ZIMBARDO
CONFORMITY TO SOCIAL ROLES, AS INVESTIGATED BY ZIMBARDO
THEORY
It had been argued that prison guards bring to their jobs a particular ‘guard mentality’ and are therefore attracted to the job as they are already sadistic and insensitive people. Whereas prisoners are individuals who have no respect for law and order and bring this aggressiveness and impulsivity to the prison. Attempts to explain the violent and brutal conditions often found in prisons had previously used dispositional attribution. That is, that the state of the prison is due to the nature of the prison guards and the prisoners. The dispositional approach is, therefore, usually biological and natural as it assumes that the problem has to do with the personality of the guard or prisoner (it could be argued that personality can be shaped by SLT and operant conditioning, though).
Zimbardo believed that prison behaviour could be best explained using situational attribution. In particular he believed that the conditions were influenced by the social roles that prisoners and prisoner guards are expected to play. Shakespeare put this quite well when he wrote, ‘All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women players’ (As You Like It). Suggesting that we are what we play. Milgram said something similar when he said, ‘it is not the apple that is bad but the barrel’.
We all play many societal roles, and these social roles shape our identity to some extent. Each role we play brings with it certain rules or expectations about how we should behave. For example, when we play the role of a student, there may be very different expectations about how we should behave compared with, say, the role of an audience member at a football game. Similarly, there may be certain expectations (stereotypes) about the role a prisoner or prison guard should play
Philip Zimbardo's situational theory, particularly exemplified in the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE), focuses on the power of the situation and environmental factors to influence individual behavior, rather than innate personality traits. While the SPE is often cited in discussions of various psychological concepts, including conformity to social roles, deindividuation, and the effects of anonymity, Zimbardo's primary hypothesis and theoretical contribution centre around the concept of the "Lucifer Effect," which explains how good people can turn evil based on situational influences.
CONFORMITY TO SOCIAL ROLES
Zimbardo's theory posits that individuals conform to the social roles they are expected to play, especially in structured environments. In the SPE, participants were assigned roles of either guards or prisoners, which they adapted to with alarming intensity and rapidity. The theory suggests that these roles come with certain expected behaviours and attitudes, which individuals adopt, often subconsciously, due to social and environmental pressures. This was evident in the way that 'guards' in the experiment adopted authoritarian behaviours while 'prisoners' became submissive.
DEINDIVIDUATION
Although deindividuation (a state where individuals lose their sense of personal identity and responsibility, often leading to uncharacteristic behaviour) was not the central hypothesis of Zimbardo's study, the SPE provided insights into how anonymity and group dynamics can contribute to deindividuation effects. Smocks, stocking caps for prisoners, and uniforms for guards were thought to strip individuals of their identities, contributing to their immersion in their roles. However, Zimbardo himself noted that the conditions of the SPE were not designed to study deindividuation in its purest form.
THE LUCIFER EFFECT
The core of Zimbardo's situational theory is encapsulated in the "Lucifer Effect," a term he later used to describe the phenomenon where ordinary, good people can engage in evil actions due to the influence of an authoritarian environment and the diffusion of personal responsibility. This theory argues that situational and systemic powers can overshadow individual moralities and personalities, leading to behaviours that the individuals involved would not typically endorse or enact in different circumstances.
HYPOTHESIS AND THEORY
Zimbardo's hypothesis in the SPE was that the behavior of individuals could be significantly altered by the social roles and the environment they are placed in, rather than being solely a function of individual personality traits. His theory, therefore, emphasizes the situational attribution of behavior, suggesting that the environment and the roles individuals are asked to play can have a profound impact on their actions, often leading to behaviors that conform to those roles, even if they contradict the individual's personal morals or social norms.
In summary, while Zimbardo's SPE is often discussed in the context of deindividuation and anonymity, the core of his situational theory revolves around the power of environmental and situational factors to influence individual behaviour through the adoption of and conformity to assigned social roles.
SOCIAL ROLES
We all play many societal roles, which shape our identity to some extent. Each role we play brings certain rules or expectations about how we should behave. For example, when we play the role of a student there may be very different expectations about how we should behave compared with saying the role of an audience member at a football game. Similarly, there may be certain expectations (stereotypes) about the role a prisoner or prison guard should play.
RESEARCH: THE STAMFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT
AIMS:
TO UNDERSTAND THE IMPACT OF SITUATIONAL VARIABLES ON BEHAVIOUR
The primary aim was to examine how situational factors—such as the assignment to 'prisoner' or 'guard'—affect individuals' behaviour and how these roles influence their interactions within a mock prison setting.
TO EXPLORE THE PSYCHOLOGICAL EFFECTS OF IMPRISONMENT
Zimbardo aimed to explore the psychological impacts experienced by participants acting as prisoners and guards, focusing on how these roles would affect their self-perception, behaviour towards others, and coping mechanisms in a highly controlled environment.
TO INVESTIGATE THE POWER DYNAMICS WITHIN A SIMULATED PRISON
The experiment also aimed to observe the development of power structures, authority, and submission within the artificial prison context, assessing how these dynamics would manifest in both 'guards' and 'prisoners.'
HYPOTHESIS
Zimbardo hypothesied that the situational variables inherent in the prison environment—rather than individual personality traits—would lead to significant changes in behaviour among participants. Specifically, he predicted that:
Participants assigned to the role of 'guards' would adopt authoritarian behaviours: It was expected that those given power and authority would begin to exercise it in increasingly oppressive ways, potentially engaging in abusive or authoritarian actions as part of their role conformity
**Participants assigned to the role of 'prisoner, would become passive and accept their subjugation*
*: Zimbardo's hypothesis further suggested that individuals placed in the role of 'prisoners' would internalize their subordinate status, leading to behaviours characterized by passivity and acceptance of the guards' dominance. This acceptance was expected to manifest through decreased resistance to orders, diminished self-esteem, and potentially increased feelings of helplessness or psychological distress as a result of their perceived lack of control and autonomy.
PROCEDURE:
(I have made this so long because it is interesting and so you know but pleeease don’t try and make it this long in the exam).
A simulated prison was built in the basement of the psychology building at Stanford University. The simulated prison comprised the following:
Three small cells (each 6 x 9 feet) with three prisoners to a cell. The cells contained three cots (with mattress, sheet and pillow) for each prisoner.
A ‘solitary confinement. Which was an extremely small, unlit room (2 x 2 x 7 ft). This room was across from the cells.
Several rooms in an adjacent building wing were used as guards’ quarters (to change in and out of uniform and for relaxation), interview rooms and a bedroom for the ‘warden’ and ‘superintendent’ (Zimbardo).
A small, enclosed room was used as a ‘prison yard’.
For the duration of the study, the prisoners remained in the mock prison for 24 hours. Three were arbitrarily assigned to each of the three cells, and the others were on stand-by at their homes. The guards worked on three-man, eight-hour shifts and went home after their shifts.
The 24 participants were randomly assigned to the role of ‘prisoner’ or ‘guard’ and informed by telephone to be available at their homes on a particular Sunday when the experiment would begin.
Those participants allocated the role of guards had to attend an orientation meeting the day before the induction of the prisoners. They met the principal investigators, the ‘superintendent’ of the prison (Zimbardo) and the ‘warden’ (undergraduate research assistant). They were told that the ‘experimenters wanted to simulate a prison environment within the limits imposed by pragmatic and ethical considerations. Their assigned task as prison guards was to ‘maintain the reasonable order within the prison necessary for effective functioning.
