2. Iraqi Prisoner – Abu Ghraib
American torture of POW’s

3. Conformity to social roles Zimbardo
The stanford prison experiment

4. The Stanford Prison Study – Zimbardo et al (1974)
After reports of brutality by guards in prisons across America in the late 1960s Zimbardo wanted to answer the question- do prison guards behave brutally because they have sadistic personalities, or is it the situation that creates the behavior?
Aim:To see whether people will conform to new social roles.

5. The Stanford Prison Study – Zimbardo et al (1974)
Procedure
The participants were all male students at the prestigious Stanford University in California.
They volunteered to take part in the study and were tested for their psychological “stability”.
They randomly allocated to two groups ­prisoners and prison guards.
The prisoners were to spend two weeks locked in 'cells' in a wing of the university.
The prison guards were there to look after the prisoners and to keep them under control but they were not allowed to use physical force.
The prisoners were arrested at home (unexpectedly) and taken to the university. They were stripped, deloused and given a prison uniform and prisoner number. From now on they were referred to by number only, not by name.
They were to spend 23 hours a day locked in their cells for two weeks. The prisoners wore a smock and stocking over their head and had no underwear
The prison guards were given uniforms, including sticks and mirrored sunglasses. They worked shifts and went home at the end of their shift.

6. Zimbardo video clip

7. The Stanford Prison Study – Zimbardo et al (1974)
Results:
The experiment was called off after only 6 days. The guards had become so brutal to the prisoners that two prisoners had some form of nervous breakdown, one developed a nervous rash all over his body and one went on hunger strike!!
While the guards were giving their orders, the prisoners became apathetic.
They did not stand up to the guards and simply did as they were told, even though it caused them distress.

8. The Stanford Prison Study – Zimbardo et al (1974)
Conclusion:
One explanation for why the participants’ reactions were so extreme in this study could be that they conformed to social roles.
A role is a part you play during your life. Each role requires different behaviour.
If you are given a new role, e.g. when you start a new job, you change your behaviour to suit.
In Zimbardo's study, the students were given new roles - prisoner or guard - and simply conformed to the behaviour of these roles.

9. The Stanford Prison Study – Zimbardo et al (1974)
Conclusion continued :
Deindividuation may also help to explain the behaviour of the participants; especially the guards. This is a state when you become so immersed in the norms of the group that you lose your sense of identity and personal responsibility. The guards may have been so sadistic because they did not feel what happened was down to them personally – it was a group norm.

10. Key study Make notes on this study:
Include Aims, Method, results and conclusion.

11. Evaluation of the Stanford prison study – Zimbardo et al
Strengths
A main strength of the study was the way it managed to maintain some degree of control and some ecological validity. The situation was very tightly controlled e.g. guards and prisoners were randomly allocated and were selected using a stringent criterion.
The study still had ecological validity because Zimbardo went to great extremes in making the study as true to life as possible, for example in the way that he had the prisoners arrested from their homes.
A further strength was in the way that Zimbardo collected data. He used a number of qualitative approaches such as observation (sometimes overt and sometimes covert) interviews and questionnaires

12. Evaluation of the Stanford prison study – Zimbardo et al
Limitations
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 other people.
Importantly the study has been criticised for lacking ecological validity. For practical and ethical reasons the simulated prison could not be totally realistic.
Many particularly unpleasant aspects of prison life were absent, such as, racism, beatings and threats to life.
Also, the maximum anticipated sentence was just two weeks. It is therefore possible that the study does not serve as a meaningful comparison to real prison environments.

13. Evaluation of the Stanford prison study – Zimbardo et al
Limitations
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 were monitored by the researchers, 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’, 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.

14. Of course, the main criticism of the Stanford prison study is on ethical grounds, but Zimbardo defends the research in a number of ways:

15. Ethics
Approval for the study was given from the Office of Naval Research, the Psychology Department and the University Committee of Human Experimentation.
This Committee also did not anticipate the prisoners’ extreme reactions that were to follow.
The only deception involved was to do with the arrest of the prisoners at the beginning of the experiment.
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 the ethics of Zimbardo’s own contract that all of the participants had signed.

16. Ethics
When Zimbardo realised just how much the prisoners disliked the experience, which was unexpected, the experiment was abandoned.
Alternative methodologies were looked at which would cause less distress to the participants but at the same time give the desired information, but nothing suitable could be found.

17. Ethics
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
Zimbardo also strongly argues that the benefits gained about our understanding of human behaviour and how we can improve society should out 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 in fact more interested in using the study to train people in the armed services to cope with the stresses of captivity.

18. Homework
If avaliable Watch BBC prison experiment