Conformity to social roles as investigated by Zimbardo: the Stanford prison experiment, the power of social roles and situational factors such as deindividuation and loss of personal identity.

What this dot point is asking

AQA wants you to describe Zimbardo's Stanford prison experiment (SPE) and use it to explain how readily people conform to social roles, plus evaluate the study. The exam skill is to separate procedure, findings and conclusions, to explain the situational (not dispositional) interpretation, and to handle the ethical and validity criticisms.

The procedure

Zimbardo (1973) converted a Stanford University basement into a mock prison. Twenty-one emotionally stable male volunteers were randomly assigned to be prisoners or guards. Prisoners were arrested at home, given numbers and uniforms; guards had uniforms, clubs and mirrored sunglasses to encourage deindividuation.

The design is important for evaluation, so know it precisely. Volunteers were psychologically screened so that only emotionally stable men were chosen, and they were randomly allocated to the role of guard or prisoner; this random allocation matters because it means any difference in behaviour could not be put down to pre-existing personality differences. The realism was heightened by having "prisoners" unexpectedly arrested at their homes by real police, stripped, deloused, and given a smock and an ID number instead of their name, while guards were given uniforms, wooden clubs, whistles and mirrored sunglasses to remove eye contact. These features were deliberately designed to strip away individual identity (deindividuation) and to make the participants feel their assigned role.

The findings

Why roles were adopted and evaluation

Uniforms and anonymity caused deindividuation and loss of personal identity, making cruelty easier; participants also identified strongly with their roles. Zimbardo's central conclusion was dispositional factors mattered far less than the situation: because the participants were ordinary, screened, randomly allocated people, the fact that they behaved so extremely points to the power of the social roles and the setting rather than to cruel personalities. This has real-world relevance, for example in explaining the abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, which Zimbardo himself analysed. The study faces strong criticism, however. Ethically, participants suffered genuine psychological harm and struggled to leave, worsened by Zimbardo's dual role as both lead researcher and prison superintendent, which compromised his duty to protect them. Methodologically, Banuazizi and Movahedi argued the participants were merely play-acting to cultural stereotypes of guards and prisoners drawn from films, which would mean the study shows role-play rather than genuine conformity to roles, and only about a third of guards behaved brutally, showing individual differences that a purely situational account underplays.