The guards were instructed in their administrative details, including the work shifts, the completion of ‘critical incident’ reports, and managing the prisoners' meals, work, and recreation programmes. To involve the guards in their roles even before the prisoners were incarcerated, they assisted in the final phases of completing the prison complex – putting the cots in the cells, moving furniture, etc. However, the guards were not told how to behave apart from being explicitly told that they were prohibited from using physical punishment or aggression.
The guards believed that the experimenters were mainly interested in studying the prisoners' behaviour, although the experimenters were just as interested in their behaviour.
The uniforms of both prisoners and guards were intended to increase group identity and reduce individuality within the two groups. They were intended to de-individuate the prisoners.
The guards’ uniform consisted of a plain khaki shirt and trousers, a whistle, a police nightstick (a wooden batten) and reflecting sunglasses, which made eye contact impossible. The guards’ uniforms were intended to convey a military attitude, while the baton and whistle were symbols of control and power.
The prisoners’ uniform consisted of a loose-fitting muslin smock with an identification number on the front and back, no underwear, rubber sandals, a hat made from a nylon stocking and they had a light chain and lock around their ankle. Each prisoner was also given a toothbrush, soap, soap dish, towel and bed linen. No personal belongings were allowed in the cell. The prisoners’ uniforms were designed to de-individuate the prisoners to be humiliating and serve as symbols of subservience and dependence. The ankle chain was a constant reminder of the oppressiveness of the environment. The stocking cap removed any distinctiveness associated with hair length, colour and style (as does shaving of heads in some ‘real’ prisons). The ill-fitting uniforms made the prisoners feel awkward in their movements; since these ‘dresses’ were worn without underwear (emasculation)., the prisoners were forced to assume unfamiliar postures, more like those of a woman than a man - another part of the emasculating process.
The prisoner participants were unexpectedly ‘arrested at their homes with the cooperation of the local police department. A police officer then charged them with suspicion of burglary or armed robbery, advised them of their rights, handcuffed them, thoroughly searched them (often in full view of their neighbours and passersby) and drove them in the back of a police car to the police station.
At the police station, they had their fingerprints and photographs taken and were put in a detention cell. Each prisoner was then blindfolded and driven to the mock prison by one of the experimenters and a guard. Throughout this arrest procedure, the police officers maintained a formal, serious attitude and did not tell the participants that this had anything to do with the mock prison study.
At the mock prison, each prisoner was stripped, sprayed with a delousing preparation (a deodorant spray) and made to stand alone and naked in the ‘yard’. After being given their uniform and having a mug shot (ID picture) taken, the prisoner was put in his cell and ordered to remain silent.
The warden read them the institution's rules (developed by the guards and the warden), which were to be memorised and followed. Prisoners were to be referred to only by the number on their uniforms, also to depersonalise and deindividuate them.
The participants were allowed three bland meals, three supervised toilet visits, and two hours for reading or letter writing every day. Work assignments had to be carried out, and two visiting periods per week were scheduled, as were movie rights and exercise periods.
Three times a day prisoners were lined up for a ‘count’ (one on each guard work-shift). The original purpose of the ‘count’ was to establish that all prisoners were present and to test them on their knowledge of the rules and their ID numbers. The first ‘counts’ lasted only about ten minutes, but as conditions in the prison deteriorated, they increased in length until some lasted for several hours.
RESULTS
After a relatively uneventful first day, on the second day, the prisoners in Cell 1 blockaded their cell door with their beds and took off their stocking caps, refusing to come out or follow the guards' instructions. Guards from other shifts volunteered to work extra hours to assist in subduing the revolt and subsequently attacked the prisoners with fire extinguishers without being supervised by the research staff. Finding that handling nine cell mates with only three guards per shift was challenging, one of the guards suggested that they use psychological tactics to control them. They set up a "privilege cell" in which prisoners not involved in the riot were treated with special rewards, such as higher-quality meals. The "privileged" inmates chose not to eat the meal to stay uniform with their fellow prisoners.
After only 36 hours, one prisoner began to act "crazy", as Zimbardo described: "#8612 then began to act crazy, to scream, to curse, to go into a rage that seemed out of control. It took quite a while before we became convinced that he was suffering and that we had to release him."
Guards forced the prisoners to repeat their assigned numbers to reinforce the idea that this was their new identity. Guards soon used these prisoner counts to harass the prisoners, using physical punishment such as protracted exercise for errors in the prisoner count. Sanitary conditions declined rapidly, exacerbated by the guards' refusal to allow some prisoners to urinate or defecate anywhere but in a bucket placed in their cell. The guards would not let the prisoners empty the sanitation bucket as punishment. Mattresses were a valued item in the prison, so the guards would punish prisoners by removing them, leaving them to sleep on concrete. Some prisoners were forced to be naked as a method of degradation. Several guards became increasingly cruel as the experiment continued; experimenters reported that approximately one-third of the guards exhibited genuine sadistic tendencies. Most guards were upset when the experiment concluded after only six days.
Zimbardo mentions his absorption in the experiment. On the fourth day, some guards said they heard a rumour that the released prisoner would return with his friends and free the remaining inmates. Zimbardo and the guards disassembled the prison and moved it onto a different building floor. Zimbardo waited in the basement in case the released prisoner showed up and planned to tell him that the experiment had been terminated. The released prisoner never returned, and the prison was rebuilt again in the basement.
Zimbardo argued that the prisoners had internalised their roles, since some had stated that they would accept "parole" even if it would mean forfeiting their pay, they did not quit when their parole applications were denied. Zimbardo argued they had no reason to continue participation in the experiment after losing all monetary compensation, yet they did because they had internalized the prisoner identity.
Prisoner No. 416, a newly admitted stand-by prisoner, expressed concern over the treatment of the other prisoners. The guards responded with more abuse. When he refused to eat his sausages, saying he was on a hunger strike, guards confined him to "solitary confinement", a dark closet: "The guards then instructed the other prisoners to punch on the door while shouting at 416 repeatedly." The guards stated that he would be released from solitary confinement only if the prisoners gave up their blankets and slept on their bare mattresses, which all but one refused to do.
Zimbardo aborted the experiment early when Christina Maslach, a graduate student he was then dating (and later married), objected to the prison conditions after she was introduced to the experiment to conduct interviews. Zimbardo noted that, of more than fifty people who had observed the experiment, Maslach was the only one who questioned its morality. The Stanford Prison experiment was discontinued after only six days of a planned two-week duration.
In summary, the study showed that the behaviour of the ‘normal’ students, who had been randomly allocated to each condition, was affected by the role they had been assigned to the extent that they seemed to believe in their allocated positions. The study, therefore, rejects the dispositional hypothesis.
The experiment had to be stopped after just six days instead of the planned 14 days, mainly because of the pathological reactions of the participants. Five prisoners had to be released even earlier because of extreme emotional depression.
The guards and prisoners generally showed a marked tendency towards increasingly negative emotions, and their overall outlook became increasingly negative. Even though guards and prisoners were essentially free to engage in any form of interaction, the nature of their encounters tended to be negative, hostile, insulting and dehumanising. The prisoners and the guards internalised the prison; that is, they started to believe in it. They adopted very contrasting behaviours, which were appropriate for their respective roles. The guards started most interactions in commands or verbal affronts, while the prisoners adopted a generally passive response mode. Although it was clear to all participants that the experimenters would not permit physical violence to take place, varieties of less direct aggressive behaviour were often observed.
