In 1971 Dr Philip Zimbardo and a team of psychologists conducted an experiment of a mock prison in the basement of Stanford University. The experiment was set out to study the influence of social roles in human behavior. In our daily lives we are expected to fulfill the social expectations of our “roles”‚ our roles will have different expectations depending on the situations we are faced with. The psychologists designed an experiment to find out how much we are truly influenced by the social
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behavior or in order to fit in with others in a group. Throughout the history‚ social scientists have done plenty of experiments related to social conformity. In the 1950s‚ a psychologist called Solomon Asch conducted the well-known Asch conformity experiments‚ demonstrating the impact of social pressure on individual behavior. Participants were told that they were in an experiment on vision. With a group of other people‚ they were asked to look at three lines of different lengths and determine which
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that are in agreement with those of a specific individual or group‚ or with known standards about how a person should behave in certain situations (social norms). The recognized studies and theories on conformity are such as (Asch‚ 1951)‚ (Sherif‚ 1935) and (Jenness‚ 1932). Asch examined men in a university in the United States of America. He gave them the task to answer simple questions with the right answers obvious to them. He had all the other participants state the wrong answer. His aim was
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Character analysis Stanley going to camp was when he was really unlucky because he got arrested from his crime. Stanley was never alone with his crime it was also bad luck that got him at Camp Green Lake. At the beginning of the story Stanley was unlucky but by the end he became good luck. Stanley’s great-great grandfather caused him to have bad luck and for him to be stuck at Camp Green Lake. ¨ He had just walked under a freeway overpass when the shoes hit him on the head‚¨ (Sachar24) When the
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wept and begged to stop believing they had killed the learner. Most of the participants thought that the experiment was real. Milgram came to the conclusion that people obey authority because of the situation they are in and not because they are evil. The study showed the power of authority over our behaviour. High levels of obedience were observed for various reasons such as the experiment was held at Yale university
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The experiment involved using university students with no previous criminal record or any debilitating mental illnesses as subjects. Zimbardo then assigned to each subject a role at random. Half of the subjects were given the role of guard and the other half would be the prisoners. The guards were given absolute control and power over the prisoner’s lives for the duration for the experiment. Over time the guards became more abusive towards the prisoners. The experiment was discontinued
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participation‚ and most continued all the way until the end. The reasons for this were similar in both studies. Similarity #2. Both Milgram and Zimbardo stated reported the effects of personality differences were very limited. For Zimbardo‚ the only personality characteristic that seemed to have any effect was authoritarianism; and this characteristic was important only for prisoner behavior. Those prisoners who were high in authoritarianism were best able to handle the oppressive conditions in the
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The Milgram experiment demonstrated that people have been socially conditioned to follow instructions by an authoritarian figure. The participants in the Milgram experiment are pressured and almost verbally forced into continuing to deliver shocks to other participants for giving false answers. They had falsely been told the experiment was to determine the influence of punishment on memory. The results showed that 65%
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Solomon Asch - Conformity Experiment Asch believed that the main problem with Sherif’s (1935) conformity experiment was that there was no correct answer to the ambiguous autokinetic experiment. How could we be sure that a person conformed when there was no correct answer? Asch (1951) devised what is now regarded as a classic experiment in social psychology‚ whereby there was an obvious answer to a line judgment task. If the participant gave an incorrect answer it would be clear that this was
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Truth dare or double dare In the article‚ “ Opinions and Social Pressure”‚ by Solomon Asch‚ a social psychologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey‚ administered experiments in the early 1950s about conformity. The experiment involved tests of visual judgments by comparing the lengths of lines in a group setting. They gathered a group of seven to nine male college students‚ with all members informed beforehand to give the wrong answers in unanimity at certain points. While a single individual
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