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AdvantagesGetting Started
- led to increased ethical guidelines that may not have come about until this study
- Zimbardo did conduct debriefing sessions years after and concluded there was no lasting damage
- findings from the study have been applied to Abu GArib - military detention in Iraq where US soldiers abused and tortured the prisoners - Zimbardo defended their actions explaining it with his study stating they were the victims of situational factors that made abuse more lileky - lack of training, boredom, lack of acounatability to higher authority and identification with a social role that has power is what caused their abuse
- changed the way prisons house inmates -juveniles are no longer houses with adult due to risk of violence
- explained guards behaviour as a natural consequence of being assigned a role with power - change the way people in power are viewed - BBC study counters this as they had different findings where guards and prisoners did not identify with their roles and the prisoners revolted
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Disadvantages
- Zimbardo belived conformity to social roles was automatic which was not true as some guards were good guards and were not degrading neither did they harass the prisonsers. The BBC study aslso contradicts this and the researchers suggested that the guards chose how to behave
- Deterministic approach as Zimbardo states environmental factors cause the sadistic behaviour, though there is a cognitive element through recognition of a 'role', this ignores individual differences which is demonstrated in SPE as some of the guards did not act as aggressively
- demand characteritics were a massive issue especially since some of the pariticipants stated they modelled their beahiour on other people and were acting, furthermore a study using a group of students who had never heard of SPE, researchers asked them to guess the aims and the students did so correctly answering that the study was to test if normal people can become assigned to a role showing that the aims of the study were easily guessable and hence demand characteristics would play a large role in the findings
- lack of ethics - no protection from harm, one person even had to be sent home after the first day after they suffered a mental breakdown and the study had to be stopped early as the conditions were so bad, and participants likely suffered long-term emotional harm
- Zimbardo was involved in the study himself, acting as the warden and so was not objective and would have massively influenced the participants actions
- no fully informed consent as Zimbardo himself did not even know what was going to happen
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