
  • Therefore, Zimbardo failed to ensure the protection of his participants because he was invested in his role as experiment. Thus, he didn't uphold ethical guidelines resulting in significant psychological harm to some participants.
  • Therefore, decreases the credibility of Zimbardo's study.
• Weakness: Exaggerated situational influence

  • Zimbardo later noted that only about a third of the guards behaved in a brutal manner towards prisoners. The remaining guards helped the prisoners or were fair to prisoners.
  • The situation may have a less significant effect than what Zimbardo suggested because not all the guards were affected by the situational influences. This suggests that situational pressures to conform are moderated by personality factors.
  • Therefore, reducing the validity of Zimbardo's belief that situational factors are a strong factor in conformity to social roles.