Stanford Prison Study
To what extent can we use situational factors in explaining human behavior?
In psychology, reasons for human behavior can be divided into two factors; dispositional and situational. Dispositional factors pertain to internal specific characteristics a person possesses, such as their personality and such unchanging features. Situational factors on the other hand are external influences on a person outside of their control not dependent on the person themselves, but the surrounding environment and circumstances. The problem for psychologists is to what extent findings on human behavior can be explained through situational factors, and not factors of the individual themselves.
One of the most renowned studies supporting the significance of situational factors is the Stanford Prison study by Zimbardo (1971), where the effects of empowerment on a person's behavior were explored. The study involved 24 participants, selected from a larger pool of 70 undergraduate white male volunteers due to their lack of any criminal background, psychological and medical issues. The 24 participants were randomly divided into two groups; prison guards and prisoners. In a simulated prison environment, in the basement of Stanford university, the guards essentially had all control over the prisoners.
Originally the simulation was …show more content…
intended to last a full two weeks, however the predicted results occurred much quicker and more intensively than expected. The guards had taken a position of abuse towards the prisoners, who themselves were suffering from stress and anxiety, causing an early termination of the experiment. Zimbardo theorized that the placing the guards in a position of power caused these otherwise normal people to act in such an unorthodox manner compared to their everyday life. The same applies to the prisoners who lost all control they held, soon experiencing features of depression and became passive.
The study has been widely criticized however, be it due to it's lack of ethical or ecological validity, as well as the very restricted sample of participants. Most importantly in the lens of the extent situational factors effect human behavior, the lack of ecological validity is an issue. Despite all attempts to make the prison as authentic as possible, it's impossible to recreate such an environment. Real prisons involve actual criminals, as well as a proper facility, and don't allow for the counseling that the Stanford prison provided. All participants knew they were partaking in an experiment, and were assigned roles. In that knowledge, it's not extreme to assume that some guards merely saw themselves emulating what they imagined a guard to be, and not how they would act as a guard in a real life situation, and as such cannot be applied effectively to real life. Although, that line of thought may imply that the situational factor that was the experiment and it's authority caused the participants to act as they did which then insinuates that situational factors have the potency to cause people to act in very abnormal ways.
An interesting observation in Zimbardo's study was that not all the guards acted in overt aggression, yet displayed no intent to prevent harm or misconduct. Behavior of this fashion can be applied to authoritative influence, where the influence of the experimenters or perhaps the more forward guards caused the other guards to simply comply to whatever happened. Behavior such as this can be described as conformity, where a person may go along with something they might find wrong, but think the majority or authority think otherwise. Behavior of this fashion is fairly commonplace in everyday life, for example when a group of friends use a certain message board or social networking platform, you'll join them despite it not being your favorite. This is conformity more out of necessity than anything else, even the guards may have felt some sort of necessity to act as they did due to, for example, the pressure of not ruining the experiment. A study carried by Asch (1951) however exposed a level of conformity that didn't cast necessity.
Asch wished to find out to what extent people would conform to an incorrect answer on a test if the opinions of the rest of the group were unanimous. The study involved a participant entering a room with 6 other people and the researcher. The other men, dressed in formal attire, were presented as other participants of the study. In reality, they were confederates of the researcher, there to deceive the participant. As the real participant took his seat, the researcher announced the purpose of the study was to judge visual judgment. The participants were shown a set of cards, one card with a line with unknown length labeled X, and another with multiple lines of varying length, all labeled with A, B, C. Over 18 trials with different sets of cards, the participants were asked to decide which line was the same length as the mysterious X line. The confederates had been instructed to give some correct answers, but also give wrongs answers. Some trials presented lines where the difference in length was clear, while others barely noticeable. The aim was to see how often the answers of the confederates changed that of the participant's.
The results discovered that 75 percent of the time, a participant conformed to the confederates in at least one of the trials, while 32 percent conformed in at least half of the trials. 24 percent were revealed to have not conformed at all, however during debriefings after the experiments, all participants reported to have had some proportion of self-doubt about their answers. Some of those who conformed reported to have known that their answers were incorrect, but didn't want to potentially ruin the examiner's results or to appear as going against the group. The study has been replicated on many occasions, on which psychologists have distinguished various factors that influences conformity, such as the size of the group, unanimity of the group, the self-esteem of individuals, and the confidence of the individuals. As it appears, confidence and self-esteem are dispositional factors, the personal level of self-esteem and how competent and familiar the person is with judging such problems. On the other hand, the size of the group and it's unanimity are situational factors that caused the participant to answer incorrectly. This suggests that those without special training or other specialization, or a high level of self-esteem, are susceptible to the unfamiliar situation.
