Zimbardo Flashcards
AO1 experiment
Aim: Why do prison guards behave so brutally is it cause they’d conform to a social role or do they have a sadistic personality. Could have been trying to explain what happened in Abu Ghraib where prison guards committed serous violations of human rights against Iraqi prisoners. Add in a newspaper (15$ a day), volunteers applied then had to do personality tests and background checks, left with 21 male student volunterrs. Students randomly assigned prisoner or guard. Prisoners were arrested outside there house and taken to Stanford university basement where the was a mock prison. Prisoners were given a smock to wear and a cap and a number. Guards wore uniform, and reflective sunglasses.
AO1 findings
On the second morning prisoners decided to rebel they barricaded themselves in there cells and swore at the gaurds
Guards did headcounts in the middle of the night and made prisoners do pushups
Prisoner 416 was put in solitary confinement and after 36 hours left thr experiment as he was in serious distress
Christina Maslach (GF) told Zimbardo to shut experiment down on day six, he did (supposed to last 2 weeks)
AO3 ethics
Poor ethics. Lack of informed consent- inadequate briefing. Participants not protected from harm, psychical (pushups no food) and psychological harm (prisoner 416 in serious distress). Zimbardo also took part in it as superintendent which not good. Also no right to withdraw. BUT zimbardo did a debrief.
AO3 realistic
Fake cells getting arrested, uniform: validity of set up. But some may argue that the experiment lacked the realism of a true prison. Some argued that the Ps were just play acting on the stereotypes of their roles. One guard claimed that he based his persona of a character ion cool Hand Luke. This also decreases the validity cause extraneous variable.
AO3 research support
BBC prison study done by Haslam and Reicher, got similar results to zimabrod but not as extreme, Zimbado may have exaggerates the power of social roles on behaviour. Only 1/3 of the guards behaved brutally, 1/3 were neutral and complied tot he rules, and 1/3 sympathised with the prisoners. So most guards were able to not conform to a brutal role, so perhaps Zimbardo overstated the conforming to roles and ignored personality factors too much.
