Heroism/Zimbardo

• How can Social Psychology be used to explain Heroism ?
• Zimbardo 1971 stanford prison experiment 22 male students volunteered to take part in a study on the effects of social roles on behaviour
• The experiment was investigating whether a situation or people create evil
• There were 2 roles allocated to the college students - a guard or prisoner
• Guards had military uniform and glasses to show power, while prisoners had white smocks to and were called by numbers to dehumanise them
• Heroism - Zimbardo created the Heroic Imagination Project to educate young people about their own psychology to prevent them from committing acts of evil
• Heroism has 4 key elements : 


  1)It is voluntary

  2) It Is done to help people in a community in need

  3) It involves some type of risk - physical, mental or mortal

  4) It is done without the need for compensation of any kind
• Universal tendency - zimbardo suggested that everyone has the potential to be a hero but our universal tendencies prevent us being heroic
• Universal tendency - 1) to react automatically to things that we are not paying attention to - can lead to group behaviour - violence (football violence)
• Universal tendency - 2) To rely on labels and categories to make quick judgements of ourselves and others - can lead to stereotypes being created - prejudice
• Universal tendency - 3) to rely on others to help us interpret what is going on around us rather than try to interpret events ourselves - can lead to conformity - relying on others - being easily influenced
• Universal tendency - 4) to seek acceptance from others to try and avoid rejection - fail to speak out against someone - can lead to social influence, behaviours, which are negative will continue - blindly obeying without knowing the consequences
• Universal tendency - 5) to believe that we cannot change - can lead to a lack of social change