Zimbardo

• What are social roles? 


  A pattern of behavior that is expected of a person in each setting to group - Hare
• Identification


  When an observer associates themselves with a role model and wants to be like the role model
• Stanford prison experiment


  1. Zimbardo set up a mock prison at Stanford University and advertised for students willing to volunteer and selected those who were deemed emotionally stable after psychological testing

  2. 75 people responded and 24 were chosen

  3. Students were randomly assigned roles of prison guards or prisoners

  4. Zimbardo himself was the prison superintendent

  5. In order to be more realistic, 'prisoners' were arrested at their homes and delivered to the 'prison'

  6. The prison was the basement of the psychology department at the uni, but the experience was made as realistic as possible by using real police officers to make the arrests

  7. Prisoners were blindfolded, finger-printed, strip-searched, deloused and issued a uniform and number

  8. Social rules of the prisoners and the guards were strictly divided and there were 16 rules they were to follow- these were enforced by guards
• The guards and prisoners quickly conformed to their assigned roles, with the guards becoming abusive and the prisoners becoming submissive
• The experiment had to be ended prematurely after only 6 days as the guards were becoming increasingly brutal and the prisoners were experiencing severe psychological distress
• Zimbardo's study was considered ethical at the time as it followed the guidelines of the Stanford University ethics committee and the participants were fully informed and consented
• However, the study has since been criticised for lacking informed consent, as the participants were not fully aware of what would happen to them, and the experiment should have been stopped earlier due to the psychological harm caused
• Despite these criticisms, Zimbardo's study remains an important example of how social roles and situational factors can influence behaviour, even in 'normal' people
• The study demonstrates the power of the situation to influence people's behaviour, and how easily participants can conform to their assigned social roles
• The study rejects the dispositional hypothesis (that behaviour is due to individual personality traits) in favour of the situational hypothesis (that behaviour is influenced by the environment)
• The study has had a lasting impact on our understanding of conformity and the power of social roles
• Zimbardo had high control over his variables in the experiment as he chose emotionally stable ppt - limited individual personality effecting behavior, therefore must be the situation.

  This gives the study high internal validity - can be confident in drawing conclusions.
• Selection of participants

  • Emotionally stable individuals were chosen and randomly assigned to the roles of guard or prisoner
• This is one way researchers tried to limited individual personality differences as an explanation of the findings
• Therefore, this is a strength as it means there was a high internal validity so we can be more confident drawing conclusions about the influences of the roles on behaviour
• Zimbardo's study lacks realism. Banuazizi and Mohavedi suggested most guards were displaying demand characteristics and most guards later claimed they were simply acting. As a result we can’t generalize findings to real life as the study has low ecological validity
• Fromm said that Zimbardo was accused of exaggerating the power of the situation to influence behaviour and minimising the role of personality factors (dispositional factors) as only 1/3 guards acted brutal , 1/3 applied rules fairly and another 1/3 sympatheised with them. This means there is investigator effects (Zimbardo was bais)