Question

Provide a PARAGRAPH description of each of the three experiments below: 1.) Asch Conformity Experiment. 2.) Milgram Obedience Experiment. 3.) The Stanford Prison Experiment. ALL THREE HAVE TO BE ANSWERED TO EARN CREDIT.

Answer 1

1. Asch Experiment:

Asch created a compelling social dilemma for his participants whose task was to simply respond to a series of perceptual problems. On each of the problems, participants were to indicate which of three comparison lines matched a standard line in length. Several other people (usually six to eight) were also presenduring the session, but unknown to the real participant, all were assistants of the experimenter. On certain occasions known as critical trials (12 out of the 18problems) the accomplices offered answers that wereclearly wrong: They unanimously chose the wrong line as a match for the standard line. Moreover, they stated their answers before the real participants re-
sponded. Thus, on these critical trials, the people in Asch’s study faced precisely the type of dilemma de-
scribed earlier. Should they go along with the other individuals present or stick to their own judgments?
The judgments seemed to be very simple ones, so the fact that other people agreed on an answer different from the one the participants preferred was truly puzzling. Results were clear: A large majority of the participants in Asch’s research chose conformity. Across several different studies, fully 76 percent of those tested went alongwith the group’s false answers at least once; and overall, they voiced agreement with these errors 37 percent of the time. In contrast, only 5 percent of the participants in a control group, who responded to the same problems alone, made such errors.

2. Milgram Obedience Experiment:

In his research, Milgram wished to find out whether individuals would obey commands from a relatively powerless stranger requiring them to inflict what seemed to be considerable pain on another person—a totally innocent stranger. Milgram’s interest in this topic derived from tragic events in which seemingly normal, law-abiding people actually obeyed such directives. In an effort to gain insights into the nature of such events, Milgram designed an ingenious, if unsettling, laboratory simulation. The experimenter informed participants in the study (all males) that they were taking part in a scientific investigation of the effects of punishment on learning. One person in each pair of participants would serve as a “learner” and would try to perform a simple task involving memory (supplying the second word in pairs of words they had previously memorized after hearing only the first word). The other participant, the “teacher,” would read these words to the learner, and would punish errors by the learner (failures to provide the second word in each pair) through electric shock. These shocks would be delivered by means of an equipment shown containing thirty numbered switches ranging from “15 volts” (the first) through “450volts” (the 30th). The two people present—a real participant and a research assistant—then drew slips of paper from a hat to determine who would play each role; as you can guess, the drawing was rigged so that the real participant always became the teacher. The teacher was then told to deliver a shock to the learner each time he made an error on task. Moreover—and this is crucial—teachers were told to increase the strength of the shock each time the learner made an error. This meant that if the learner made many errors, he would soon be receiving strong jolts of electricity. It’s important to note that this information was false: In reality, the assistant (the learner) never received any shocks during the experiment. The only real shock ever used was a mild pulse from button number three to convince participants that the equipment was real. During the session, the learner (following prearranged instructions) made many errors. Thus, participants soon found themselves facing a dilemma: Should they continue punishing this person with what seemed to be increasingly painful shocks? Or should they refuse? If they hesitated, the experimenter pressured them to continue with a graded series “prods”: “Please continue”; “The experiment requires that you continue”; “It is absolutely essential that you continue”; and “You have no other choice; you must go on, Fully 65 percent showed total obedience—they proceeded through the entire series to the final 450 volt level. Many participants, of course, protested and asked that the session should be ended. When ordered to proceed, however, a majority yielded to the experimenter’s influence and continued to obey.

3. Stanford prison experiment

Phillip Zimbardo was interested in how people adopt and internalise roles to guide behaviour. he was also interested in whether it is the prescription of the role rather than the personality of the role occupant that governs inrole behaviour. In a famous role-playing exercise, twentyfour psychologically stable male Stanford university student volunteers were randomly assigned the roles of prisoners or guards. the prisoners were arrested at their homes and initially processed by the police, then handed over to the guards in a simulated prison constructed in the basement of the psychology department at Stanford university. Zimbardo had planned to observe the role-playing exercise over a period of two weeks. however, he had to stop the study after six days! Although the students were psychologically stable and those assigned to the guard or prisoner roles had no prior dispositional differences, things got completely out of hand. the guards continually harassed, humiliated and intimidated the prisoners, and they used psychological techniques to undermine solidarity and sow the seeds of distrust among them. Some guards increasingly behaved in a brutal and sadistic manner.
the prisoners initially revolted. however, they gradually became passive and docile as they showed symptoms of individual and group disintegration and an acute loss of contact with reality. Some prisoners had to be released from the study because they showed symptoms of severe emotional disturbance (disorganised thinking, uncontrollable crying and screaming), and in one case, a prisoner developed a psychosomatic rash all over his body. Zimbardo’s explanation of what happened in the simulated prison was that the students complied (too well!) with the roles that they thought were expected of them.