Conformity to social roles

• P: Haslam and Reicher (2012) challenged Zimbardo's belief that the guards' drift into sadistic behaviour was an automatic consequence of them embracing their role.

  E: They pointed out that, in the SPE, guard behaviour varied from being fully sadistic to, for a few, being 'good guards, who did not degrade or harass the prisoners, and even did small favours for them.
• Link for Haslam and Reicher

  L: Haslam and Reicher argue that this shows that the guards chose how to behave,

  rather than blindly conforming to their social role, as suggested by Zimbardo.
• P: Banuazizi and movahedi argued that the behaviour of participants in the SPE was more a consequence of demand characteristics than conformity to roles

  E: they presented some of the details of the SPE procedure to a large sample of students who had never heard of the study. The vast 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, and they predicted that guards would act in a hostile, domineering way and the prisoners would react in a passive way.
• link for demand characteristics

  L: This suggests that the behaviour of Zimbardo's guards and prisoners was not due to their response to a 'compelling prison environment', but rather it was a response to powerful demand characteristics in the experimental situation itself
• P: Zimbardo's study is often criticised for being unethical, despite the act that it followed the guidelines of the stanford university ethics committee that had approved it

  E: Zimbardo acknowledges that perhaps the study should have been stopped earlier as so many of the participants were experiencing emotional distress. He attempted to make amends for this by carrying out debriefing sessions for several years afterwards and concluded that there were no lasting negative effects
• Link for ethicality

  L: recognising the potential for harm in studies such as this, Reicher and Haslam used the same basic set-up as Zimbardo, but took greater steps to minimise the potential harm to their participants. They created a situation that was harsh and testing, but not harmful.