Conformity to social roles

Question 1

What are social roles?

Answer 1

• The behaviours expected of an individual who occupies a given social position or status.
• Each social role carries expected behaviours called norms

Question 2

What were the aims and procedures of the Stanford Prison experiment?

Answer 2

Aims:
* Examine whether people would conform to the social roles of a prison guard or prisoner when placed in a mock prison environment
* Examine whether behaviour displayed in prisons was due to internal factors or external factors

Procedures:
* 21 male university students obtained through volunteer sampling, selected based on physical/mental stability and were paid $15 a day to take part
* Participants assigned either prisoner or guard role
* Stanford basement turned into a mock prison, and participants were arrested by real police, fingerprinted, stripped and numbered
* Experiment ran for 2 weeks
* Five prisoners released early because of extreme adverse reactions, and the whole experiment was terminated after 6 days

Question 3

What were the conclusions of the Stanford Prison experiment?

Answer 3

• Prisoners and guards quickly identified with social roles, even when it goes against their moral principles
• Situational factors were responsible for behaviour found as none of the participants had demonstrated that behaviour previously

Question 4

What are the evaluations for the strengths of the Stanford Prison experiment?

Answer 4

Abu Ghraib
* Military prison in Iraq notorious for the torture and abuse of Iraqi prisoners by US soldiers in 2003 and 2004
* Zimbardo believed abusive guards were victims of situational factors that made abuse more likely. He concluded the SPE findings could explain Abu Ghraib, e.g prison environment, boredom or no accountability
* Shows that these factors, combined with an opportunity to misuse power, led to abuses in SPE and Abu Ghraib

High internal validity
* Emotionally stable participants were selected from a group of volunteers and randomly assigned a role
* If there was a difference in behaviour, theoretically it was be due to the pressures of the situation and roles they were given
* Having such control over variables is a strength because validity is increased, and we can draw more confident conclusions

Question 5

What are the evaluations for the weaknesses of the Stanford Prison experiments?

Answer 5

No protection from harm
* Prisoners were stressed, frightened and abused
* The guards may feel guilty at how they ended up treating them, although not all guards were bad but may have been scared so did not attempt to stop the ‘ringleaders’
* Overall, the 6 day study was an ethically incorrect and traumatic experience

Conformity to roles is not automatic
* Haslam and Reicher (2012) challenged the belief that the sadistic behaviour was automatic
* In the experiment, guard behaviour varied. ⅓ were brutal, ⅓ applied rules fairly and ⅓ actively tried to help prisoners
* This shows the guards chose how to behaviour and exercised right and wrong choices instead of blindly conforming

Demand characteristics
* Banuazizi and Movahedi (1975) believed behaviours were not due to prison environment and social roles but were due to powerful demand characteristics around how experimenters wanted them to behave
* They presented details of the study to a large group of students who had not heard of the study, and the majority guessed the purpose was to show that ordinary people assigned roles would act in these certain ways
* This suggests that the participant behaviour in the experiment was due to demand characteristics, rather than the prison environment