Conformity to social roles: Zimbardos research (1973)

• Aim: To investigate the extent to which people would conform to the roles of guard and prisoner in a role-playing simulation of prison life. They wanted to answer the question ‘do prison guards behave brutally because they have sadistic personalities, or is it the situations that creates have behaviour?’
• Method:

  • set up a mock prison in the basement of Standford University
  • advertised for students willing to volunteer and selected those who were deemed emotionally stable after extensive psychological testing.
  • randomly assigned to roles of guards/prisoners
  • arrested in their homes by the local police and delivered to the prison
  • blind-folded, strip-searched, deloused, uniformed, numbered (which they were referred by), locked in a cell, chained at times to go the bathroom. Social roles of prisoners and guards were divided.
• Continuing method:

  • daily routines was heavily regulated (16 rules issued by guards that worked shifts 3 per time)
  • To illustrate the guards role they had a uniform which was wooden club, handcuffs and mirrored sun glasses to avoid there eyes being seen.
  • they were instructed to exert power on the prisoners
• Results:

  • found that especially guards they began to identify more closely with their social roles
  • behaviour became a threat to prisoners' mental and physical health
  • In 2 days the prisoners started to rebel against harsh treatment by the guards, by ripping their uniform and swearing at them, who then fired-extinguished them
  • They became more brutal and aggressive by putting one prisoner in 'the hole' (dark closet) as punishment for taking a hunger strike. They gave them exercises in the middle of the night to say their numbers, made them clean toilets and held frequent head counts.
• Continuing results:

  • These were examples of divide and conquer tactics used to turn prisoners against one another. After the rebellion was extinguished the prisoners became despondent and depressed.
  • One prisoner was released from the study on just the first day as he showed signs of psychological disturbance.
  • Some appeared to enjoy the power they exerted over the prisoners and eventually their behaviour became so threatening towards the prisoners psychological and physical health which deteriorated over time, the study was stopped after 6 days rather than the intended 14.
• Conclusion:

  The situation revealed the power of the situation to influence people's behaviour.Guards prisoners and researchers and volunteers e.g. prison chaplains all automatically conformed to their roles within prison which was done easily. Overall they concluded that the situation is more powerful than personality.
• Strength: high control-lab experiment

  Zimbardo's study has high control over key variables such as the selection of ppts. E.g. only emotionally stable ppts were chosen and randomly assigned to the roles of prisoner or guard (researchers could control individual personality differences as an explanation of the findings). This is a strength because we are confident that the findings (behaviour of the ppts) are not affected by confounding variables and are being caused by the roles that they were allocated. This increases the internal validity and the confidence of researchers.
• Limitation: low population validity

  A limitation of Zimbardo's study is that it has low population validity. Zimbardo only used 24 male American students, the study could be criticised for being gender biased as it is not representative of how all people would behave in such a situation. It may be the case that males or students would behave differently compared to others. This is a limitation because the results are difficult to generate to the general population and may not fully explain the extent to which all people conform to social roles. Therefore the study has low population validity.
• Strength: ppts behaved as if the prison was real to them

  A strength of Zimbardo's research is that (as McDermott 2019 argues) the ppts did behave as if the prison was real to them. For example, 90% of the prisoners' conversations (which were monitored) were about prison life. Amongst themselves, they discussed how it was impossible to leave the experiment before their sentences were over. This is a strength of Zimbardo's research because it suggests the study did replicate the roles of prisoners and guards in a real prison (giving the study high internal validity).
• Limitation: ethical issues (protection of ppts)

  Zimbardo didn't follow the Stanford university ethics committee guidelines and them approving the study. Zimbardo's ppts (prisoners) experienced a significant amount of psychological harm (stress, breakdowns etc) and some physical damage. The prisoners were not aware about the debrief about the study (e.g. didn't get told that they were going to get arrested in their homes) and therefore could not give informed consent. This is a limitation because it would go against the current BPS ethical guidelines for conducting psychological research.
• Further counterpoint of limitation (ethical issues)

  Some psychologists may argue that it was necessary to allow the ppts to experience a certain stress level so that the research setting reflected a real prison environment. In addition, it may have been necessary to deceive ppts to ensure the behaviour that was exhibited was natural and limited the effect of any demand characteristics (thereby making the findings of the study more valid).