One of the most dramatic pieces of evidence of the impact of this situation upon the participants was when five prisoners had to be released early due to extreme emotional depression, crying, rage and acute anxiety. Of the remaining prisoners, only two said they were unwilling to forfeit the money they had earned in return for being ‘paroled’. When the simulation was terminated after only six days instead of the projected fourteen days, all of the remaining prisoners were delighted by the news, but most of the guards seemed to be distressed by the premature end to the study - it appeared that they had become sufficiently involved in their role that they now enjoyed the extreme control and power which they exercised. Zimbardo refers to this as a pathology of power.
EVALUATION
However, there were individual differences in coping styles with this novel experience. Half of the prisoners endured the oppressive atmosphere, and not all the guards resorted to hostility; some guards were tough but fair, while some went far beyond their roles to engage in creative cruelty and harassment.
Explanation
Zimbardo believes the study demonstrates the powerful effect roles can have on peoples’ behaviour. The participants were playing the role that they thought was expected of, either a prisoner or prison guard. (It is a simulation of what we expect prison life to be, rather than what it is, as none of the participants had previously been in prison as a guard or prisoner).
Zimbardo then went on to explain the prison guards’ behaviour and the prisoners’ behaviour.
Zimbardo explains that the deterioration in guard behaviour was power and deindividuation. The guards were given control over the lives of other human beings and did not have to justify their displays of power as they would normally have to in their daily lives. They started to enjoy this power very earlier on in the study (pathology of power) as demonstrated that even after the first day all prisoner rights became redefined as privileges, and all privileges were cancelled.
The loss of personal identity – the prisoners were de-individuated by being stripped of their individuality, their name, dress, appearance, behaviour style, and history. Living among strangers who do not know your name or history, dressed like all the other prisoners, all led to the weakening of self-identity among the prisoners. The prisoners became de-individuated not only to the guards but to themselves.
Ethics: Lack of fully informed Consent
The only deception involved was the prisoners' arrest at the experiment's beginning. The prisoners were arrested at their homes and charged with armed robbery. The local Palo Alto police department assisted Zimbardo with the arrests and conducted full booking procedures on the prisoners, including fingerprinting and mug shots. They were transported to the mock prison from the police station, where they were strip-searched and given their new identities.
However, Zimbardo defends the experiment in several ways:
The prisoners were not told partly because final approval from the police wasn’t given until minutes before the participants decided to participate, and partly because the researchers wanted the arrests to come as a surprise. However, this was a breach of Zimbardo’s contract ethics that all participants had signed.
Ethics: Psychological and Physical Harm
The main criticism of Zimbardo’s study is on ethical grounds.
‘’The guards and prisoners adapted to their roles more than they were expected, stepping beyond the boundaries of what had been predicted, leading to dangerous and psychologically damaging situations. One-third of the guards were judged to have exhibited "genuine sadistic tendencies". At the same time, many prisoners were emotionally traumatized, as two of them had to be removed from the experiment early. Zimbardo realised that he had been passively allowing unethical acts to be performed under his supervision; Zimbardo concluded that prisoners and guards had become grossly absorbed in their roles and terminated the experiment. Ethical concerns surrounding the experiment often compared to the Milgram experiment, conducted in 1961 at Yale University by Stanley Milgram, Zimbardo's former high school friend. Tom Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Jr. wrote in 1981 that The Milgram and Stanford prison experiments were frightening in their implications about the danger lurking in the darker side of human nature. “
For the harm:
When Zimbardo realised just how much the prisoners disliked the experience, which was unexpected, the experiment was abandoned.
The Office of Naval Research, the Psychology Department, and the University Committee of Human Experimentation approved the study. This Committee also did not anticipate the prisoner’s extreme reactions that were to follow. However, the Navy’s involvement was also criticised as they were said to have wanted the study done for dubious reasons, e.g., not to investigate how their soldiers would act if POWs would react. Still, more to know how to make the POW they captured feel vulnerable.
Ethics: Could alternative research methods be used?
Alternative methodologies were looked at which would cause less distress to the participants but also give the desired information, but nothing suitable could be found.
Ethics: Was the debriefing sensitive? Did the participants feel harmed?
Extensive group and individual debriefing sessions were held and all participants returned post-experimental questionnaires several weeks, then several months later, then at yearly intervals.
Ethics: Do the ends justify the means?
Zimbardo also strongly argues that the benefits gained about our understanding of human behaviour and how we can improve society should balance the distress caused by the study. However it has been suggested that the US Navy was not so much interested in making prisons more human and were more interested in using the study to train people in the armed services to cope with the stresses of captivity.
Un-representative sample
Male subjects were recruited through newspaper ads, offering them $15 daily to participate. Seventy-five men applied to participate, and 24 were chosen. A battery of tests was employed to select the most stable personalities. Volunteers were randomly assigned to play prison guard or prisoner through the flip of a coin. Random allocation is important as it suggests all pps had an equal chance of being prisoners or guards.
The study can also be criticised for its unrepresentative sample. Since the experiment was conducted using 24 normal, healthy male college students who were predominantly middle class and white (one was described as oriental), we must carefully generalise the results to people of different ages, genders, cultures, ethnicities, and classes.
Selection bias: Was it dispositional factors?
Out of 75 respondents, Zimbardo and his team selected the 24 males they deemed the most psychologically stable and healthy. The group was intentionally selected to exclude those with criminal background, psychological impairments or medical problems. Real criminals are not psychologically healthy. If they chose 24 out of 75, they hand-picked their sample, which is biased. They all agreed to participate in a 7 to 14-day period and received $15 per day (roughly equivalent to $85 or £40-£60 in 2011). Offering money for participating and advertising in a particular newspaper again means a biased sample as only poor people, with time on their hands, applied. Again, selection bias, as maybe the under-advantaged would be more likely to abuse power as they feel oppressed.
Also, it has been argued that selection bias may have played a role in the results. Researchers from Western Kentucky University recruited students for a study using an advertisement similar to the one used in the Stanford Prison Experiment, with and without the words "prison life". It was found that students volunteering for a prison life study possessed dispositions toward abusive behaviour.
Mundane Realism: Against
Importantly, the study has been criticised for lacking mundane realism. For practical and ethical reasons, the simulated prison could not be realistic. Many particularly unpleasant aspects of prison life were absent, such as involuntary homosexuality, racism, beatings and threats to life. Nor had the prisoners committed any real crime. In real prisons many of the inmates are violent aggressive, psychopathic, suicidal, alcoholic, withdrawing from drugs etc. In contrast, Zimbardo’s prisoners had been tested for psychological stability. They demonstrated they would do something honest yet degrading to obtain a little money (e.g., participate
in the experiment). Also, the maximum anticipated sentence was just two weeks. This is very different to facing years or a life sentence. Nor were they deprived of their families, sex, or anything else for long. Lastly, the prisoners did not attack each other, as happens with alarming regularity in US and UK prisons. Plus, according to Lockwood, 1980, twenty percent of prisoners in the US have been subjected to sexual assault Wortley, 2002, reports that there were 26, 0000 prisoner-prisoner assaults in 1995. Therefore, the study may not be a meaningful comparison to real prison environments. Moreover, in real prisons, prisoners do not act helplessly, as there is evidence that prison attacks on prison officers occur with great frequency. It has been argued that Zimbardo’s experiment has better mundane realism when compared to prisoners of war (POWS) in military conditions as soldiers can be compared better with the guards in Stamford prison experiment, e.g., young men not used to having power. POWS may also be more comparable to the prisoners as they had not committed a crime.
