Conformity to Social Roles

The extent to which we confrom depends on the expectations that people around us have.

These expectations arise out of the roles we play in society and are powerful influences on our behaviour.

A famous study that set out to investigate conformity to social roles was carried out by Phillip Zimbardo in 1971, and this study changed the face of social psychology.

• Zimbardo and his colleagues (Haney et al. 1973) set up a mock prison in the basement of the psuchology department of Stanford University to test whether the brutality of prison guards was the result of sadistic personalities or whether it was created by the situation.
• They recruited 24 'emotionally stable' students determined by psychological testing and randomly assigned them roles of guards or prisoners.
  To increase realism, 'prisoners were arrested in their homes and delivered to the 'prison'- they were blindfolded, *****-searched, deloused and issued a uniform and a number.
• The prisoners' daily routines were heavily regulated. There were 16 rules to follow, enforced by the guards working in shifts, three at a time.
• De-individualisation (losing a sense of personal identity):
  • Prisoners' names were never used, only their numbers,
  • Guards had their own uniform- wooden club, handcuffs, keys and mirror shades. They were told they had complete power over the prisoners, for instance deciding when they could go to the toilet.

• Within two days, the prisoners rebelled against their treatment. They ripped their uniforms and shouted and swore at the guards, who retaliated with fire extinguishers.
  Guards harrassed prisoners constantly by conducting frequent head counts, sometimes in the middle of the night.
  Guards highlighted the difference in social roles by creating opportunities to enforce the rules and punish slight misdemeanours.
• The guards took up their roles with enthusiasm. Their behaviour threatened the prisoners' psychological and physical health.  For example:
  • After the rebellion was put down, the prisoners became subdued, anxious and depressed.
  • Three prisoners we released early because they showed signs of psychological disturbance.
  • One prisoner went on hunger strike; the guards attemoted to force feed him and punished him by putting him in 'the hole', a tiny dark closet.
• The study was stopped after 6 days instead of the planned 14 days.
• The simulation revealed the power of the situation to influence people's behaviour. Guards, prisoners and researchers all conformed to their social roles withing the prison. The more the guards identified with their roles, the more brutal and aggressive their behaviour became.

STRENGTH

The researchers had some control over variables.

Only emotionally stable participants were recuited and randomly assigned the roles of guards or prisoners.

The guards and prisoners had those roles only by chance.

This means that their behaviour was due to the pressure of the situation and not their personalities,

Control increases the study's internal validity and we can be mroe confident in drawing conclusions about the influences of social roles on behaviour.

LIMITATION

Banuazizi and Mohamed (1975) suggested that the participants were play acting and their performances reflected stereotypes of how prisoners and guards were supposed to behave.

One guard based his role on a character from the film Cool Hand Luke and the prisoners rioted because they thought that that is what real prisoners do.

However, Zimbardo's data showed that 90% of the prisoners conversations were about prison life and that the simulation seemed real to them which increases the study's internal validity.

LIMITATION

The SPE lacks research support and has been contradicted by subsequent research.

Reicher and Haslam (2006) partially replicated the SPE, but got different findings.
The prisoners eventually took control.

Tajfel's (1981) social identity theory (SIT) explains this:

The guards in the replication failed to develop a shared social idientity as a group, but the prisoners did and refused to accept the limits of their assigned roles.

This means that the brutality of the guards in the original SPE was due to a shared social identity as a group, rather than conformity to their social roles.

LIMITATION

One issue arose because Zimbardo was both the lead researcher and the prison superintendent.

A student who wanted to leave the study spoke to Zimbardo, who responded as a superintendent worried about the running of the prison rather than as a researcher.

This limited Zimbardo's ability to protect his participants from harm because his superintendent role conflicted with his lead researcher role.