Conformity To Social Roles Zimbardo's Research

Question 1

Social roles

Answer 1

Are the behaviour that society expects from you

Positions in society like teenager

Social roles set of behaviour and expectations that come from holding a specific position

Question 2

Internalising social roles

Answer 2

Expectations of the role are held by society. When accept role internalise expectations so shape our behaviour

Question 3

Procedure

Answer 3

Stanford prison experiment (SPE) students volunteer in mock prison

Randomly allocated to roles, guards had complete power

Prisoners and guards de-individuated (uniforms) to lose personal identity.

Question 4

Findings and conclusions

Answer 4

Guards identified with role and became increasingly more aggressive

Prisoners rebelled but passive after guards responded, SPE ended early (after 5 days)

Everyone conformed to their social roles, (power of situation)

Question 5

Positive aspect of research

Answer 5

Control of variables (allocation of social roles) increased internal validity

Emotionally stable participants

If the guards and prisoners behaved very differently, but were in those social roles only by chance, then their behaviour must have been due to the pressure of the situation.

Question 6

Lack of realism

Answer 6

Participants play acted stereotypes (Banuazizi and Mohaved)

One guard claimed he based his rule on a brutal character from the film COOL HAND LUKE

Question 7

Understated dispositional influences

Answer 7

Fromm

Accused him of exaggerating power of situation to influenced behaviour.

Minimising dispositional influences (personality)

Some prisoners smoked too…

1/3 of guards brutal conclusions were exaggerated

Question 8

Contradicted by subsequent research

Answer 8

BBC study supported social identity theory. (Reicher and Haslam)

Prisoners where rebelling

SIT - guards failed to develop a shared social identity as cohesive group but prisoners did

^^ hard to understand ask teacher

Question 9

Ethical issues

Answer 9

Conflict between zimbardo’s two roles (prison superintendent and lead researcher)

Prisoner wanted to leave answers him as superintendent

Question 10

Internal validity

Answer 10

Internal validity is a way to measure if research is sound (i.e. was the research done right?). … In a perfect world, your experiment would have a high internal validity. This would allow you to have high confidence that the results of your experiment are caused by only one independent variable.

Question 11

Dispositional influences are all the dispositional factors in an individual

Answer 11

are individual characteristics that influence behavior and actions in a person. Things like individual personality traits, temperament, and genetics are all dispositional factors.