Conformity Zimbardo

• Social roles are parts people play as members of various social groups (Parent, child, teacher etc). These are accomplished by what ourselves and others have of what us appropriate behaviour in each role e.g. caring, obedient etc.
• Zimbardo wanted to see if brutality by guards in prisons across America were due to sadistic personalities or the situation.
• Zim Procedure: Create a prison situation in the basement of Stanford Uni to observe effects on those p's acting as guards and those acting as prisoners.
• Zim Procedure:

  • Randomly allocated ps to either prisoner or guard
  • Guards arrived a day early and helped prep the prison as well as chose their own uniform
  • Prisoners were arrested by real officers (deceived)
  • During the experiment, guards beat with force, stripped them, placed them in solitary confinement, increasing the level of aggression each day
  • Zimbardo stopped the experiment after 5 days even though it was supposed to last up to 2 weeks
• Findings: The guards abused their power by torturing the prisoners because they would suffer no consequences, in which the once psychologically emotionally stable prisoners broke down and became emotionally unstable, they were also mindlessly obedient.
• The conformity to roles comes in the form of total acceptance as the role of prisoner or guard and carrying out the behaviour of that role.
• The obedience is shown by the prisoners obedience toward the authority of the guards.
• Zimbardo felt that deindividuation happened due to a complete loss of individuation, in which the p's seemed unable to focus on who they were and so fell into he role of a prisoner. This was manipulated by the humiliation of the arrest and the punishments carried out by the guards. The labelling of numbers also helped this process as they no longer had personal responsibility for their actions.
• This study revealed the power of situation to influence people's behaviour.
• Ethical issues:

  • Deception - prisoners were unaware that they were going to be publicly arrested
  • Informed consent - P's did not have enough info in regards to what they were getting themselves into
  • Not confidential - video recorder
  • RTW
• This study provides real world application as the guards at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were similarly affected by an evil situation, which led them to behave in ways that they would normally reject, just like some of the guards in Zimbardo's prison study.
• Evaluation: Weakness

  • Reicher and Haslam proposed an alternative explanation because Zimbardo's explanation does not account for the behaviour of the non-brutal guards. They used social identity theory instead to argue the guards had to actively identify with their social roles to act as they did.