Question

Description of Zimbardo experiment and findings?

Answer 1

• Zimbardo (1973) was interested in finding out whether the brutality reported among guards in American prisons was due to the sadistic personalities of the guards (i.e., dispositional) or had more to do with the prison environment (i.e., situational).
• For example, prisoner and guards may have personalities which make conflict inevitable, with prisoners lacking respect for law and order and guards being domineering and aggressive. Alternatively, prisoners and guards may behave in a hostile manner due to the rigid power structure of the social environment in prisons.
• If the prisoners and guards behaved in a non-aggressive manner, this would support the dispositional hypothesis, or if they behave the same way as people do in real prisons, this would support the situational explanation.
• To study the roles people play in prison situations, Zimbardo converted a basement of the Stanford University psychology building into a mock prison. He advertised asking for volunteers to participate in a study of the psychological effects of prison life,
• More than 70 applicants answered the ad and were given diagnostic interviews and personality tests to eliminate candidates with psychological problems, medical disabilities, or a history of crime or drug abuse.The study comprised 24 male college students (chosen from 75 volunteers) .
• Participants were randomly assigned to either the role of prisoner or guard in a simulated prison environment.
• Prisoners were treated like every other criminal, being arrested at their own homes, without warning, and taken to the local police station. They were fingerprinted, photographed and ‘booked.’
• Then they were blindfolded and driven to the psychology department of Stanford University, where Zimbardo had had the basement set out as a prison, with barred doors and windows, bare walls and small cells. Here the deindividuation process began.
• Zimbardo observed the behavior of the prisoners and guards (as a researcher), and also acted as a prison warden.
• Within a very short time both guards and prisoners were settling into their new roles, with the guards adopting theirs quickly and easily.The prisoners soon adopted prisoner-like behavior too. They talked about prison issues a great deal of the time. They ‘told tales’ on each other to the guards.
• The Stanford Prison Experiment degenerated very quickly and the dark and inhuman side of human nature became apparent very quickly.
• The prisoners began to suffer a wide array of humiliations and punishments at the hands of the guards, and many began to show signs of mental and emotional distress.
• On the second day of the experiment, the prisoners organized a mass revolt and riot, as a protest about the conditions. Guards worked extra hours and devised a strategy to break up and put down the riot, using fire-extinguishers.
• The experiment showed that one third of the guards began to show an extreme and imbedded streak of sadism, and Zimbardo himself started to become internalized in the experiment. Two of the prisoners had to be removed early because they were showing real signs of emotional distress.
• Zimbardo believed that the experiment showed how the individual personalities of people could be swamped when they were given positions of authority.
  
• People will readily conform to the social roles they are expected to play, especially if the roles are as strongly stereotyped as those of the prison guards.
• The “prison” environment was an important factor in creating the guards’ brutal behavior (none of the participants who acted as guards showed sadistic tendencies before the study).Therefore, the findings support the situational explanation of behavior rather than the dispositional one.