Additionally, many of the conditions imposed in the experiment were arbitrary. They may not have correlated with actual prison conditions, including blindfolding incoming prisoners, not allowing them to wear underwear, not allowing them to look out of windows and not allowing them to use their names.
Mundane Realism: for
Zimbardo argued that prison is a confusing and dehumanizing experience and that it was necessary to enact these procedures to put the prisoners in the proper frame of mind; however, it is difficult to know how similar the effects were to an actual prison and the experiment's methods would be difficult to reproduce exactly.
However, there is considerable evidence that the participants did react to the situation as though it was real. For example, 90% of the prisoners’ private conversations, which the researchers monitored, were about prison conditions, and only 10% were about life outside prison. The guards, too, rarely exchanged personal information during their relaxation breaks - they either talked about ‘problem prisoners’, other prison topics, or did not talk at all. The guards were always on time and even worked overtime for no extra pay. When the prisoners were introduced to a priest, they referred to themselves by their prison number rather than their first name. Some even asked him to get a lawyer to help get them out.
Internal Validity: Demand characteristics and role-playing
Some of the experiment's critics argued that participants were merely engaging in role-playing, basing their behaviour on how they were expected to behave or modelling it after stereotypes about the behaviour of prisoners and guards. In response, Zimbardo claimed that although there was role-playing initially, participants internalised these roles as the experiment continued.
In contrast to Zimbardo's claim that participants were given no instructions about how to behave, his briefing of the guards gave them a clear sense that they should oppress the prisoners. In this sense, the study explored the effects of tyrannical leadership. In line with this, maybe certain guards changed their behaviour because of their desire to conform to the behaviour that Zimbardo was trying to elicit.
Therefore, the results could have been demand characteristics. However, Zimbardo told officers explicitly not to harm prisoners and video footage showed they were worse when they thought nobody was watching, also initially prisoners tried to rebel and one had to be sent home for psychological stress. If displaying demand characteristic surely this would not have occurred.
Theory for behaviour: Deindividuated and situational factors
The guards' brutality could be explained in terms of perceived social roles. Individuals are asked to play a role and act as they think they should. The fact that they are deindividuated increases their ability to cast aside personal norms and act out socially accepted behaviour. This was a criticism of the study; it did not tell us how real guards behave but how people behave when asked to ‘act’ like guards.
Prisoners and prison guards were deindividuated (see A01 research). Still, there are too many variables to show whether this was the primary reason for the findings in Zimbardo’s study.
More evaluation
A main strength of the study was how it managed to maintain some degree of control and some mundane realism. The situation was tightly controlled, e.g., guards and prisoners were randomly allocated and selected using stringent criteria. The study still had mundane realism in how Zimbardo went to great extremes in making the study as true to life as possible; for example, he had the prisoners arrested from their homes.
Research methods/methodology
Because of the structure of the experiment, Zimbardo found it impossible to keep traditional scientific controls in place. He could not remain a neutral observer since he influenced the direction of the experiment as the prison's superintendent. The conclusions and observations drawn by the experimenters were largely subjective and anecdotal, and the experiment would be difficult for other researchers to reproduce.
Some critics however, do believe Zimbardo research did have strengths in the way collected data. He used several qualitative approaches such as observation (sometimes overt and sometimes covert) interviews and questionnaires.
Zimbardo’s study is the closest we can come to using controlled conditions to study the effects of imprisonment. It simply would be unethical to study real prison experimentally, for this reason it is a very valuable and rare experiment and one of the many reasons it is still cited today.
Evaluation of Explanation
Zimbardo’s study was trying to give a situational explanation for behaviour. He argued that the study demonstrates the powerful effect roles can have on peoples’ behaviour.
However some psychologists believe that he has over emphasised` the situational explanation. They state that the behaviour of prisoners and guards may have arisen from the stereotyped expectations of how they should behave. That is, the participants were only role-playing. However, Zimbardo would strongly suggest that the participants’ experiences were all too real and that even if they were only role-playing at the beginning of the study, they were internalising these roles as the study progressed. They could no longer differentiate between role-playing and self.
Other critics like Erich Fromm challenged generalising the experiment's results. Fromm specifically wrote that the personality of an individual does affect behaviour when imprisoned; he used historical examples from the Nazi concentration camps. This ran counter to the study's conclusion that the prison situation controls the individual's behaviour. Fromm also argued that the amount of sadism in the "normal" subjects could not be determined by the methods employed to screen them.
Is an eclectic Approach needed?: It is also worth noting that Zimbardo’s argument can be seen as too narrow an explanation. For example, in Zimbardo’s study, not all participants behaved similarly. For example, some guards were less willing to abuse their power. Perhaps some participants' lack of willingness had something to do with their personalities (dispositional factors). Therefore a situational explanation is reductionist other factors must be involved such as class, ethnicity, religion, personality, brain structure, emotion, addiction etc. An eclectic approach is probably the best approach to why aggression occurs in institutions such as prisons. The specification says that you must give a detailed alternative explanation here.
Has real life applications to War crimes such as abuse of prisoners in Iraq. When the Abu Ghraib military prisoner torture and abuse scandal was publicized in March 2004, many observers were immediately struck by its similarities to the Stanford Prison Experiment, among them Philip Zimbardo, who paid close attention to the details of the story. He was dismayed by official military and government representatives' shifting the blame for the torture and abuses in the Abu Ghraib American military prison onto "a few bad apples" rather than acknowledging it as possibly systemic problems of a formally established military incarceration system.BBC prison study: Alex Haslam and Steve Reicher, psychologists from the University of Exeter and the
The University of St Andrews conducted the BBC Prison Study in 2002. This was a partial replication of the Stanford Prison Experiment conducted with the assistance of the BBC, which broadcast events in the study in a documentary series called The Experiment. Their results and conclusions differed from Zimbardo's, leading to several publications on tyranny, stress and leadership. Moreover, unlike results from the Stanford Prison Experiment, these were published in leading academic journals such as the British Journal of Social Psychology, Journal of Applied Psychology, and Social Psychology Quarterly. The BBC Prison Study is now taught as a core study on the UK A-level Psychology OCR syllabus. While Haslam and Reicher's procedure was not a direct replication of Zimbardo's, their study casts further doubt on the generality of his conclusions. Specifically, it questions the notion that people slip mindlessly into roles and the idea that the dynamics of evil are in any way banal. Their research also points to the importance of leadership in the emergence of the tyranny of the form displayed by Zimbardo when briefing guards in the Stanford experiment.
EXPLANATIONS OF INSTITUTIONAL AGGRESSION:
SITUATIONAL FORCES, E.G., ZIMBARDO AND PRISONS
ZIMBARDO’S STANFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT
The Stamford prison experiment is a fabulous experiment to learn. It has applicability to:
Conformity, i.e., we conform to our stereotypes of social roles, such as what a prison officer should behave like and a prisoner will behave like.
Deindividuation, e.g., the prisoners and guards being Deindividuated because of their lack of identity (dress codes and loss of personal address (names) etc.
Institutionalised aggression, i.e., you become aggressive in institutions because of conforming to social roles, deindividuation, and deprivation of freedom, sex, family and friends, privacy, autonomy, personal security, goods and services.
