zimbardo

Question 1

strength:its control of participant extraneous variables

Answer 1

E:participants were randomly assigned to being a guard or the prisoner.
E:by randomly allocating participants, zimbardo was able to ensure participants didn’t purposely choose the role they wanted to play because it matched their disposition.this also controlled for investigator effect as zimbardo was not in charge of the roles the participants played. random allocation helped ensure thee was an even distribution of dispostioonal types within the prisoners and guards which additionally controlled for participant evs becoming confounding. from this Zimbardo was able to infer that when prisoners behaved like prisoners and guards behaved like guards , the conformity was due to the power of the situation rather than their individual dispositions.
L:Zimbardo’s use of random allocation controlled for participant EVs and improved the internal validity of his research into conformity to social roles

Question 2

limitation:ethical issues

Answer 2

E:when one prisoner asked zimbardo permission to leave the experiment as he felt mentally distressed, Zimbarodo did not immediately agree and conducted the conversion as a prisoner requesting to be released.
E:zimbardos role as superintended interfered with his duty and obligation to protect the rights if his participants. however it could be argued that zimbardo did take steps to protect participants e.g. he was careful to select only emotionally stable participants. moreover his study was conducted before psychologists were forced to sign the modern codes of ethics so we could arguably be more tolerant of his actions.
L:there were ethical issues with zimbardos research into the effects of conformity to social roles.