strengths and weaknesses of Zimbardo's study DONT DO

Question 1

what ethical issues were there

Answer 1

• The participants had the right to withdraw but this was breached
• The participants were not protected from psychological harm for example humiliation and stress
• Zimbardo asked the participants to stay which shows a lack of inconformed consent
• However it can we argue that the stress participants went through was not foreseen by the researchers nor the Naval research and university committee of human experimentation
• participants did not consent to being arrested in the own homes
• Zimbardo played a dual role which ruins the validity of the experiment

Question 2

demands characteristics (weakness)

Answer 2

• Lowest ecological validity
• Guards said that they were acting so if this is true it shows that they did not really conform to their social roles
• No real-world application so findings cannot be reasonably generalised

Question 3

demand characteristics (strength)

Answer 3

• guards only talked about situation inside the prison for example problem prisoners so they were not acting
• 90% of the time prisoners talked about the conditions and only 10% of the time they talked about outside life

Question 4

gender and cultural differences

Answer 4

• US male students so findings cannot be generalised to females – this lacks population validity AND ANDROCENTRIC
• Study was conducted in America (individualistic culture), If it were conducted in a collectivist culture the results may have been different
• all of his participants were students of a similar age so the results cannot be generalised to all ages

Question 5

ethical guidelines (strength)

Answer 5

• All future experiments are to be placed under review
• The ethic boards now review research before it is conducted to ensure protection for participants from psychological harm
• The ethic boards are now able to tell the researchers to change anything or deny the proposal altogether
• whenever you do research you have to gain approval
• more safety procedures have come to light

Question 6

methodology (strength)

Answer 6

• Allows for more accurate and unbiased results as participants were randomly allocated to the roles of guards and prisoners
• They were able to identify how much the participants conformed to the social roles
• only emotionally stable individuals were chosen and randomly assigned to the roles, this is one way in which the researchers tried to rule out individual personality differences as an explanation for the findings
• Sampling allocation was done in such a way it. prevents any extraneous variables affecting their results
• it gave Zimbardo more control over the variables which led to more accurate results that can be generalised