Conformity To Social Roles Flashcards
Summarise zimbardos prison study procedure
• A mock prison at Stanford University USA.
• A controlled observation
• 24 male students from a volunteer sample.
• All volunteers were psychologically and physically screened.
• Participants were randomly allocated to either the role of prisoner or guard.
• Zimbardo played the role of prison supervisor and the study was planned to last 14 days.
Summarise the dehumanising and de individuality process
• Dehumanisation (is a process where people are degraded by lessening their human qualities). Prisoners were dehumanised by being blindfolded and being given stocking caps to simulate a bald head.
• The process of deindividuation was also part of the procedure. Deindividuation (is a process where individuals lose a sense of personal identity). The prisoners were de-individuated by being dressed in smock dresses and given a prison ID number.
• The guards were also deindividuated by wearing uniforms and reflective (mirror) sunglasses which made them feel anonymous.
What were the findings of zimbardos prison study?
• Dehumanisation was apparent as the guards began to humiliate the prisoners and made them clean the toilets with their bare hands.
• Deindividuation was noticeable by the prisoners referring to each other and themselves by their prison numbers instead of their names.
• Guards, prisoners and researchers all conformed to their social roles within the prison. Participants found themselves behaving as if they were in a prison rather than in a psychological study.
• Their behaviour became a threat to the prisoners’ psychological and physical health and the study was stopped after 6 days.
What is a real life strength of zimbardos prison experiment?
Zimbardo argues that the same conformity to social role effect that was evident in the study was also present in Abu Ghraib, a military prison in Iraq notorious for the torture and abuse of Iraq prisoners by US soldiers in 2003/2004. He believed that the guards who committed the abuse were victims of situational factors that made abuse more likely. Zimbardo suggests that situational factors such as lack of training, boredom and no accountability to higher authority were present both in the SPE and at Abu Ghraib.
it has increased our understanding of the power of the situation. Zimbardo’s research helped to lead to beneficial reforms within prison systems
Ethical issues with SPE
due to Zimbardo’s dual role and participants were not protected from psychological harm. For example, a student who wanted to leave the study spoke to Zimbardo in his role as supervisor and the conversation was conducted on the basis that the student was a prisoner in a prison, asking to be ‘released’. Zimbardo responded to him as a superintendent worried about the running of his prison rather than a researcher with responsibilities to his participants. This is a weakness of the procedure of Zimbardo’s research, because he failed to protect his participants from psychological harm by making the right to withdraw difficult
Zimbardo eventually acknowledged this and stopped the study after 6 days as so many of the participants were experiencing emotional distress.
What is another issue with zimbardos research ?
demand characteristics.
It has been argued that the behaviour of Zimbardo’s guards and prisoners was due to the powerful demand characteristics in the research situation itself, not due to their response to a compelling prison environment. They
guessed what the researchers wanted them to behave like. Banuazizi and Movahedi (1975) gave details of the procedure to a large sample of students who had never heard of the study before and found that the vast majority of these students correctly guessed that the purpose of the research was to show that ordinary people would act like real prisoners (passive) and guards (hostile).
limitation of the procedure of Zimbardo’s study because it lowers the studies internal validity.
What is a limitation of zimbardos findings?
One limitation of Zimbardo’s findings and conclusions was that he exaggerated the role of the environment. Fromm (1973) accused Zimbardo of exaggerating the power of the situation to influence behaviour, and minimising the role of personality factors (dispositional influences).
The differences in the guards’ behaviour showed that they could exercise right and wrong choices despite situational pressures to conform to a role. This is a limitation of the findings of the study because both situational and dispositional factors should be considered in order to draw accurate conclusions of conformity to social roles
