Conformity to social roles: Zimbardo's Stanford Prison experiment, were psychology and physically screened, the 24 most stable students were randomly allocated to either guards and prisoners. Planned to last 2 weeks. Only lasted 6 days.
Guards- uniforms, whistles, reflective sunglasses, clubs.
Prisoners- uniform, 3 supervised bathroom visits a day, 2 visits weekly, and 3 meals.
Found that guards were increasingly aggressive and abusive towards prisoners, on the 2nd day prisoners through a riot for poor treatment, 5 had to leave due to extreme emotions, they conformed to roles even when not being watched.
AO3:
Strengths:
- Real life application to Abu Ghraib, Zimbardo claimed that conformity could account for US guards treatment of Iraqui prisoners, abusive etc. Zimbardo claimed that there was situational factors that increased the likelihood of this mistreatment.
Weaknesses:
1.Unethical, people became increasingly distressed and had to leave the study, which means that it doesn't have protection from harm and had to be stopped by a fellow researcher.
- Haslam and Reicher challenged Zimbardo that sadistic behaviour is an automatic consequence of embracing their role. There was a few good guards who didn't harass or degrade prisoners which shows there is some amount of choice involved and not them blindly conforming got their roles.