THEORY
It had been argued that prison guards bring to their jobs a particular ‘guard mentality’ and are therefore attracted to the job as they are already sadistic and insensitive people. Whereas prisoners are individuals who have no respect for law and order and bring this aggressiveness and impulsivity to the prison. Attempts to explain the violent and brutal conditions often found in prisons had previously used dispositional attribution. That is, that the state of the prison is due to the nature of the prison guards and the prisoners. The dispositional approach is, therefore, usually biological and natural as it assumes that the problem has to do with the personality of the guard or prisoner (it could be argued that personality can be shaped by SLT and operant conditioning, though).
Zimbardo believed that prison behaviour could be best explained using situational attribution. In particular he believed that the conditions were influenced by the social roles that prisoners and prisoner guards are expected to play. Shakespeare put this quite well when he wrote, ‘All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women players’ (As You Like It). Suggesting that we are what we play. Milgram said something similar when he said, ‘it is not the apple that is bad but the barrel’.
We all play many societal roles, and these social roles shape our identity to some extent. Each role we play brings with it certain rules or expectations about how we should behave. For example, when we play the role of a student, there may be very different expectations about how we should behave compared with, say, the role of an audience member at a football game. Similarly, there may be certain expectations (stereotypes) about the role a prisoner or prison guard should play.
The Zimbardos study was funded by the US Navy, which, along with the US Marine Corps, was interested in discovering the causes of conflict between guards and prisoners in naval prisons.
In this experiment, Zimbardo wished to discover what happens to "normal" people who are placed in an "evil" environment.
APFC Research (I have made this so long because it is interesting, and so you know, but please don’t try to make it this long in the exam).
A simulated prison was built in the basement of the psychology building at Stanford University. The simulated prison comprised of:
Three small cells (each 6 x 9 ft) with three prisoners to a cell. The cells contained three cots (with mattress, sheet and pillow) for each prisoner.
A ‘solitary confinement’. Which was an extremely small, unlit room (2 x 2 x 7 ft). This room was across from the cells.
Several rooms in an adjacent building wing were used as guards’ quarters (to change in and out of uniform and for relaxation), interview rooms and a bedroom for the ‘warden’ and ‘superintendent’ (Zimbardo).
A small, enclosed room was used as a ‘prison yard’.
For the duration of the study, the prisoners remained in the mock prison for 24 hours. Three were arbitrarily assigned to each of the three cells, and the others were on stand-by at their homes. The guards worked on three-man, eight-hour shifts and went home after their shifts.
The 24 participants were randomly assigned to the role of ‘prisoner’ or ‘guard’ and informed by telephone to be available at their homes on a particular Sunday when the experiment would begin.
Those participants allocated the role of guards had to attend an orientation meeting the day before the induction of the prisoners. They met the principal investigators, the ‘superintendent’ of the prison (Zimbardo) and the ‘warden’ (undergraduate research assistant). They were told that the ‘experimenters wanted to try to simulate a prison environment within the limits imposed by pragmatic and ethical considerations’. Their assigned task as prison guards was to ‘maintain the reasonable degree of order within the prison necessary for effective functioning’.
The guards were instructed in their administrative details, including the work shifts, the completion of ‘critical incident’ reports, and the management of meals, work, and recreation programmes for the prisoners. To involve the guards in their roles even before the prisoners were incarcerated, they assisted in the final phases of completing the prison complex – putting the cots in the cells, moving furniture, etc. However, the guards were not told how to behave apart from being explicitly told that they were not allowed to use physical punishment or physical aggression.
The guards believed that the experimenters were mainly interested in studying the prisoners' behaviour, although the experimenters were just as interested in their behaviour.
The uniforms of both prisoners and guards were intended to increase group identity and reduce individuality within the two groups. They were intended to de-individuate the prisoners.
The guards’ uniform consisted of a plain khaki shirt and trousers, a whistle, a police nightstick (a wooden batten) and reflecting sunglasses, which made eye contact impossible. The guards’ uniforms were intended to convey a military attitude, while the baton and whistle were symbols of control and power.
The prisoners’ uniform consisted of a loose-fitting muslin smock with an identification number on the front and back, no underwear, rubber sandals, a hat made from a nylon stocking, and they had a light chain and lock around their ankles. Each prisoner was also given a toothbrush, soap, soap dish, towel and bed linen. No personal belongings were allowed in the cell. The prisoners’ uniforms were designed to de-individuate the prisoners to be humiliating and serve as symbols of subservience and dependence. The ankle chain was a constant reminder of the oppressiveness of the environment. The stocking cap removed any distinctiveness associated with hair length, colour and style (as does shaving of heads in some ‘real’ prisons). The ill-fitting uniforms made the prisoners feel awkward in their movements; since these ‘dresses’ were worn without underwear (emasculation)., the prisoners were forced to assume unfamiliar postures, more like those of a woman than a man - another part of the emasculating process.
The prisoner participants were unexpectedly ‘arrested at their homes with the cooperation of the local police department. A police officer then charged them with suspicion of burglary or armed robbery, advised them of their rights, handcuffed them, thoroughly searched them (often in full view of their neighbours and passers-by) and drove them in the back of a police car to the police station.
At the police station, they had their fingerprints and photographs taken and were put in a detention cell. Each prisoner was then blindfolded and driven to the mock prison by one of the experimenters and a guard. Throughout this arrest procedure, the police officers involved maintained a formal, serious attitude, and did not tell the participants that this had anything to do with the mock prison study.
At the mock prison, each prisoner was stripped, sprayed with a delousing preparation (a deodorant spray) and made to stand alone and naked in the ‘yard’. After being given their uniform and having a mug shot (ID picture) taken, the prisoner was put in his cell and ordered to remain silent.
The warden read them the institution's rules (developed by the guards and the warden), which were to be memorised and followed. Prisoners were to be referred to only by the number on their uniforms, also to depersonalise and deindividuate them.
Every day, the participants were allowed three bland meals, three supervised toilet visits, and two hours for the privilege of reading or letter writing. Work assignments had to be carried out, and two visiting periods per week were scheduled, as were movie rights and exercise periods.
Three times daily, prisoners were lined up for a ‘count’ (one on each guard work shift). The original purpose of the ‘count’ was to establish that all prisoners were present, and to test them on the knowledge of the rules and their ID numbers. The first ‘counts’ lasted only about ten minutes, but as conditions in the prison deteriorated, they increased in length until some lasted for several hours.
RESULTS
After a relatively uneventful first day, on the second day, the prisoners in Cell 1 blockaded their cell door with their beds and took off their stocking caps, refusing to come out or follow the guards' instructions. Guards from other shifts volunteered to work extra hours to assist in subduing the revolt and subsequently attacked the prisoners with fire extinguishers without being supervised by the research staff. Finding that handling nine cell mates with only three guards per shift was challenging, one of the guards suggested that they use psychological tactics to control them. They set up a "privilege cell" in which prisoners who were not involved in the riot were treated with special rewards, such as higher-quality meals. The "privileged" inmates chose not to eat the meal to stay uniform with their fellow prisoners.
After only 36 hours, one prisoner began to act "crazy", as Zimbardo described: "#8612 then began to act crazy, to scream, to curse, to go into a rage that seemed out of control. It took quite a while before we became convinced that he was really suffering and that we had to release him."
