A03: STANFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT

What is a strength of the prison experiment in terms of control?

P: strength - zimbardo had some control over the variables

E: emotionally stable individuals were chosen and randomlyu assigned to the role of guard and prisoner

EX: By ensuring that all his pps were all emotionally stabel to the same degree, he rules out the results being explained away by personality differences

IMP: having control over theses varibales increases the internal validity - we can be more confident that the results were due to conformity to social roles rather than the individual factors , meaning that the research studied what it intended to

whats a limitation the prisoner experimet in terms of realism

P: study lacked realism

E: Banuazizi and Mohavedi suggets thsat the guaerd may actually have been play acting rather than genuinley conforming to the role. They think that their performances may be based on the steretyoes of what a prison guard shoudl look like.

EX: this means that the behaviour that occcured andd was observed would njot be the natural behaviour of the guards and prisoners and instead, the participants may have been acting based off of depictions of guards and prisoners that they have seen in media such as the television.

IMP: this could mean that the results lack internal validity - they have not measured what they wished to measure, which was participants natural behaviour, and have instead measured what the prisoners think is the appropriate behaviour, instead of the effects of the environment on conformity

What is a limitation of the prison studies in terms of evidence supporting conformity due to being assigned to roles?

P:There is no supporting reasearch that suggests that Zimabrdo’s statement that partcipants natrually conformed to roles just because they were assigned them, is correct.
E:Reicher and Haslam partially replicated the mock prison experiment - the prisoners took control of the prison and subjected the guards to harassment and disobedience.
EX:This is very different from what Zimbardo found and challenge his idea that people just conform to roles that they are assigned
IMP: Due to the lack of consistency, especially with findings of similar research, this calls the reliability of Zimbardo’s research.

What is a strength of the prison experiment in terms of real world applications?

P: There are real world applications for the stanford prison experimetn
E: Zimbardo believes that the same conformity to social roles that occurred in his experiment also happened ay Abu Ghraib, a military prison in Iraq, in which Iraqi prisoners were tortured and abused by American soldiers in 2003 and 2004
EX: Zimabrdo suggested that certain situational factors, combined with an opportunity to misuse the power associated with certain roles, can lead to people behaving in tyrannical and abusive ways.
IMP: The knowledge of what situations can lead to inappropriate behaviour from people, then practices can be put in pace to prevent this from occurring in the future