Conforming To Social Roles Flashcards
Who researched conforming to social roles?
Zimbardo - Stanford prison experiment
What was Zimbardo’s aim?
To find out whether the brutality reported among guards in American prisons was due to the sadistic personalities of the guards or the prison environment
What was Zimbardo’s method?
Using a controlled observation, a realistic mock prison was created at Stanford University. 24 male students were randomly assigned to either the role of guard or prisoner. The prisoners were treated like every other prisoner, arrested at their homes, stripped naked and given prison uniform and bedding.
What were the results of Zimbardo’s study?
Prisoners quickly became passive and negative in their attitudes while the guards became more active. Five prisoners had to be released because of extreme reactions to the situation but the rest endured till it was ended in 6 days
The guards behaved in a brutal and sadistic manner, torturing the prisoners
What was the conclusion of Zimbardo’s study?
Zimbardo proposed that two processes can explain the prisoners final submission. The participants became deindividualised and lost their identity because of the uniform that they were wearing. Also, learned helplessness could explain the prisoners submission to the guards. The prisoners learnt that whatever they did had little affect on what happened to them. In the mock prison, the unpredictable behaviour of the guards led to the prisoners giving up responding.
What are the ethical criticisms of Zimbardo’s study?
Zimbardo did not consider the mental and physical wellbeing of the participants, especially his prisoners. Many of his participants had to leave his experiment due to becoming extremely distressed about the situation. This indicates that the conditions of the experiment were unethical. Some of the prisoners even went on hunger strike in an attempt to be removed from the experiment. Therefore, there are major implications with the ethics of this experiment.
How could demand characteristics explain the findings of Zimbardo’s study?
One of the prison guards actually stated that he purposely changed his personality in an attempt to make the research more ‘interesting’. This means that his behaviour in the experiment is not a true representation, therefore the findings can be devalued in a sense that demand characteristics were used. This thus lowers the validity of Zimbardo’s study as the person would not act like this in a real life situation.
What is the research to criticise Zimbardo’s?
Fromm pointed out that only about a third of guards in the study behaved in a brutal manner, while the rest were either keen to implement rules fairly or support and help prisoners. This suggests that Zimbardo’s conclusion that participants were conforming to social roles may be over stated and the differences in the guards behaviour indicate that they were able to exercise right and wrong choices, despite situational pressures to conform. Therefore, dispositional factors and individual differences between the participants are perhaps more significant when understanding conformity to social rules.
What are the real life applications of Zimbardo’s study?
It altered the way US prisons were run. For example juveniles accused of federal crimes are no longer housed before trial with adult prisoners as this would heighten the risk of violence against them. Such violence could well have been a result of group pressures to conform and behave violently in response to the status differences in prison.
By this research coming to the conclusions it did these changes in policies have resulted in less violence and conformity to social roles/ pressures in prisons.
