Conformity to social roles: the Stanford Prison Experiment

Stanford Prison Experiment

Phillip Zimbardo 1971

research aim

to study what happens to good people in an evil place

The prisoners:

what happened to them?

- arrested in home

- blindfolded, strip searched, de-loused, issued uniform + a number

- identity removed and referred to only by number (de-individualisation)

-------------------------------------------

what effects did they have?

=PSYCHOLOGICAL TRAUMA

. believed they were really prisoners

.. 819 believed he couldn't leave + "bad prisoner"

... 8612 became severely disturbed + had to leave experiment

.... 8692 & 416 were put in solitary confinement as punishment

= REBELLION

. barricaded cells with beds, started riots, hurled abuse at guards on day 2

.. 416 went on hunger strike, new to experiment

= OTHER PRISONERS BECAME SUBMISSIVE

. compliant with guard's rules

.. started to turn against each other and snitch

... turned on 416 and believed he was a troublemaker

....turned against 819 and blamed him for punishments

.... couldn't stand up for themselves as were victims of the system

Guards:

what happened to them?

- given mirrored sunglasses so prisoners couldn't see eyes

- given uniforms + wooden club, handcuffs, keys to cell

what effects did it have?

CONTROL

= dominate, humiliation, harassment, verbal abuse, increased brutality, sadistic tendencies

--> woke prisoners up in the night and forced them to...

exercise

clean toilets with bare hands

line up with bag on head and chains on feet

= encouraged prisoners to turn on each other, enforced work on cellmates when a prisoner disobeyed

"JOHN WAYNE"

= head guard, enforced the rules, disassociated from reality and contributed to the script

"GOOD GUYS" = didn't participate

... did not contribute to harassment but were "GOFERS", went to collect food and didn't intervene when presented with opportunity

General findings

- experiment stopped after 6 days, meant to last for 14

- basement of Stanford university turned into a mock prison

- randomly assigned role of prisoner/guard

- nothing but 3 beds in he cells

- advertised in a newspaper for male volunteers ($15/day), random selection of those deemed emotionally stable after extensive psych tests

- solitary confinement in a closet called "the hole" and used to punish prisoners

-zimbardo took a role in experiment as prison superintendent and told guards to enforce law and order, became too involved

- fellow psychologists witnessed experiment and convinced Zimbardo to stop it due to it being unethical

WEAKNESS: ethical issues

P

= a weakness of Zimbardo's prison experiment is that it breaks many ethical guidelines

EX

= the participants weren't told the entire nature of the study, endured verbal abuse and psychological trauma such as nervous breakdowns, and the prisoners were led to believe that they weren't allowed to leave

EV

= due to this, the participants were deceived about the true aim of the study, were not able to give their informed consent, were not protected from harm and were not allowed to use their right to withdraw from the experiment

EXT

= furthermore, Banuazizi and Mohave (1975) argued that the participants were play-acting rather than genuinely conforming to their roles. for example, one of the guards Dave Eshelman earned the nickname "John Wayne" for his imaginative cruelty and later stated in an interview that he developed his character after watching the movie "cool hand Luke", simply playing a role because he saw the experiment "as a kind of improv exercise"

LB

= consequently the findings of the experiment can be questioned due to the contradictory research and the many ethical issues, and even Zimbardo himself acknowledged that the study should have been stopped earlier

WEAKNESS: dual role

P

= in addition to this. Zimbardo's own behaviour during the study may have affected the events that unfolded

EV

= Zimbardo took on a dual role as both the researcher and the prison superintendent who told the guards to enforce law or order when necessary, and this role meant that he arguably became too involved in the experiment

EV

= for example, Zimbardo acted as a superintendent rather than a researcher when one of the participants asked to leave as he tried to convince him to become a snitch instead and did not care about the participants protection from harm

EXT

= as well as this, Zimbardo's study used a biased sample as all the participants were white male university students who were all around the same age and American. therefore, the findings cannot be generalised to a wider population

LB

= as a result of this, the findings from Zimbardo's experiment lack validity and cannot be used as a credible explanation of conformity because it suffered from research bias and is population bound

STRENGTH: control

P

= however, a strength of the experiment is that it was a highly controlled observation in which Zimbardo attempted to control some variables

EV

= Zimbardo carried out personality tests on the participants to ensure they were emotionally stable, and the participants had their roles randomly allocated to prevent researcher bias

EX

= therefore, Zimbardo could conclude that any conformity to social roles was due to situational factors such as NSI and not because of dispositional factors like their personality, giving the study high internal validity due to these high levels of control

C

= on the other hand, a replication of this experiment carried out by Reicher and Haslam (2006) contradicts Zimbardo's findings. The researchers randomly assigned 15 men to the role of prisoner of guard and found that the participants did not conform to the social roles automatically, with the guards refusing to impose their authority and the prisoners identifying as a group who challenged the guards, resulting in a shift of power and a collapse in the prison system.

LB

= despite this. it cannot be argued that the study lacked ecological validity as the high control made the experiment as realistic as possible, also giving the experiment high external validity

WEAKNESS: individual differences

P

= furthermore, individual differences and personally also determine the extent to which a person conforms to social roles

EV

= in zimbardos experiment the behaviour of the guards varied dramatically from extremely sadistic behaviour such as that of "John Wayne" to empathetic guards who helped prisoners

EX

= this suggests that situational factors are mot the only cause of conformity to social roles and dispositional factors may also play a role