Zimbardo's Theory Of Conformity Essay

“The Stanford Prison Experiment” by Philip G. Zimbardo was written to explain the results of the Stanford prison experiment. Zimbardo while trying to gain support for his conclusions of the experiment, demonstrated many errors in his writing, and in his own experiment. The errors that Zimbardo commits call into question the validity of his argument, and the experiment. The goal explained by Zimbardo was “to understand more about the process by such people called “prisoners” lose their liberty, civil rights, independence, and privacy, while those called “guards” gain social power by accepting the responsibility for controlling and managing the lives of their dependent charges” (Zimbardo 733).

This article brings to light the opposite spectrum of what most society would not consider which is toxic followers. Most times in society we always look to the leader and how they are toxic or manipulative. We never consider who they are consulting or who they are looking to when it comes to making those big decisions. Many times you can have the follower that tries to protect the leader or the one who tries to lead the leader astray based off their own personal agenda. How can we as a society make sure that not only the leaders are being ethical but, that the followers are acting in the same ethical way?

In 1951, Solomon Asch carried out several experiments on conformity. The aim of these studies was to investigate conformity in a group environment situation. The purpose of these experiments was to see if an individual would be swayed by public pressure to go along with the incorrect answer. Asch believed that conformity reflects on relatively rational process in which people are pressured to change their behaviour. Asch designed experiments to measure the pressure of a group situation upon an individual judgment. Asch wanted to prove that conformity can really play a big role in disbelieving our own senses.

In Maria Konnikova’s “The Real Lesson of the Stanford Prison Experiment” she reveals what she believes to be the reality of sociologist Philip Zimbardo’s controversial study: its participants were not “regular” people.

In 1971, psychologist Philip Zimbardo and his colleagues created the experiment known as the Stanford Prison Experiment. Zimbardo wanted to investigate further into human behavior, so he created this experiment that looked at the impact of taking the role of a prisoner or prison guard. These researchers examined how the participants would react when placed in an institutionalized prison environment. They set up a mock prison in the basement of Stanford University’s psychology building. Twenty four undergraduate students were selected to play the roles of both prisoners and guards. These students were chosen because they were emotional, physically, and mentally stable. Though the experiment was expected to last two weeks, it only lasted six days after the researchers and participants became aware of the harm that was being done.

Two very important and significant psychological experiments were Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment and Milgram’s Shock Experiment. Both experiments were conducted to test subjects’ obedience to authority. Although each experiment achieved their goal and had enticing results, they both proposed many ethical issues and violations. Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment aimed to test how well subjects would conform to roles of guard and prisoner in a role-playing exercise (McLeod).

Solomon Asch 's (1951) conformity experiment is the study of people adapting their behaviours in order to follow the social normalities. This experiment entails a group of people who are actors and know about the experiment, and one person who is unknowing of the experiment, which are all in the same room. The group is shown a pair of cards; card A has a line on the card, and card B has three lines varying in length on the card, the similarities of the lines are obvious. The group individually, saying out loud picks one of the three lines on card B that matches the length of the line on card A. Everybody picks the correct line, this happens for a few rounds, then when shown another pair of cards the first actor chooses the wrong line on card B. The rest of the actors choose the same line the first actor chose, this tests to see if the unknowing participant will choose the same answer as the group (McLeod, 2008). The person who is unknowing of the

The “guards” could have lost their complete sense of reality and agreed to these unethical procedures because they were merely playing a part in this experiment. Zimbardo tried to justify these unethical acts by stating that these procedures were implemented so that the “prisoners” were in the proper frame of mind. What I took from this study was the potential fact that normal healthy, educated young men could be completely transformed under the institutional pressures of a “prison

There is a fundamental human need to belong to social groups especially if people were to live and work together, it is likely that they need to agree on common beliefs, values, attitudes and behaviours in order to get along and fit-in. Thus, we learnt to conform to rules of other people, the more people see others behaving in a particular way or making particular decisions, the more likely people will feel obliged to follow the suit. This is called conformity and can be defined in different ways, Aronson, Wilson & Akert (2014) stated it is the changing of one’s behavior due to the real or imagined influence of other people. According to Deutsch and Gerard (1955), social influence should be distinguished into two types, the informational social influence and normative social influence. The occurrence of social influence has implied to many real life events, which has drawn many researchers to attention. This has lead many researchers to design distinct experiments to try and understand the cause of the conformity, whether conformity is situation dependent, and whether we are able to resist social influences.