Guards forced the prisoners to repeat their assigned numbers to reinforce the idea that this was their new identity. Guards soon used these prisoner counts to harass the prisoners, using physical punishment such as protracted exercise for errors in the prisoner count. Sanitary conditions declined rapidly, exacerbated by the guards' refusal to allow some prisoners to urinate or defecate anywhere but in a bucket placed in their cell. The guards would not let the prisoners empty the sanitation bucket as punishment. Mattresses were a valued item in the prison, so the guards would punish prisoners by removing them, leaving them to sleep on concrete. Some prisoners were forced to be naked as a method of degradation. Several guards became increasingly cruel as the experiment continued; experimenters reported that approximately one-third of the guards exhibited genuine sadistic tendencies. Most of the guards were upset when the experiment concluded after only six days.
Zimbardo mentions his absorption in the experiment. On the fourth day, some guards said they heard a rumour that the released prisoner would return with his friends and free the remaining inmates. Zimbardo and the guards disassembled the prison and moved it onto a different building floor. Zimbardo himself waited in the basement in case the released prisoner showed up and planned to tell him that the experiment had been terminated. The released prisoner never returned, and the prison was rebuilt in the basement once again.
Zimbardo argued that the prisoners had internalised their roles, since, even though some had stated that they would accept "parole" even if it would mean forfeiting their pay, they did not quit when their parole applications were all denied. Zimbardo argued they had no reason to continue participation in the experiment after losing all monetary compensation, yet they did because they had internalized the prisoner identity.
Prisoner No. 416, a newly admitted stand-by prisoner, expressed concern over the treatment of the other prisoners. The guards responded with more abuse. When he refused to eat his sausages, saying he was on a hunger strike, guards confined him to "solitary confinement", a dark closet: "The guards then instructed the other prisoners to repeatedly punch on the door while shouting at 416." The guards stated that he would be released from solitary confinement only if the prisoners gave up their blankets and slept on their bare mattresses, which all but one refused to do.
Zimbardo aborted the experiment early when Christina Maslach, a graduate student he was then dating (and later married), objected to the prison conditions after she was introduced to the experiment to conduct interviews. Zimbardo noted that, of more than fifty people who had observed the experiment, Maslach was the only one who questioned its morality. After only six days of a planned two-week duration, the Stanford Prison experiment was discontinued.
In summary, the study showed that the behaviour of the ‘normal’ students, who had been randomly allocated to each condition, was affected by the role they had been assigned to the extent that they seemed to believe in their allocated positions. The study, therefore, rejects the dispositional hypothesis.
The experiment had to be stopped after just six days instead of the planned 14 days, mainly because of the pathological reactions of the participants. Five prisoners had to be released even earlier because of extreme emotional depression.
In general, the guards and prisoners showed a marked tendency towards increasingly negative emotions, and their overall outlook became increasingly negative. Although guards and prisoners were essentially free to engage in any form of interaction, the nature of their encounters tended to be negative, hostile, insulting and dehumanising. Both the prisoners and the guards internalised the prison, that is, they started to believe in it. They adopted very contrasting behaviours, which were appropriate for their respective roles. The guards started most of the interactions, mostly in the form of commands or verbal affronts, while the prisoners adopted a generally passive response mode. Although it was clear to all participants that the experimenters would not permit physical violence to take place, varieties of less direct aggressive behaviour were often observed.
One of the most dramatic evidence of the impact of this situation upon the participants was when five prisoners had to be released early due to extreme emotional depression, crying, rage and acute anxiety. Of the remaining prisoners, only two said they were unwilling to forfeit the money they had earned in return for being ‘paroled’. When the simulation was terminated after only six days instead of the projected fourteen days, all of the remaining prisoners were delighted by the news. Still, most of the guards seemed to be distressed by the premature end to the study - it appeared that they had become sufficiently involved in their role that they now enjoyed the extreme control and power which they exercised. Zimbardo refers to this as a pathology of power.
However there were individual differences in styles of coping with this novel experience. Half of the prisoners endured the oppressive atmosphere, and not all the guards resorted to hostility, some guards were tough but fair, while some went far beyond their roles to engage in creative cruelty and harassment.
EXPLANATION
Zimbardo believes that the study demonstrates the powerful effect roles can have on peoples’ behaviour. Basically the participants were playing the role that they thought was expected of, either a prisoner or prison guard. (It is, in fact, a simulation of what we expect prison life to be, rather than what it is, as none of the participants had previously been in prison as a guard or prisoner).
Zimbardo then went on to explain the prison guards’ behaviour and the prisoners’ behaviour.
Zimbardo explains that the reason for the deterioration in guard behaviour was power and deindividuation. The guards were given control over the lives of other human beings and did not have to justify their displays of power as they would normally have to in their daily lives. They started to enjoy this power very early on in the study (pathology of power), as demonstrated by the fact that even after the first day, all prisoner rights became redefined as privileges, and all privileges were cancelled.
The loss of personal identity – the prisoners were de-individuated by being stripped of their individuality, their name, dress, appearance, behaviour style, and history. Living among strangers who did not know your name or history and dressing like all the other prisoners led to the weakening of self-identity among the prisoners. The prisoners became de-individuated not only to the guards but to themselves.
ETHICS: CONSENT
The only deception involved had to do with the arrest of the prisoners at the beginning of the experiment. The prisoners were arrested at their homes and charged with armed robbery. The local Palo Alto police department assisted Zimbardo with the arrests and conducted full booking procedures on the prisoners, including fingerprinting and mug shots. They were transported to the mock prison from the police station, where they were strip-searched and given their new identities.
However, Zimbardo defends the experiment in several ways:
The prisoners were not told, partly because final approval from the police wasn’t given until minutes before the participants decided to participate and partly because the researchers wanted the arrests to come as a surprise. However, this was a breach of Zimbardo’s contract ethics that all participants had signed.
ETHICS HARM
The main criticism of Zimbardo’s study is on ethical grounds.
‘’The guards and prisoners adapted to their roles more than they were expected, stepping beyond the boundaries of what had been predicted, leading to dangerous and psychologically damaging situations. One-third of the guards were judged to have exhibited "genuine sadistic tendencies". At the same time, many prisoners were emotionally traumatized, as two of them had to be removed from the experiment early. Zimbardo realised that he had been passively allowing unethical acts to be performed under his supervision; Zimbardo concluded that both prisoners and guards had become grossly absorbed in their roles and terminated the experiment. Ethical concerns surrounding the experiment often compared to the Milgram experiment, which was conducted in 1961 at Yale University by Stanley Milgram, Zimbardo's former high school friend. Tom Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Jr. wrote in 1981 that The Milgram experiment and the Stanford prison experiment were frightening in their implications about the danger which lurks in the darker side of human nature. “
FOR
When Zimbardo realised just how much the prisoners disliked the experience, which was unexpected, the experiment was abandoned.
The Office of Naval Research, the Psychology Department, and the University Committee of Human Experimentation gave approval for the study. This Committee also did not anticipate the prisoner’s extreme reactions that were to follow. However, the Navy’s involvement was also criticised as they were said to have wanted the study done for dubious reasons, e.g., not to investigate how their soldiers would act if POWs would react. Still, more to know how to make the POW they captured feel vulnerable.
ALTERNATIVE METHOD
Alternative methodologies were looked at which would cause less distress to the participants but also give the desired information, but nothing suitable could be found.
