Zimbardo - Conformity Social Roles Flashcards
A strength of Zimbardo’s study was his control of participant extraneous variables/individual differences
E – Zimbardo didn’t allow participants to choose their preferred role. Instead, he randomly allocated his participants to take on the role of guard or prisoner.
E – This was an important control as by randomly allocating participants, Zimbardo prevented participants selecting a social role that matched their disposition (e.g., the domineering people selecting the guard role). Moreover, this also controlled for investigator effects by preventing the research team making the similar mistake of allocating social roles to participants that seemed dispositionally suited to the role. Ultimately, Zimbardo’s use of random allocation helped to evenly distribute individual differences between the conditions, reducing the likelihood that dispositional individual differences would become a confounding variable.
L – Therefore, Zimbardo’s random allocation effectively strengthened the experiment’s internal validity, allowing him to attribute the observed behaviour to the social roles rather than participants’ dispositions.
A limitation of Zimbardo’s research was its ethical issues
E – A major cause of these issues was Zimbardo’s dual role in the experiment as both a researcher and prison superintendent/warden. When one prisoner asked Zimbardo if he could leave the experiment due to feeling mental distress, Zimbardo’s did not immediately agree, and instead conducted their conversation on the basis that the man was a prisoner asking to be released.
E – Zimbardo’s role as superintendent interfered with his duty to protect the rights of the participants, such as protecting them from psychological harm and guaranteeing their right to withdraw. However, it could be argued that Zimbardo did take steps to protect the participants. For example, he was careful to only select emotionally stable participants, which helped reduce the possibility of harm. Furthermore, the ethical issues in this study did not undermine the study’s validity, meaning Zimbardo’s conclusions on the power of the situation causing conformity to social roles is unaffected by its problematic ethics.
L – Therefore, it’s clear that ethical issues compromised Zimbardo’s research into social role conformity to some extent, even if this failed to undermine his study’s validity.
A limitation of Zimbardo’s research is the presence of demand characteristics
E – There were obvious cues to the experiment’s aim. Notably, prior to taking part, participants were explicitly told the researchers were interested in whether people would act like real-life prisoners or guards. One guard even later confessed he had behaved brutally as he believed this was what the researchers hoped to see.
E – These facts mean that it’s extremely likely that participants were able to guess the aim of the experiment. The behaviour of the participants may therefore have been caused by a desire to please the researcher (I.e., demand characteristics) rather the role of the situation causing participants to conform to their social role. However, even if participants guessed the aim and adjusted their behaviour to please Zimbardo, this doesn’t undermine his conclusions because the power of the social situation (a psychology experiment) still caused them to conform to their social role (participants playing the role of a prisoner or guard).
L – Therefore, demand characteristics may have influenced Zimbardo’s study, but the experiment’s unique nature suggests they don’t undermine his conclusion about the power of social situations in shaping role conformity.
The ecological validity of Zimbardo’s research has been both prasied and criticized
E - Zimbardo conducted his research in the basement of Stanford University, rather than a real participant, and he asked his particiaonts to assume social roles which did not match their real lives. This suggests Zimbardo’s research lacked ecological validity, as the setting and task were artificial, meaning the behaviour of participants may not have represented real-life behaviour of people conforming to social roles, like prisoner or guard. However, Zimbardo provided evidence that the situation felt very real to the participants. For example, one participant, ‘Prisoner 416’ expressed that the prison was a real one, although run by psychologists rather than the government. The fact that the participants experienced the prison as real is evidence that the procedure and setting of Zimbardo’s research – although not actually real – felt real. This means his research did have ecological validity.
L – Therefore, Zimbardo’s conclusions on conformity to social roles can be generalised beyond the research setting to the behaviour of real people outside his experiment.
A limitation of Zimbardo’s research is that his findings may not support his conclusion.
E – Only a minority of the guards (about a third) behaved in a brutal manner. Another third applied the rules fairly and a final third were largely sympathetic to the prisoners (e.g., offering them cigarettes).
E – Since all participants were exposed to the same situation, the variation in their behaviour is best explained by dispositional rather than situational factors. This therefore challenges Zimbardo’s conclusion that participants all conformed to their social role.
