Conformity to social roles:

• STRENGTH

  • had control over key variables
  • IE the selection of participants
  • Emotionally stable individuals were chosen and randomly assigned to the roles of guard and prisoner
  • One way in which the researchers ruled out individual personality differences as an explanation of the findings
  • If guards and prisoners behaved differently, but were in those roles only by chance then their behaviour must have been due to the role itself

  Degree of control over variables increased the internal validity of the study can be more confident in drawing conclusions about the influence of roles on conformity
• LIMITATION:

  • did not have the realism of a true prison
  • Banuazizi and Movahedi 1975 argued the pp were merely play-acting rather than genuinely conforming to a role
  • Pp performances were based on their stereotypes of how prisoners and guards are supposed to behave
  • For example, one of the guards claimed he had based his role on a brutal character from the film Cool Hand Luke
  • This would also explain why the prisoners rioted - they thought that was what real prisoners did

  This suggests that the findings of the SPE tell us little about conformity to social roles in actual prisons
• COUNTERPOINT:

  • However, McDermott 2019 argues that the pp did behave as if the prison was real to them
  • IE: 90% of the prisoners conversations were about prison life
  • Amogust themselves they discussed how it was impossible to leave the SPE before their sentences were over
  • Prisoner 416 later explained how he believed the prison was a real one, but run by psychologists rather than the government

  This suggests that the SPE did replicate the social roles of prisoners and guards in a real prison, giving the study a high degree of internal validity.