– Following reports in the 1960s USA of brutality by prison guards, Zimbardo wanted to know if the brutality was created by statistic personalities or the situation
THE STANFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT
– In 1973 Zimbardo et al set up a mock prison in the basement of the psychology department at Stanford University.
– He wanted to find out if prison guards behaved brutally because they have sadistic personalities, or is it the situation that created such behaviour?
PROCEDURE
– They advertised for male student volunteers and selected those who were deemed ‘emotionally stable’ after extensive psychological testing.
– 24 were chosen
– The students were randomly assigned the roles of guards or prisoners.
– The prisoners were treated as extreme as real prisoners and were randomly arrested
– They were given a uniform and an ID number and were only referred to as their number
– The social roles of these were strictly divided and the prisoner’s daily routines heavily regulated.
– There were 16 rules they had to follow which were enforced by the guards.
– The guards were told they had complete power over the prisoners, for instance even deciding when they could go to the toilet
FINDINGS
– Over the first few days of the study the guards grew increasingly tyrannical and abusive towards the prisoners
– They made the prisoners carry out degrading activities
– Within two days, the prisoners rebelled as the guards harassed the prisoners constantly.
– After the rebellion, the prisoners became subdued, depressed and anxious.
– One prisoner was released on the first day because he showed symptoms of psychological disturbance.
– Two more were released on the fourth day, with one prisoner going on hunger strike and then shunned by the other prisoners.
– The guards identified more and more closely with their role, with some of them appearing to enjoy the power they had over the prisoners.
– The guard’s behaviour became a risk to the prisoner’s psychological and physical health and the study was stopped after six days instead of the intended 14.
CONCLUSIONS
– Zimbardo concluded that all guards, prisoners and researchers conformed to their roles within the prison
– Even volunteers who came in to perform certain functions found themselves behaving as if they were in a prison rather than a psychological study
EVALUATION OF ZIMBARDO’S STUDY
STRENGTH
High Control
– Zimbardo has some control over variables.
– For example, the selection of participants.
– Emotionally stable individuals were chosen and randomly assigned the roles.
– This was one way to rule out individual personality differences as an explanation of the findings.
– Having this control over variables is a strength because it increases the internal validity of the study.
– So we can be much more confident in drawing conclusions about the influence of roles on behaviour.
– Therefore, as this study has high control extraneous variables are less likely to affect the results meaning there is a higher validity
LIMITATIONS
Demand Characteristics
– Some say that the behaviour of the participants in the experiment was more a consequence of demand characteristics than conformity to roles.
– They presented some of the details of the procedure to a large sample of students who had never heard of the study.
– The vast majority correctly guessed that the purpose of the experiment was to show that ordinary people assigned to the role of guard or prisoner would act like a real prisoner and guard
– They predicted that guards would act in a hostile domineering way and that prisoners would react in a passive way.
– This suggests that the behaviour of Zimbardo’s guards and prisoners was not due to their response to a compelling prison environment but rather it was a responsible for the demand characteristics in the experimental situation itself
– Instead of conforming to the roles because of the prison situation, they were playing the roles that the thought they had to do
Conformity to Roles is Not Automatic
– Haslam and Reicher challenge Zimbardo’s believe that the guards drifted into sadistic behaviour due to an automatic consequence of them embracing their role.
– The guard’s behaviour varied from being fully statistic to being good guards who did not degrade or harass the prisoners
– Haslam and Reicher argue that this shows that the guards choose how to behave, rather than blindly conforming to the social role, as suggested by Zimbardo