Conformity to Social Roles: Zimbardo (OCR A-Level Psychology): Revision Notes
1.1.4 Conformity to Social Roles: Zimbardo
Zimbardo (1970's) - Conformity to social roles
Social roles = The parts individuals play as members of a social group
Aim:
To investigate the extent to which individuals would conform to the social roles of guards and prisoners in a role-playing simulation of prison life
Participants:
👬 24 physically and emotionally stable male undergraduate students
Key facts:
- Advertised in a newspaper and paid prisoners $15 a day
- Prisoners wore smocks, nylon stocking caps, and a chain around one ancle and were only referred to by their assigned number - an attempt to deindividualise them.
- Guards wore khaki uniforms and were given handcuffs and reflective sunglasses
- Prisoners were given a realistic, unexpected arrest - fingerprinted and stripped.
Procedure:
- Zimbardo converted the basement of Stanford University into a mock prison.
- Participants were randomly assigned the roles of guards and prisoners.
- The guards were instructed to run the prison without using physical violence.
- The experiment was set to run for two weeks.
Findings:
- Both the prisoners and guards quickly identified with their social roles. Within days the prisoners rebelled and the guards then grew increasingly aggressive and abusive towards the prisoners, becoming a threat to the prisoner's physical and psychological health. The prisoners became increasingly submissive, identifying further with their subordinate role.
- Prisoners would snitch on other prisoners in an attempt to please the guards.
- They would defend the guards when other prisoners broke the rules, reinforcing their social roles as guards and prisoners, despite it being a role-play simulation of prison life.
Conclusion:
The guards became more assertive and demanding of obedience from the prisoners while the prisoners became more submissive. This suggests that the social roles became increasingly internalised even when the role went against their moral principles
Prison guards
Evaluation - Zimbardo
Participants were fully debriefed about the aims and results of the study. This is particularly important when considering that the BPS ethical guidelines of deception and informed consent had been breached. Dealing with ethical issues in this way makes the study more ethically acceptable, but does not change the validity and reliability of the findings
Zimbardo's research has provided real-life applications as it changed the way US prisons are run. The number of ethical issues with the study led to the formal recognition or ethical guidelines so that future studies were safer and less harmful to participants due to legally bound rules.
As the participants knew they were taking part in an experiment and were being observed, they may have changed their behaviour to please the experimenter or due to confounding variables such as their response to being observed. In a real-life situation, they may not have behaved in the same way. However, the level of brutal behaviour by the guards was far more extreme than would be expected when simply acting a role.
The study may also lack population validity as it consisted of only American male students so the findings cannot be generalised to other genders and cultures. For example, America is an individualist culture (where people are generally less conforming) and the results may be different in collectivist cultures such as China or Japan.
Participants were not protected from psychological harm and stress, such as anxiety, emotional distress and embarrassment, and as a result, the study had to stop after 6 days as opposed to the original 14 days planned. This study would be deemed unacceptable according to modern ethical standards.