Zimbardo Stanford Prison Experiment

What was the aim of Zimabardo’s experiment?

To investigate how readily people would conform to the social roles in a simulated environment, and specifically to investigate why good people do bad things

What was the procedure?

• The basement of the Stanford university psychology building was converted into a mock prison

• American student volunteers were paid to take part in study. They were randomly issued one of the two roles guard or prisoner.

• Prisoners were only referred by the assigned number and guards were given props like handcuffs and sunglasses

• The guards were given 16 rules that they were to enforce on the prisoners, and a behaviour of the participants were observed

What were the findings?

• identification occurred very fast as both the prisoners and God adopted the Euros, and played their part in a short amount of time

• Guards began to arrest and torment prisoners in hard and aggressive ways

• Prisoners would only talk about prison issues and snitch on other prisoners to the guards to please them. This is significant evidence to suggest that prisoners believe that the prison was real and weren’t acting simply due to demand characteristics.

• The guards became more demanding of obedience whereas the prisoners became more submissive

Lack of population validity

The sample only consisted of American male students and so the findings cannot be generalised to other genders and cultures, for example, collective cultures such as China or Japan, maybe more conformist to their prescribed social roles because such cultures value the needs of the group over the needs of the individual this suggest that such findings may be culture bound.

Real life applications

This reset changed the way US prisons were run. Young prisoners, were no longer kept with adult prisoners to prevent the bad behaviour perpetuating.