Zimbardo

• aim: investigate whether aggressive prison conditions was due to prisoners/guard dispositions or prison environment
• fake prison created in Stanford uni basement, 21/75 of the most mentally and physically stable volunteers were picked from newspaper advert
• pp randomly allocated, 10 were guards, 11 were prisoners
• prisoners were arrested from their homes, stripped, deloused, fingerprints taken, dressed in overalls, given identification number to dehumanise them and had to follow orders
• guards were given uniforms ,clubs, handcuffs, and sunglasses to avoid eye contact
• findings: both conformed to roles quickly, but prisoners revolted against their treatment after 2 days, experiment was closed down on day 6 due to prisoners mental health
• conclusion: pp conformed to social roles showing situational environment changes behavior
• strength is researcher had some control over variables, volunteers were screened of mental and physical issues and randomly assigned roles, therefore behavior was due to situation not personality. this increases internal validity, allowing us to draw conclusions
• weakness: lacks research support, Reicher & Haslam replicated study in 2011 with BBC programme, however prisoners became dominant, disobedient and controlled the guards, this suggests Zimbardo study comes down to individual differences and society may have been more obedient during his time.
• weakness is lacks realism, pp may have been acting in a stereotypical way observed from the media to fulfil the aim of the study, they may have shown demand characteristics, however Zimbardos data showed 90% of prisoners conversations showed they believed prison life was real
• weakness is ethical concerns, a student intended to leave however zimbardo responded as a superintendent of the study rather than a psychologist as he was more worried about running the prison, this limits his ability to protect pp from harm because he was conflicted with his experiment role