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Key Study Title: Stanford Prison Experiment
Researcher: Phillip Zimbardo
Date:14th August 1971
Hypothesis:

If you put good people in an evil place, they will do bad things
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Dependent Variable:

It is the resulting behaviour of the participants
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Procedure:

The basement of the Stanford University Psychology Building was converted into a
simulated prison
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Those who were assigned the role of a “guard” were given sticks and
sunglasses
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The
“prisoners” were fingerprinted, photographed and booked
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They were issued a
uniform and referred to by their ID numbers
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They
were instructed to do whatever they thought was necessary to maintain law and order in
the prison as well as commanding respect from the prisoners
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Zimbardo observed the behaviour of the prisoners and guards but also acted
as a prison warden
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The guards were quick to harass and torment the prisoners in
aggressive ways by waking them up in their sleep and having to clean the toilets with
their bare hands
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The guards
had later reported that they enjoyed doing so and relished in their power and control
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They snitched on other
prisoners to guards in order to please them
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Over time, the guards become more demanding of obedience and
assertiveness towards the prisoners, just as the prisoners become more submissive
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Conclusions/Implications:

Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment revealed how people will readily conform to the
social roles that they are expected to play
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Therefore, the findings support
the situational explanation of behavior rather than a dispositional one
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Participants were fully debriefed after the study and were told about the
aims and the results of the study
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The sample only consisted of American male students and so the findings
cannot be generalised to other genders and cultures
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Key Study Title: Asch’s Line Experiment
Researcher:Solomon Asch
Date:1951
Hypothesis:

Increasing group pressure to go along with the majority viewpoint led to a % increase in
conforming responses by participants in critical trials
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Dependent Variable:

% of participants answers conforming with the majority response
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Procedure:

Asch used a lab experiment to study conformity, whereby 123 male students from
Swarthmore College in the USA participated in a ‘vision test
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The
confederates had agreed in advance what their responses would be when presented
with the line task
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Each person in the
room had to state aloud which comparison line (A, B or C) was most like the target line
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The real participant sat at the end of the row and
gave his answer last
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Asch was interested to see if the real
participant would conform to the majority view
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"

Findings:

Asch measured the number of times each participant conformed to the majority view
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Over
the 12 critical trials, about 75% of participants conformed at least once, and 25% of
participant never conformed
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Conclusions/Implications:

When they were interviewed after the experiment, most of them said that they did not
really believe their conforming answers, but had gone along with the group for fear of
being ridiculed or thought "peculiar
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Ashc states that there are two reasons why people may
conform: Normative Social Influence (NSI) or Informational Social Influence (ISI)
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Evaluation Points
(including):
Methodological
assessment;
Ethical issues;
Alternative explanations;
Real World applications

STRENGTHS: Extraneous and confounding variables were strictly controlled, meaning
that the replication of the experiment was easy
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WEAKNESSES: As it was situated in a lab, the experiment lacks ecological validity
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Furthermore, the sample of participants that were used are biased as they are only
white, American men around the same age group, meaning the data is not
generalisable to wider populations
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Independent Variable:

Situational variables are manipulated, e
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proximity of learner
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e
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Aim:

To investigate what level of obedience would be shown when participants were told by
a figure of authority to administer electric shocks to another person

Procedure:

A participant given the role of ‘teacher’ and a confederate given the role of ‘learner’
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Participant had to ask the confederate
a series of questions
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The electric
shocks incremented by 15 volts at a time, ranging from 300V to 450V, where 330V
was marked as ‘lethal’
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The shocks were
falsely demonstrated to be real prior to the start of the study
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The
experimenter’s role was to give a series of orders / prods when the participant refused
to administer a shock, which increased in terms of demandingness for every time the
participant refused to administer a shock
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The first 3 demanded obedience
to science, whereas the final prod demanded obedience specifically to the
confederate
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No participants stopped
below 300V, whilst only 12
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Complications/Implications:

Ordinary people are likely to follow orders given by an authority figure, even to the
extent of killing an innocent human being
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People tend to obey orders from other people if they
recognize their authority as morally right and/or legally based
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Evaluation Points
(including):
Methodological
assessment;
Ethical issues;
Alternative explanations;
Real World applications

STRENGTHS: The participants were thoroughly and carefully debriefed on the real
aims of the study, in an attempt to deal with the ethical breach of the guideline of
protection from deception and the possibility to give informed consent
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This suggests that the study left little or no
permanent or long-term psychological harm on participants
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The procedure has been repeated all over the world,
where consistent and similar obedience levels have been found
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Therefore, the
participants may have trusted that nothing serious would happen to the confederate,
especially considering the immense prestige of the location
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5%
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g
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