Zimbardo AO1 fill in the gap

Procedures:

Sampling method: Volunteer sample - an advertisement sought male volunteers, to be paid $15 a day, for a study of ‘prison life’.

Participants: the 24 most stable men (physically and mentally) were selected, all students, and largely middle class.

Participants were assigned randomly to the role of either a prisoner or a guard.

Mock prison was built in the basement of Stanford University.

Guards were each given a uniform, a whistle, a wooden baton and sunglasses.

They were told that they should ‘maintain a reasonable degree of order within the prison’ but were given no further instructions about how to behave.

Prisoners were issued with a prison uniform: a numbered smock, a light ankle chain, rubber sandals and a cap to make it look like their hair had been cut off.

Findings:

The guards became sadistic and oppressive.

Punishments included solitary confinement and humiliation.

The prisoners became passive and depressed.

Five prisoners had to be released early because of extreme depression.

The experiment was ended after 6 days, despite the intention to continue for 2 weeks.

Even when participants believed they were unobserved, they conformed to their roles.

Conclusions:

There was strong evidence of conformity to social roles for prisoners and guards.

Participants reported that they had ‘acted out of character’, and there was no lasting change in their private opinions.

The conformity was due to the social situation rather than to the personal characteristics of the male student participants, as none of the participants had ever shown such character traits or behaviour in the past.

Zimbardo’s research is taken as providing evidence in favour of the importance of situational factors in determining behaviour, rather than dispositional factors.