Conformity To Social Roles Flashcards
What was the key study?
Stanford prison experiment
Haney, 1973 - and Zimbardo
What was the procedure for the prison experiment?
A mock prison was set up in the basement of the psychology department at Stanford University in California.
Male student volunteers were psychologically and physically screened and the 24 most stable of these were randomly assigned to either play prisoner or guard.
The prisoners were unexpectedly arrested at home and on entry to the prison they were put through a delousing procedure, given a 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 and three supervised toilet trips a day and two visits per week.
Participants allocated the role of guard were given uniforms, clubs, whistles and wore reflective sunglasses (prevent eye contact).
Zimbardo himself took on the role of prison superintendent.
It was planned to last 2 weeks.
What were the findings of the prison experiment?
It demonstrated that both guards and prisoners conformed to their social roles.
The guards became increasingly cruel and sadistic and the prisoners became increasingly passive and accepting of their plight.
What happened to the guards?
Over the first few days of the study they grew increasingly tyrannical and abusive towards the prisoners.
They woke prisoners in the night and forced them to clean the toilets with their bare hands and made them carry out other degrading activities.
Some were so enthusiastic in their role that they volunteered to do extra hours without pay.
What happened to the participants?
Appeased 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 enough he asked for parole rather than asking to withdraw from the study.
What happened to the participants?
5 prisoners had to be released early because of their extreme reactions (e.g. crying, rage and acute anxiety) - symptoms that has started to appear after just two days.
How did the study end?
After just 6 days,
Following the intervention of postgraduate student Christina Maslach who reminded the researchers that this was a psychological study and, such as, did not justify the abuse being meted out to the participants
What’s another prison study?
The BBC prison study - Reicher and Haslam (2006)
What was the procedure of the BBC study?
Like the SPE, the BBC study (broadcast as documentary) randomly assigned men to the role of guard or prisoner and examined their behaviour within a specially created prison.
15 male participants were divided into five groups of three people who were closely matched as possible on key personality variables, and from each group of three, one person was randomly chosen to be a guard and the other two prisoners.
This study was run for 8 days.
What were the findings for the BBC study?
Participants didn’t conform automatically to their assigned role as the happened in the SPE.
Over the course of the study, the prisoners increasingly identified as a group and worked collectively to challenge the authority of the guards and establish a more egalitarian set of social relations within the prison.
The guards also failed to identify with their role, which made them reluctant to impose their authority on the prisoners.
This led to a shift of power and the collapse of the prisoner-guard system.
What are the evaluative points?
Conformity to roles is not automatic The problem of demand characteristics Were these studies ethical? The SPE and its relevance to Abu Ghraib What did we learn from these studies?
What is meant by conformity to roles is not automatic?
Zimbardo believed that the guards drift into sadistic behaviour was an automatic consequence of them embracing their role, which in turn suppressed their ability to engage with the fact that what they were doing was wrong.
However, in the SPE, guard behaviour varied from being fully sadistic to, for a few, being ‘good guards’.
These guards did not degrade or harass the prisoners, and even did small favours for them.
Haslam and Reicher (2012) argue that this shows that the guards chose how to behave, rather than blindly conforming to their social role.
What is meant by the problem of demand characteristics?
Banuazizi and Movahedi (1975) argued that the behaviour of Zimbardo’s guards and prisoners was not due to their response to a ‘compelling prison environment’, but rather it was a response to powerful demand characteristics in the experimental situation itself.
These refer to the characteristics of a study that let research participants guess what experiments expect to want them to behave like.
Banuazizi and Movahedi presented some of the details of the SPE experimental procedure to a large sample of students who had never heard of the study.
The vast majority of these students correctly guessed that the purpose of the experiment was to show that ordinary people assigned the role of guard or prisoner would act like real prisoners and guards, and they predicted that guards would act in a hostile, domineering way and the prisoners would react in a passive way.
What is meant by were these studies ethical?
Zimbardo’s study was considered ethical because it followed the guidelines of the Stanford university ethics committee that had approved it.
There was, for example, no deception, with all participants being told in advance that many of their usual rights would be suspended.
However, Zimbardo acknowledges that perhaps the study should have been stopped earlier as so many of the participants were experiencing emotional distress.
He attempted to make amends for this by carrying out debriefing sessions for several years afterwards and concluded that there were no lasting negative effects.
Reicher and Haslam’s study used the same basic set-up as Zimbardo, but took greater steps to minimise the potential harm to their participants.
Their intention was to create a situation that was harsh and testing, but not harmful.
What is meant by the SPE and its relevance to Abu Ghraib?
Zimbardo argues that the same conformity to social role effect that was evident in the SPE was also present in Abu Ghraib, a military prison in Iraq notorious for the torture and abuse of Iraqi prisoners by US soldiers in 2003 and 2004.
He believed that the guards who committed the abuses were the victims of situational factors that made abuse more likely.
He suggests that situational factors such as lack of training, unrelenting boredom and no accountability to higher authority were present both in the SPE and at Abu Ghraib.
These, combined with an opportunity to misuse the power associated with the assigned role of ‘guard’, led to the prisoner abuses in both situations.
