Zimbardo’s Prison Experiment AO3

• -One limitation; Zimbardo may've exaggerated the power of social roles to influence behaviour. (Fromm) Only 1/3 of the guards actually behaved in a brutal manner, another third tried to apply the rules fairly. The rest tried to actively tried to help and support the prisoners. They sympathised, offered cigarettes and reinstated privileges. Most guards were able to resist situational pressures to conform to a brutal role. This suggests that Zimbardo overstated his view that SPE participants were conforming to social roles and minimised the influence of dispositional factors. (personality )
• +One strength of the SPE: Zimbardo had control over key variables. Emotionally stable participants were chosen and randomly assigned to the roles of guard / prisoner. This eliminated individual personality differences as an expianation of the findings. If guards and prisoners behaved very differently, but were in those roles only by chance, then their behaviour must've been by the role itself. This degree of control over variables increased the internal validity of the study, so we can be much more confident in drawing conclusions about the influence of roles on conformity.
• -One limitation of the SPE; it didn't have the realism of a true prison. Banvazizi & Morahedi argued that participants were play acting rather than genuinely conforming to a role. Participants performances were based on their stereotypes of how prisoners and guards and supposed to behave; one of the guards claimed he based his role on a brutal character from the film Cool Hand Luke. This would also explain why the prisoners rioted- they thought it was what actual prisoners did. This suggests that the findings of the SPE tell us little about conformity to social roles in actual prisons.
• +McDermott argues that the participants did behave as if the prison was real to them. 40% of prisoners conversations were about prison life. Together they discussed how it was impossible to leave the SPE before their sentences were over. Prisoner 416 later explained how he thought the prison was a real one run by psychologists rather than the government. This suggests SPE did replicate the social roles of prisoners and guards in a real prison, giving the study a high degree of internal validity.