conformity to social roles

• Zimbardo's prison experiment(1973)

  aim: investigate how far people would conform to social roles

  procedure: A mock prison set up in the basement of Stanford University where 21 male student volunteers who were tested as 'emotionally stable' and were randomly assigned roles of prisoner or guard, they were encourages to conform to the role, to help they were given uniforms to their assigned roles and instructions about behaviour

  guards - uniform, wooden clubs, handcuffs and mirrored glasses

  prisoners - referred to as a number and given a uniform
• Zimbardo's prison experiment results

  both groups conformed to their roles very quickly where the guards began to harass prisoners in aggressive ways leading prisoners to rebel, the prisoners would only talk about prison issues(forgetting about their real life) and snitch on other prisoners to please the guards

  the prisoners became depressed and anxious causing other psychological problems leading to the study ending after 6 days instead of 14

  showing social roles have a strong influence on behaviour
• social roles evaluation strength

  research support: Hofling (1966) - observed behaviour of doctors and nurses in natural experiment (covert), found 95% of nurses obeyed a doctor (confederate) over the phone to increase the dosage of a patients medicine of what is advised, showing that everyday individuals obey an authority figure

  
  

  the participants were fully aware and completely debriefed about the aims and results of the study so it makes the experiment more ethically acceptable, they also had the opportunity to leave/withdraw at any point in the study
• social role evaluation limitation

  it did not have the realism of a real prison as it was in a basement on Stanford university, Banauzizi and Movahedi (1975) - argued that they were merely play-acting rather than genuinely conforming to their roles as participant performances were based on characters from tv shows and acting how they thought they were supposed to act

  
  

  minimising the influence of dispositional factors: Fromm (1973) - Zimbardo may have exaggerated the power of social roles to influence behaviour as only 1/3 of the guards behaved brutally as some sympathised with prisoners