Conformity to social roles

Question 1

What was zimbardos aim?

Answer 1

• Zimbardo wanted to know why prison guards behaved brutally, was it because of their personality or social roles

Question 2

Where was the location of Zimbardo’s study?

Answer 2

• Stanford university

Question 3

Who were the participants?

Answer 3

• 21 men

Question 4

What was Zimbardo’s procedure?

Answer 4

• Zimbardo selected 21 men who were tested as emotionally stable
• They were randomly assigned to play the role as either prisoner or guard
• They were encouraged to conform to their social roles
• Zimbardo acted as the superintendant

Question 5

What were the uniforms?

Answer 5

• Prisoners were given a loose smock to war and a cap to cover their hair
• They were identified with numbers for de - individuation
• Guards had wooden clubs, handcuffs and mirror shades to hide their emotion

Question 6

What were Zimbardos findings?

Answer 6

• Guards took up their roles with enthusiasm, treating prisoners harshly

Question 7

What happened on day two?

Answer 7

• prisoners rebelled
• They ripped their uniforms and swore at guards
• guards used divide and rule tactics and harassed the prisoners
• After the rebellion was put down, prisoners were subdued, depressed and anxious
• one prisoner was released

Question 8

What happened on day four?

Answer 8

• two more prisoners were released
• one went on hunger strike
• the guards tried to force feed them and punished them by putting the prisoner in the hole

Question 9

What happened on day 6?

Answer 9

• Guards became increasingly brutal and aggressive, enjoying their power
• On day 6, the study ended early instead of 14 days

Question 10

What is a strength of Zimbardo’s study?

Answer 10

• A strength is that Zimbardos experiment was well controlled
• For example, all participants were emotionally stable and were chosen randomly as guard and prisoner
• This means that individual differences were ruled out and all behaviours were caused by social roles taken on
• This increased internal validity

Question 11

What is a limitation of Zimbardo’s research? (R)

Answer 11

• One limitation is that there is a lack of realism
• Movahedi and Banuazizi argued that participants were merely play acting rather then actually conforming
• The participants acted on stereotypes of a prisoner and guard
• For example, one guard was based on a brutal character from Cool Hand Luke, showing that the SPE does not tell us about conformity to social roles
  Counterpoint = Mark McDermott argues that prisoners did behave that prison was real to them. For example, 90% of prisoners conversations were about prison life and their ‘sentences’. A prisoner ‘416’ also believed that the prison was real and just ran by psychologists. This shows SPE had high internal validity

Question 12

What is limitation of Zimbardo’s research? (E)

Answer 12

• Another limitation is that Zimbardo may have exaggerated the power of social roles
• Fromm
• For example, 1/3 of guards actually were brutal. Additionally another third tried to apply rules fairly. The rest actively tried to help and offered cigarettes. This shows that Zimbardo may have minimised the influence of dispositional factors (personality) and overstated the influence of social roles