Zimbardo - Stanford prison experiment

Aim

To see if police brutality is dispositional or situational

Method

• College students were randomly assigned roles as either prisoners or guards but made to believe there was a reason for their selection

• Creation of a meticulously simulated prison environment, designed to mimic the real-life conditions of confinement.

• All prisoners arrested in their own homes and humiliated/stripped naked in front of family and friends

• Guards instructed to do whatever they felt necessary to maintain law and order within the prison

Participants

• 24 men obtained through volunteer sample

• Tested beforehand for mental and physical stability

• Paid for participation

Results

• Guards begin harassing prisoners within mere hours

• Prisoners verbally abused, given pointless tasks and humiliated

• Guards would step on prisoners’ backs as they did push-ups

• Prisoners rebelled on day 2 and barricaded themselves in rooms to avoid guards’ harassment

  • Experiment ends on day 6 instead of day 14 due to the deep psychological distress caused to prisoners

Conclusions drawn

• Everyone conformed to their roles due to situational factors, otherwise psychologically normal people harassed and bullied innocent people due to the situation created within the prison environment

GRAVE

• Low generalisability, unrepresentative sample

• High reliability, lab experiment so conditions are easily replicable

• High applicability, applicable to day to day prison life and explains why police brutality exists

• High internal validity

• Low external validity

• Ethical issues surrounding protection from harm and informed consent

Reicher and Haslam

Recreated Milgram’s study on the BBC and found that

• Guards felt insecure in their roles as prisoners could be promoted to guard position

• Guards had low group identification and did not act as a solid group i.e. harassing prisoners collectively

• By day 5, prisoners challenged the guards. By day 6, guards HQ is broken into. Study ends on day 8

Control

• High control over variables

• Participants selected based on emotional and physical stability, reducing participant extraneous variables

• Highly controlled environment

• High reliability

Mohaveal

• Participants conformed to the idea of a “prison guard” not the actual situation

  • They had preconceived notions about what a prison guard should act like from TV shows and the media

Fromm

• Milgram exaggerated his findings and only a minority of the guards were cruel, with some guards even sympathising with the prisoners