Conformity to Social Roles Flashcards
What was the procedure for Zimbardo’s study?
- Procedure:
- A mock prison was set up in the basement of the Psychology department at Stanford University in California.
- Male student volunteers were psychologically & physically screened & the 24 most stable of these were randomly assigned to play the role of ‘prisoner’ or ‘guard’
- The prisoners were unexpectedly arrested at home & on entry to the ‘prison’ they were put through a delousing procedure, given a prison uniform and assigned an ID number.
- The guards referred to the prisoners only by these numbers throughout the study
- Prisoners were allowed certain rights including, three meals & three supervised toilet trips a day and two visits per week
- Participants allocated the role of the guard were given uniforms, clubs, whistles and wore reflective sunglasses (to prevent eye contact and from showing emotion)
- Zimbardo himself took the role of the Prison Superintendent & the study was planned to last two weeks
What were the findings of Zimbardo?
- Over the first few days of the study the guards grew increasingly tyrannical and abusive to-wards the prisoners
- They woke prisoners in the night and forced them to clean the toiletd with their bare hands and made them carry out other degrading activities.
- The ppts appeared at times to forget that this was only a psychological study and that they were merely acting. Even when they were unaware of being watched, they still conformed to their role of prisoner or guard.
- When one prisoner had had enough he asked for ‘parole’ rather than asking to withdraw from the study
- Five prisoners had to be released early because of their extreme reactions (e.g crying, rage and acute anxiety) – symptoms that had started to appear just after two days
- The study was finally terminated and lasted only 6 days following the intervention of post-graduate student Christina Maslach (later to become Zimbardo’s wife) who reminded the researchers that this was a psychological study and, as such did not justify the abuse being meted out to the participants.
The study demonstrated that both guards & prisoners conformed to their social roles the guards became increasingly cruel & sadistic, and the prisoners became increasingly passive & accepting of their plight.
What are some limitations of Zimbardo’s study?
ethical issues: lack of informed consent, whether or not the consent gained was sufficiently
informed; deception; lack of protection from psychological harm – participants soon
became distressed; whether or not the distress should have been anticipated; right to
withdraw was initially declined
- Zimbardo playing a ‘dual-role’/participant observer. Zimbardo’s own behaviour affected
the way in which events unfolded, thus the validity of the findings could be questioned - methodological issues: sample bias; demand characteristics/lack of internal validity; lack of
ecological validity/mundane realism and their implications for the findings - lack of supporting evidence/exact replication
- over exaggeration of findings: only a third of participants conformed to roles
What was the other research that the BBC carried out?
Like the SPE the BBC study randomly assigned men to the role of prisoner or guard & examinned behaviour within a specially created ‘prison’
15 males divided into 5 groups of 3 who were closely matched as possible on key personality variables.
From each group of 3 one chosen to be a guard & other 2 chosen to be prisoners
Study was run for 8 days
What did the BBC find when conducting their research?
Ppts did not conform automatically to their assigned role as had happened in the SPE.
Over course of the study, prisoners increasingly identified as a group & worked collectively to challange authority of gaurds & establish a more egalitarian set of social relations within the prison
Give one strength of Zimbardo’s study.
- Zimbardo & his collegues had control over key variables
- Most obvious example of this was the selection of ppts
- Emotionally stable ppts individuals were chosen & assigned the roles of guard & prisoner
- This was one way in which individuals ruled out individual personaility differences as an explanation of findings
- If guards & prisoners behaved very differently but were in those roles only by chance, then their behaviour must have been due to the role itself
This degree of control over variables increased the internal validity of the study so we can be much more confident in drawing conclusions about the influence of roles on conformity
Give a limitation of the SPE.
- It did not have the realism of a real prison
- Ali Banauazzi & Siamk Movahedi argued that the ppts were merely play-acting rather than geniuenly conforming to a role
- Ppts performances were based on their stereotypes of how prisoners & guards are supposed to behave
- This also explains why the prisoners rioted, they thought that this was what real prisoners did.
This suggests that the SPE tells us little about conformity to social roles in actual prisons
Give another limitation of the SPE.
- Zimbardo may have exaggerated the power of social roles to influence behaviour (Fromm 1973)
- For example only one third of the guards actually behaved in a brutal manner
- Another third tried to apply the rules fairly
- The rest actively tried to help and support the prisoners
- They sympathised, offered cigarettes & reinstated privaleges (Zimbardo 2007)
- Most guards were able to resist pressures situational pressures to conform to a brutal role
Suggests Zimbardo overstated his view that SPE ppts were conforming to social roles & minimised the influence of dispositional factors (e.g. personality).