When you compare the two studies, you can see that both involved some level of conformity to the situation, however the scale of how unfamiliar the situation is vast when you compare a line choice study and a simulated prison. Accordingly, the reactions to the two studies are similar, where Asch's study involved some self-doubt and some degree of conformity, Zimbardo's prison deeply affected how the participants acted. This could suggest that the larger and further one ventures from their comfort zone, the less inclined they are to act along with their personal dispositional factors. However, once again, it's difficult to apply these findings to typical real life as even Asch's study presents a very atypical situation with strangers and an authoritative researcher with perceived expectations. Although a study on camp boys has shown that even in cases similar to real life, a situational factor can influence a person's behavior.
Sherif M.
(1956) conducted an experiment on inter-group and outer-group conflict, which simply described mean a group you belong to and group you don't respectively. In the experiment, 22 white 11 year old boys were sent off to a special camp at Robbers Cave State Park. The boys, none of whom knew each other beforehand, were randomly divided into two equal groups. Kept in the dark of each others existence, the boys spent a week building an attachment to their group through various camp activities. After the week was over, the camp councilors introduced the other groups existence as well as a competition the groups would participate in against each
other.
The groups quickly developed hostile feelings between each other. The established bonds of one's own group, the inter-group, quickly strengthened and turned on the sudden revelation of the other group, the outer-group, who were seen as enemies. Name calling was the first reaction, goading the outer-group through taunts, and soon enough the relation between the groups became virulent enough for one group to burn the other groups's flag, which was later countered by ransacking the flag-burner group's cabins leading to a physical separation of the two “factions”. The councilors first attempted the reconcile the two groups by increasing the time they spent together, but as tempers grew even more vehement, they introduce cooperative task which eventually destroyed the perceived inter-group and outer-group perspectives.
The study has a clear apparent lack in sample variety in gender, cultural, and age validity, as the participants were all 11 year old white boys, but the study does demonstrate how the introduction of a situation, the inter- and outer-group, caused the boys to eventually react violently. It's unclear how applicable these results would be to varied grown adults, although when Robbers Cave is juxtaposed and compared with the previous two studies, it's clear that situational factors can have some influence on human behavior, or apparently, at least on the behavior of white males.
In conclusion, situational factors may not universally applicable with only these studies, however they can clearly have an effect on people thrust into situations they are not familiar with or for example children who have not yet fully developed their own rationale. It's not prudent to say situational factors entirely override dispositional factors, as the studies still retained some variation in behavior, however they have the potential to mold the ways in which we act.
In psychology, reasons for human behavior can be divided into two factors; dispositional and situational. Dispositional factors pertain to internal specific characteristics a person possesses, such as their personality and such unchanging features. Situational factors on the other hand are external influences on a person outside of their control not dependent on the person themselves, but the surrounding environment and circumstances. The problem for psychologists is to what extent findings on human behavior can be explained through situational factors, and not factors of the individual themselves.
One of the most renowned studies supporting the significance of situational factors is the Stanford Prison study by Zimbardo (1971), where the effects of empowerment on a person's behavior were explored. The study involved 24 participants, selected from a larger pool of 70 undergraduate white male volunteers due to their lack of any criminal background, psychological and medical issues. The 24 participants were randomly divided into two groups; prison guards and prisoners. In a simulated prison environment, in the basement of Stanford university, the guards essentially had all control over the prisoners.
Originally the simulation was …show more content…
intended to last a full two weeks, however the predicted results occurred much quicker and more intensively than expected. The guards had taken a position of abuse towards the prisoners, who themselves were suffering from stress and anxiety, causing an early termination of the experiment. Zimbardo theorized that the placing the guards in a position of power caused these otherwise normal people to act in such an unorthodox manner compared to their everyday life. The same applies to the prisoners who lost all control they held, soon experiencing features of depression and became passive.
The study has been widely criticized however, be it due to it's lack of ethical or ecological validity, as well as the very restricted sample of participants. Most importantly in the lens of the extent situational factors effect human behavior, the lack of ecological validity is an issue. Despite all attempts to make the prison as authentic as possible, it's impossible to recreate such an environment. Real prisons involve actual criminals, as well as a proper facility, and don't allow for the counseling that the Stanford prison provided. All participants knew they were partaking in an experiment, and were assigned roles. In that knowledge, it's not extreme to assume that some guards merely saw themselves emulating what they imagined a guard to be, and not how they would act as a guard in a real life situation, and as such cannot be applied effectively to real life. Although, that line of thought may imply that the situational factor that was the experiment and it's authority caused the participants to act as they did which then insinuates that situational factors have the potency to cause people to act in very abnormal ways.