DEBRIEFING
Extensive group and individual debriefing sessions were held, and all participants returned post-experimental questionnaires several weeks, then several months later, and then at yearly intervals.
DOES THE END JUSTIFY THE MEANS
Zimbardo also strongly argues that the benefits gained from our understanding of human behaviour and how we can improve society should outbalance the distress caused by the study. However, it has been suggested that the US Navy was not so much interested in making prisons more human and was, in fact, more interested in using the study to train people in the armed services to cope with the stresses of captivity.
Male subjects were recruited through newspaper ads offering them $15 daily to participate. Seventy-five men applied to participate, and 24 were chosen. A battery of tests was employed to select those with the most stable personalities. Volunteers were randomly assigned to play prison guard or prisoner through the flip of a coin. Random allocation is important as it suggests all PPs had an equal chance of being prisoners or guards.
The study can also be criticised for its unrepresentative sample. Since the experiment was conducted using 24 normal, healthy, male college students who were predominantly middle class and white (one was described as oriental), we have to be careful generalising the results to people of different ages, genders, cultures, ethnicities, and classes.
SELECTION BIAS
Out of 75 respondents, Zimbardo and his team selected the 24 males they deemed the most psychologically stable and healthy. The group was intentionally selected to exclude those with criminal backgrounds, psychological impairments or medical problems. Real criminals are not psychologically healthy. If they chose 24 out of 75, they hand-picked their sample, which is biased. They all agreed to participate in a 7 to 14-day period and received $15 per day (roughly equivalent to $85 or £40-£60 in 2011). Offering money for participating and advertising in a particular newspaper again means a biased sample as only poor people, with time on their hands, applied. Again, selection bias as maybe the under-advantaged would be more likely to abuse power as they feel oppressed.
Also, it has been argued that selection bias may have played a role in the results. Researchers from Western Kentucky University recruited students for a study using an advertisement similar to the one used in the Stanford Prison Experiment, with and without the words "prison life". It was found that students volunteering for a prison life study possessed dispositions toward abusive behaviour.
MUNDANE REALISM: NEGATIVE
Importantly, the study has been criticised for lacking mundane realism. The simulated prison could not be totally realistic for practical and ethical reasons. Many particularly unpleasant aspects of prison life were absent, such as involuntary homosexuality, racism, beatings and threats to life. Nor had the prisoners committed any real crime. In real prisons, many of the inmates are violent, aggressive, psychopathic, suicidal, alcoholic, withdrawing from drugs, etc. In contrast, Zimbardo’s prisoners had been tested for psychological stability. They demonstrated they would do something honest yet degrading to obtain a little money (e.g., participate in the experiment). Also, the maximum anticipated sentence was just two weeks. This is very different to facing years or a life sentence. Nor were they deprived of their families, sex, or anything else for long. Lastly, the prisoners did not attack each other as happens with alarming regularity in US and UK prisons. Plus, according to Lockwood, 1980, twenty per cent of prisoners in the US have been subjected to sexual assault. Wortley, 2002, reports that there were 26 0000 prisoner-prisoner assaults in 1995. It is, therefore, possible that the study does not serve as a meaningful comparison to real prison environments. Moreover, in real prisons, prisoners do not act in a helpless way, as there is evidence that prison attacks on prison officers occur with great frequency. It has been argued that Zimbardo's experiment has better mundane realism when compared to prisoners of war (POWS) in military conditions, as soldiers can be perhaps compared better with the guards in the Stamford prison experiment, e.g., young men not used to having power. POWS may also be more comparable to the prisoners as they had not committed a crime.
Additionally, many of the conditions imposed in the experiment were arbitrary. They may not have correlated with actual prison conditions, including blindfolding incoming prisoners, not allowing them to wear underwear, not allowing them to look out of windows and not allowing them to use their names.
MUNDANE REALISM: POSITIVE
Zimbardo argued that prison is a confusing and dehumanizing experience and that it was necessary to enact these procedures to put the prisoners in the proper frame of mind; however, it is difficult to know how similar the effects were to an actual prison, and the experiment's methods would be difficult to reproduce exactly.
However, there is considerable evidence that the participants did react to the situation as though it was real. For example 90% of the prisoners’ private conversations, which the researchers monitored, were on the prison conditions, and only 10% of the time were their conversations about life outside of the prison. The guards, too, rarely exchanged personal information during their relaxation breaks - they either talked about ‘problem prisoners’ and other prison topics or did not talk at all. The guards were always on time and even worked overtime for no extra pay. When the prisoners were introduced to a priest, they referred to themselves by their prison number, rather than their first name. Some even asked him to get a lawyer to help get them out.
INTERNAL VALIDITY
Some of the experiment's critics argued that participants were merely engaging in role-playing, basing their behaviour on how they were expected to behave or modelling it after stereotypes about the behaviour of prisoners and guards. In response, Zimbardo claimed that although there was role-playing initially, participants internalised these roles as the experiment continued.
In contrast to Zimbardo's claim that participants were given no instructions about how to behave, his briefing of the guards gave them a clear sense that they should oppress the prisoners. In this sense, the study explored the effects of tyrannical leadership. In line with this, maybe certain guards changed their behaviour because of their desire to conform to the behaviour that Zimbardo was trying to elicit.
Therefore, the results could have been demand characteristics. However, Zimbardo told officers explicitly not to harm prisoners, and video footage showed they were worse when they thought nobody was watching. Also, initially, prisoners tried to rebel, and one had to be sent home for psychological stress. If displaying demand characteristics, surely this would not have occurred.
SOCIAL ROLES
The guards' brutality could be explained in terms of perceived social roles. Individuals are asked to play a role and act as they think they should. The fact that they are deindividuated increases their ability to cast aside personal norms and act out socially accepted behaviour. This was a criticism of the study; it did not tell us about how real guards behave, but just about how people behave when they are asked to ‘act’ like guards.
Prisoners and prison guards were Deindividuated (see A01 research). Still, there are too many variables to be able to show whether this was the primary reason for the findings in Zimbardo’s study.
ANALYSIS
A main strength of the study was how it managed to maintain some degree of control and some mundane realism. The situation was tightly controlled, e.g., guards and prisoners were randomly allocated and selected using a stringent criterion. The study still had mundane realism in how Zimbardo went to great extremes in making the study as true to life as possible, for example, in how he had the prisoners arrested from their homes.
METHODOLOGY
Because of the structure of the experiment, Zimbardo found it impossible to keep traditional scientific controls in place. He could not remain a neutral observer since he influenced the direction of the experiment as the prison's superintendent. Conclusions and observations drawn by the experimenters were largely subjective and anecdotal, and the experiment would be difficult for other researchers to reproduce.
Some critics, however, believe Zimbardo's research was strong in how it collected data. He used several qualitative approaches, such as observation (sometimes overt and sometimes covert) interviews and questionnaires.
Zimbardo’s study is the closest we can come to using controlled conditions to study the effects of imprisonment. It simply would be unethical to study real prison experimentally, for this reason it is a very valuable and rare experiment and one of the many reasons it is still cited today.
EVALUATION
Zimbardo’s study clearly tried to give a situational explanation for behaviour. He argued that the study demonstrates the powerful effect roles can have on peoples’ behaviour.
