Zimbardo

Question 1

AO3 - lack of realism

Answer 1

Zimbardo’s study lacked realism. Banuazizi and Movahedi claimed that the participants were playacting based on stereotypes of how they thought prisoners and prison guards were supposed to behave. E.g. One participant based his role on a character from the film ‘Cool Hand Luke’. Suggests we cannot use Zimbardo’s study to understand real life prison conformity to social roles.
However, Zimbardo reported that 90% of the prisoners’ conversations were about prison life, and one of the prisoners said he believed it to be a real prison. Therefore it was reflective of a real prison environment.

Question 2

AO3 - failure to replicate

Answer 2

Other research has failed to replicate Zimbardo’s findings. Reicher and Haslam replicated the study in the UK and found that the guards were unwilling to impose authority over the prisoners. Both groups (prisoners and guards) attempted to establish an equal and fair social system, although this ended up failing and some prisoners took control. This is therefore opposite to Zimbardo’s findings suggesting they had little reliability.
Furthermore, Zimbardo’s experiment was extremely unethical as prisoners were not protected from physical or psychological harm.

Question 3

AO3 - all male sample, and Zimbardo took part

Answer 3

Zimbardo’s study had very low population validity. This was due to the small sample size and the sample being only male. This creates low ecological validity as the results are not representative of the wider population meaning they cannot be generalised.
Furthermore, Zimbardo took part in the study as a prison warden. This could have compromised his objectivity and led to bias in the way he interpreted the results due to him potentially only seeing what he wanted the outcome of the experiment to be. This therefore decreases the scientific credibility of this study.