Conformity has been the topic of many researches throughout history in Psychology. However, famous psychologist Solomon Asch discovered that these experiments never gave a precise answer to what they were looking for. In 1951, Asch devised what is now regarded as a classic experiment in social psychology. One test subject sat at a table with several others whom he thought were also test subjects, but they were actually a part of the experiment. When asked if 3 lines drawn on a piece of paper were of varying length, the experimenter asks all of them, one at a time, to choose which of the three lines on the right card matches the length of the line on the left card. When the people a part of the experiment chose the wrong line intentionally, it proved that the test subject would indeed conform to the majority's decision, which is proof of conformity.

Solomon Asch was a psychologist that conduced numerous expirments designed to illustrate the increasing conformity within social groups. The experiments also invesigated the effect the number of people present within the group had one the conformity rate. Asch hypothesized, “ that the majority of the people would not conform to something obviosly wrong; however, when surrounded by (other) individuals all voicing an incorrect answer, 75% of them(the participant) will conform to the groups answer” (Watzlawick 1976)

Topic and Hypothesis: The Stanford Prison Experiment is the topic that is under discussion. It entails the study of prisoners that were in a make-believe prison. It is common knowledge that when one is in prison, they lose freedom and there are rules that they have to conform to under the stewardship of the guards who look after them round the clock. The hypothesis that Dr. Zimbardo had is that anonymity, depersonalization and dehumanization of prisoners promotes their submissive and docile nature. Prisoners deserve this kind of treatment because of their failure to lead a normal life in society and hence will also lead an unhealthier life in prison. The guards are the instruments in carrying out these vile acts on the prisoners who

Solomon Asch conducted one of the most famous studies of conformity in 1951. The problem, he believed, was there was no correct answer to Sherif’s experiment; so judging conformity was vague in terms of data (Asch 1951). In answer to this issue, he devised a study to distinctively judge the conformation of the participants. Using 50 male college students, Asch placed one participant with seven confederates, who had previously agreed on their answers, and asked each person to state which line out of three options was the closest to the sample line given.

His theories were tested in his famous line test experiments, where a participant, placed last in a row of other “participants” (actors) were to choose the correct corresponding line for a set of lines. However, all the actors were instructed to answer incorrectly, leading the participants to conform, on average, “about one third (32%)”(Asch 1-70) of the time in the complete trials. In addition, the varying cases monitored had shown that “75% of the participants had conformed at least once” (McLeod) during the duration of their tests. The majority of the subjects felt that their judgement was clouded, or, more surprisingly, knew that the group was incorrect yet went with the flow to avoid conflict. The real world impacts of this trial are massive: By placing individuals in groups, there bears the risk of conformity overtaking the free will of the group through the want of the individual to fit in, known as normative influence, or the clouding of their judgement through believing that the group has the better answer, known as informational influence. This can have massive repercussions in group centric fields such as politics, or affect the opinions of the members of a group during discussions. In addition, the urge to “fit in”, often experienced by many teenagers, is attributed to the same effect. Conformity is a powerful force, capable of weakening the strongest

People confirm to belong to the group and to become socially accepted as they live in the society. There are several conditions under which people feel the need to conform. Some of the circumstances are: when they feel insecure and left out, when the group contains at least three people, when everybody in the group agrees on a certain issue and when people admire the speaker’s status. In 1995, Solomon Asch conducted a test to study how social pressure form a majority group could affect a person to conform. In the test, male students participated in a ‘vision test’. Upon asked which of the three lines resembles the standard line, even the brightest students, who knew the right answer, gave the wrong answer one-third of the times than they were alone when the majority of the group had given the wrong answer. Therefore, social pressure could affect the person to