Zimbardo

• Stanford university prison experiment

  • conformity to social roles / identification
  • wanted to see if normal people would identify with a given role
  • to investigate if prison brutality happens because of the personality of the guards and prisoners or because they are both conforming to social roles
• 75 male university students

  volunteer sampling through a newspaper ad

  • 21 were recruited as participants
  • randomly divided into prisoners and guards
• guards were given uniforms, sunglasses, handcuffs and bats
• zimbardo put participants in a controlled environment and observed their behaviour - so this was an overt controlled observation
• zimbardo found that prisoners tried to rebel

  to which the guards responded by using fire extinguishers

  they also took away the prisoners clothes

  then became more brutal

  gave them tasks that would be seen in an actual prison
• one prisoner was released after a fit of hysterical crying

  another prisoner went on a hunger strike
• the experiment was ended after 6 days, not the intended 14
• it was found that these participants conformed quickly after a change in their situation and social role
• conclusion:

  • when normal men were given new social roles that gave them more power and encouraged violent behaviour, they conformed to the social role and identified with it, becoming brutal
• zimbardo's study had 4 main criticisms
• one criticism was that people believed zimbardo's study was unethical for two reasons

  • they said participants were psychologically harmed and put through unnecessary distress (one participant released after a break down)
  • they also said that the participants did not know what they were truly consenting to and so could not give informed consent

  zimbardo's argument: recruited psychologically healthy people. didnt know that the study was going to be violent. stopped the study before it got worse.
• one criticism that people had was that the study lacked generalisability

  • 21 male american university participants
  • the study does not tell us about conformity in other genders or cultures

  zimbardo's response: his study is still an explanation for brutality in the real world
• one criticism was that his study lacked ecological validity

  • participants may not have believed that it was real and so may not have behaved as they would in the real world

  response: they acted as if it was real. they had strong emotional reactions and 90% of conversations during the study were about life in prison
• one criticism was that zimbardo's presence may have biased the experiment by influencing the behaviour of his pariticpants

  • investigator effects

  there is no response to this