A03

• What are the strengths of Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison experiment?

  1. High internal validity
  2. Real-life applications
• What are the limitations of Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison experiment?

  1. Demand characteristics
  2. Ethical issues
• Strength = high internal validity

  • Zimbardo and his researchers had an element of control over variables
  • Emotionally stable individuals were chosen and randomly assigned to the role of either guard or prisoner to try and rule out individual personality differences as an explanation for findings
  • If guards and prisoners behaved very differently, but were in those roles only by chance, then their behaviour must have been due to the pressures of the situation, not their character or personality traits
• Strength = real-life applications

  • Findings can be used to explain events in the Abu Ghraib, a military prison in Iraq, notorious for the torture and abuse of Iraqi prisoners by US soldiers in 2003 and 2004
  • Zimbardo believed that the guards who committed the abuses were the victims of situational factors that made abuse more likely
  • Awareness of these factors and awareness that they can lead to abuse can help to prevent them from happening in the future
• Limitation = demand characteristics

  • Argued that the behaviour of the participants in the SPE was more a consequence of demand characteristics than conformity to the assigned social role
  • To demonstrate this some of the details of the SPE procedure were presented to a sample of students who had never heard of the study
  • The majority correctly guessed that the purpose of the experiment was to show that ordinary people assigned the role of guard or prisoner would act like real prisoners and guards due to expectations
• Limitation = ethical issues

  • Despite study following the guidelines of the Stanford University ethics committee, participants experienced extreme emotional distress and so weren‘t protected from psychological harm
  • Zimbardo played a dual role (researcher but also superintendent)
  • On one occasion a prisoner who wanted to leave the study spoke to Zimbardo in his role as superintendent and Zimbardo responded to him as a superintendent concerned about the running of his prison rather than a researcher with ethical responsibilities