However, some psychologists believe that he has over-emphasised the situational explanation. They state that the behaviour of prisoners and guards may have arisen from the stereotyped expectations of how they should behave. That is, the participants were only role-playing. However, Zimbardo would strongly suggest that the participants’ experiences were all too real and that even if they were only role-playing at the beginning of the study, as the study progressed, they were internalising these roles. They could no longer differentiate between role-playing and self.
Other Critics, such as Erich Fromm, challenged the generalization of the experiment's results. Fromm specifically wrote that the personality of an individual does affect behaviour when imprisoned, using historical examples from the Nazi concentration camps. This ran counter to the study's conclusion that the prison situation itself controls the individual's behaviour. Fromm also argued that the amount of sadism in the "normal" subjects could not be determined by the methods employed to screen them.
ECLECTIC APPROACH
It is also worth noting that Zimbardo’s argument can be seen as too narrow an explanation. For example, in Zimbardo’s study, not all of the participants behaved in the same way. For example, some of the guards were less willing to abuse their power. Perhaps the reason why some of the participants were less willing had something to do with their personalities (dispositional factors). Therefore a situational explanation is reductionist other factors must be involved such as class, ethnicity, religion, personality, brain structure, emotion, addiction etc. An eclectic approach is probably the best approach to why aggression occurs in institutions such as prisons.
Has real-life applications to War crimes, such as the abuse of prisoners in Iraq. When the Abu Ghraib military prisoner torture and abuse scandal was publicized in March 2004, many observers were immediately struck by its similarities to the Stanford Prison Experiment, among them Philip Zimbardo, who paid close attention to the details of the story. He was dismayed by official military and government representatives' shifting the blame for the torture and abuses in the Abu Ghraib American military prison onto "a few bad apples" rather than acknowledging it as possibly systemic problems of a formally established military incarceration system.
BBC PRISON STUDY
Alex Haslam and Steve Reicher, psychologists from the University of Exeter and the University of St Andrews, conducted the BBC Prison Study in 2002. This was a partial replication of the Stanford Prison Experiment conducted with the assistance of the BBC, which broadcast events in the study in a documentary series called The Experiment. Their results and conclusions differed from Zimbardo's and led to several publications on tyranny, stress and leadership. Moreover, unlike results from the Stanford Prison Experiment, these were published in leading academic journals such as the British Journal of Social Psychology, Journal of Applied Psychology, and Social Psychology Quarterly. The BBC Prison Study is now taught as a core study on the UK A-level Psychology OCR syllabus.
While Haslam and Reicher's procedure was not a direct replication of Zimbardo's, their study casts further doubt on the generality of his conclusions. Specifically, it questions the notion that people slip mindlessly into roles and the idea that the dynamics of evil are in any way banal. Their research also points to the importance of leadership in the emergence of the tyranny of the form displayed by Zimbardo when briefing guards in the Stanford experiment.
If you don’t like Zimbardo, look below at another explanation:
AN ESSAY
Outline and evaluate explanations of institutional aggression (16) marks.
Institutional aggression is described as aggression that occurs and becomes the norm in any form of institution. Examples of institutions are schools, offices, hospitals, prisons, police forces, military, and terrorist groups. Two models that have been proposed to explain IA are the situational model and the dispositional model (sometimes called the importational model).
The situational model includes several aspects of the institution, including the management style, staff characteristics (gender, age and experience), perceived and real deprivations and environmental factors such as noise, temperature and crowding. This model, therefore, states that an individual who is not normally aggressive can be made to behave aggressively due to factors within the institution.
A01 research
Much of the research into the situational model has been carried out in prisons, and this model has much support. Sykes 1958 stated that the IA within prisons was due to the deprivations that prisoners were subjected to, he said that deprivations such as loss of autonomy lead to stress and that this stress caused the prisoners to act aggressively. For Sykes aggression was seen as a way of gaining some sense of control over the social order imposed upon them in prisons. This deprivation model could also explain aggression in schools and hospitals where patients and pupils see aggression as a means of exerting some level of autonomy in situations where they feel they have no control e.g. lengthy waiting lists and unfair rules. Another factor that is part of the situation is the style of management. Dilullio 1987 investigated the role of management in IA in prisons and found that much aggression occurred as a direct result of failed management, high staff turnover and lack of discipline amongst staff. This finding was supported by McCorkle, who investigated the relative strengths of the deprivation model and management model in causing aggression in prisons and found that poor management was the stronger factor in leading to aggression. The particular aspect of the situational model that applies may vary between the different types of institutions. All of these studies can be criticised as they are correlational; therefore, a direct cause and effect cannot be proposed. Nonetheless, they firmly point to the conclusion that management has a strong role in IA in all institutions.
Further support for the situational model comes from Folger and Starlicki 1995 who proposed the popcorn model. This was suggested as a result of the finding from prison research that even non-aggressive types can be made to behave aggressively if the situational factors demand it. Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment further supports this idea when apparently psychologically normal and amicable individuals behaved violently once placed into a ‘prison’ situation. All these studies show that even people who do not value aggression can become aggressive if it is the norm within the institution.
On the other hand, the dispositional or importation model claims that aggression occurs within institutions because of the characteristics of the individuals within the institution. Personal and psychological characteristics are brought into the institution by the individual, and these characteristics determine how much aggression each individual displays. If enough individuals value aggression, this will become the norm, and IA will occur. Examples of this can be found within many institutions. Still, the police and military services have been in the news recently because of cases of IA used by the Met during the G8 summit demonstrations and the abuse of prisoners by American and British soldiers in Iraq. In both scenarios, the institution has tried to distance itself from the abuse by claiming it was down to a few violent individuals. Indeed, in the case of the Abu Ghraib abuse, the American General Myers said that this horrific behaviour was due to a ‘few bad apples’. Zimbardo, on the other hand, would argue that it was the situation that led to these extreme examples of IA.
Please apply the synoptic stuff yourself.
Once again, much of this research has been carried out within prisons and has produced much evidence to support the model. Many inmates in prisons have demographic characteristics that would seem to predispose them to aggress. Research from America by Kane and Janus 1981 shows that non-whites and younger prisoners are more likely to behave violently than other groups, they also found that those who had long periods of unemployment and low levels of education were more likely to use aggression. Toch 1997 further supports this view by stating that ‘all prisons inherit their subcultural sediments from the street corners that supply them with clients’. This means that individuals bring their aggressive behaviour to each new setting they find themselves in. Another personal characteristic found to be of importance amongst prison inmates is drug or alcohol dependency. A Canadian study by Mills, Kroner and Weekes 1998 found inmates who had a higher level of alcohol dependency were associated with greater levels of aggression. All of this research gives credence to the idea that the importation model explains IA and that individuals bring their aggression with them to the institution.
There are several problems with this research. However, the first is that much of it is correlational and therefore, a direct causal link between personal characteristics and IA cannot be assumed. Also, as much of the research into IA has been carried out in prisons, it has a problem of sample bias as many inmates have already been shown to value aggression higher than the rest of the population. One further problem is that much of this research is culture-biased as it was carried out either in Western prisons or prisons run by Western powers and, therefore, is possibly only applicable in those types of institutions.
In conclusion, it is probable that both the situational and the dispositional models are needed to explain IA and that such models are rather too simplistic to explain this complex human behaviour. It is also probable that the type of institution involved would dictate which model and which aspect of that model was most appropriate to explain the IA. Both models have been found to have important real-life applications and, therefore, be valuable, but further research is needed in this complex field of human behaviour. The aggressor/s, the victim/s, and the situation must all be considered when considering IA.
