Zimbardo's Study

Question 1

When and where was Zimbardo’s study conducted?

Answer 1

1973, Stanford University’s Jordan Hall

Question 2

What was Zimbardo investigating?

Answer 2

Power of situation versus personality
- conformity to social roles

Question 3

How did Zimbardo choose his participants?

Answer 3

He placed an ad in a newspaper asking for volunteers to help a study of prison life, offering $15 per day for 1-2 weeks.

Question 4

How many guards and prisoners were in Zimbardo’s experiment, and how did they find out their role?

Answer 4

12 prisoners, 12 guards, randomly allocated.
- prisoners were arrested in real life by actual police officers

Question 5

What are the strengths of Zimbardo’s study?

Answer 5

Random allocation of roles
- remove researcher bias
High mundane realism
- environment mimicked a real prison
Application to real life
- prison camp in Iraq during Iraqi War (Abu Chraib)

Question 6

What are the weaknesses of Zimbardo’s study?

Answer 6

Screened each participant beforehand
- may have skewed the group when allocating roles
Demand characteristics
- some participants may have not acted how they would have, but rather as a character
Bad ethics
Participants were all from same demographic
- lowered generalisability