AO3

• Conformity to roles


  Not automatic - guard behaviour varied from fully sadistic to a few 'good' guards
• Guards chose how to behave, rather than blindly conforming
• Demand characteristics


  Participants may have guessed what the experimenter expected
• Students unfamiliar with the SPE study guessed correctly
• This weakens the internal validity of the SPE study
• The SPE study followed the standards set by the Stanford University ethics committee
• Zimbardo acknowledges the experiment should have been stopped earlier due to emotional distress
• Zimbardo attempted to make amends by debriefing the participants for several years after
• ·         Real-world application: Abu Ghraib - Zimbardo argues that the same conformity to social roles was evident in Abu Ghraib—a military prison in Iraq in 2003-2004. Zimbardo believed that the guards were victims of situational factors that made abuse more likely—such as lack of training, unrelenting boredom and no accountability to a higher authority.