An interesting observation in Zimbardo's study was that not all the guards acted in overt aggression, yet displayed no intent to prevent harm or misconduct. Behavior of this fashion can be applied to authoritative influence, where the influence of the experimenters or perhaps the more forward guards caused the other guards to simply comply to whatever happened. Behavior such as this can be described as conformity, where a person may go along with something they might find wrong, but think the majority or authority think otherwise. Behavior of this fashion is fairly commonplace in everyday life, for example when a group of friends use a certain message board or social networking platform, you'll join them despite it not being your favorite. This is conformity more out of necessity than anything else, even the guards may have felt some sort of necessity to act as they did due to, for example, the pressure of not ruining the experiment. A study carried by Asch (1951) however exposed a level of conformity that didn't cast necessity.
Asch wished to find out to what extent people would conform to an incorrect answer on a test if the opinions of the rest of the group were unanimous. The study involved a participant entering a room with 6 other people and the researcher. The other men, dressed in formal attire, were presented as other participants of the study. In reality, they were confederates of the researcher, there to deceive the participant. As the real participant took his seat, the researcher announced the purpose of the study was to judge visual judgment. The participants were shown a set of cards, one card with a line with unknown length labeled X, and another with multiple lines of varying length, all labeled with A, B, C. Over 18 trials with different sets of cards, the participants were asked to decide which line was the same length as the mysterious X line. The confederates had been instructed to give some correct answers, but also give wrongs answers. Some trials presented lines where the difference in length was clear, while others barely noticeable. The aim was to see how often the answers of the confederates changed that of the participant's.
The results discovered that 75 percent of the time, a participant conformed to the confederates in at least one of the trials, while 32 percent conformed in at least half of the trials. 24 percent were revealed to have not conformed at all, however during debriefings after the experiments, all participants reported to have had some proportion of self-doubt about their answers. Some of those who conformed reported to have known that their answers were incorrect, but didn't want to potentially ruin the examiner's results or to appear as going against the group. The study has been replicated on many occasions, on which psychologists have distinguished various factors that influences conformity, such as the size of the group, unanimity of the group, the self-esteem of individuals, and the confidence of the individuals. As it appears, confidence and self-esteem are dispositional factors, the personal level of self-esteem and how competent and familiar the person is with judging such problems. On the other hand, the size of the group and it's unanimity are situational factors that caused the participant to answer incorrectly. This suggests that those without special training or other specialization, or a high level of self-esteem, are susceptible to the unfamiliar situation.
When you compare the two studies, you can see that both involved some level of conformity to the situation, however the scale of how unfamiliar the situation is vast when you compare a line choice study and a simulated prison. Accordingly, the reactions to the two studies are similar, where Asch's study involved some self-doubt and some degree of conformity, Zimbardo's prison deeply affected how the participants acted. This could suggest that the larger and further one ventures from their comfort zone, the less inclined they are to act along with their personal dispositional factors. However, once again, it's difficult to apply these findings to typical real life as even Asch's study presents a very atypical situation with strangers and an authoritative researcher with perceived expectations. Although a study on camp boys has shown that even in cases similar to real life, a situational factor can influence a person's behavior.
Sherif M.
(1956) conducted an experiment on inter-group and outer-group conflict, which simply described mean a group you belong to and group you don't respectively. In the experiment, 22 white 11 year old boys were sent off to a special camp at Robbers Cave State Park. The boys, none of whom knew each other beforehand, were randomly divided into two equal groups. Kept in the dark of each others existence, the boys spent a week building an attachment to their group through various camp activities. After the week was over, the camp councilors introduced the other groups existence as well as a competition the groups would participate in against each
other.
The groups quickly developed hostile feelings between each other. The established bonds of one's own group, the inter-group, quickly strengthened and turned on the sudden revelation of the other group, the outer-group, who were seen as enemies. Name calling was the first reaction, goading the outer-group through taunts, and soon enough the relation between the groups became virulent enough for one group to burn the other groups's flag, which was later countered by ransacking the flag-burner group's cabins leading to a physical separation of the two “factions”. The councilors first attempted the reconcile the two groups by increasing the time they spent together, but as tempers grew even more vehement, they introduce cooperative task which eventually destroyed the perceived inter-group and outer-group perspectives.
The study has a clear apparent lack in sample variety in gender, cultural, and age validity, as the participants were all 11 year old white boys, but the study does demonstrate how the introduction of a situation, the inter- and outer-group, caused the boys to eventually react violently. It's unclear how applicable these results would be to varied grown adults, although when Robbers Cave is juxtaposed and compared with the previous two studies, it's clear that situational factors can have some influence on human behavior, or apparently, at least on the behavior of white males.
In conclusion, situational factors may not universally applicable with only these studies, however they can clearly have an effect on people thrust into situations they are not familiar with or for example children who have not yet fully developed their own rationale. It's not prudent to say situational factors entirely override dispositional factors, as the studies still retained some variation in behavior, however they have the potential to mold the ways in which we act.