there are few psychology studies as famous or perhaps I should say as Infamous as zimbardo's Prison Experiment investigating the causes of prison violence in the basement of Stanford University he took on the role of prison intendent randomly assigning half a group of college age males to be prison inmates while the other half became prison officers the results absolute chaos no surprise right but zimbardo argued this was evidence of previously independent individuals ad their behavior to fit into the defined social roles of the prison environment the prison officers becoming dominant and aggressive and the prisoners well at first attempting to resist ultimately becoming submissive zimbardo claimed that even he was taken over by his need to perform the role of prison superintendent prioritizing the need to run his prison over the well-being of his participants you can now follow along by making your notes in my psycho workbook 150 full color worksheets covering all the compon units it's on Amazon or you can get signed additions from our website and teachers can order packs for the whole class Conformity to social roles as this video is fundamentally about Conformity to social roles we should Define a social role a commonly accepted definition is a socially defined pattern of behavior that's expected of persons who occupy a certain social position or belong to a particular social category it might be helpful to pause a moment here and consider some social positions and what are expected socially defined patterns of behavior for people in those roles someone can have the social role of doctor teacher police officer politician student artist prisoner or correctional officer what stereotypical behaviors would you expect of people in these roles well you would likely expect the doctor to be empathetic and caring the teacher to be knowledgeable and communicative the police officer to be confident and act with authority the politic to be well let's say persuasive and charismatic ideally the student should be curious and hardworking an artist unconventional and passionate a prisoner submissive or potentially dangerous and finally would expect a correctional officer to be tough uncaring and domineering of course not all people in those roles act this way but they are the stereotypical mental images we have when considering those roles in the previous video we discussed free types of Conformity the identification type of Conformity is where membership of a group is valued and even if we don't privately agree with the beliefs and behaviors of the group we adopt them publicly to feel part of the group you can probably see how that type of Conformity links to social roles people like to have a sense of social identity and by conforming to the socially defined pattern of behaviors linked to a social role we can Define ourselves as members Philip zimbardo F the reason for the intense levels of agression in the American prison system was due not to dispositional reasons so not due to Bringing together naturally aggressive prisoners and prison officers instead he claimed aggression was situational the environment of the prison itself led to people acting according to expected social roles that promoted abuse in order to study Conformity to social roles in a prison setting zimbardo created a mock prison in the basement of Stanford University his aim was to see if typical mentally healthy people would conform to the social roles of gods so become aggressive and the social roles of prisoners so submissive zimbardo's study is typically referred to as the Stanford Prison Experiment and abbreviated to the SP zimbardo's prison study you can see here the original advert asking for volunteers for a 7 to 14-day study on Prison life for $15 a day applicants were given psychological testing to ensure mental ability and ultimately 24 were selected importantly the participants were randomly assigned to be prisoners or guards to reduce the likelihood of participant variables the prisoner's experiences included being unexpectedly arrested at home by real police officers being booked deloused and given a basic prison uniform with their assigned ID number on it the prisoners had a list of rules to follow but the prisoners also had rights like free meals a day supervised toilet trips and visits from family each cell contained fre prisoners to give the guards an appearance of authority they were given uniforms a club whistles and sunglasses their instruction was to manage the prison without resorting to violence unlike the Prisoners the guards returned home at the end of their 8 hour shift in the study zimad played the part of Chief prison superintendent and Lead investigator a point I return to in the evaluations zimbardo found that both prisoners and guards quickly lost their individual identities and took on the social roles of prisoner or guard the prisoners initially attempted to resist they barricaded themselves in their cells using their bedding to block the cell doors the gods quickly crushed the rebellion and the prisoners became passive as the experiment progressed the prisoners showed significant distress to the point that a number of the prisoners were released early After experiencing mental breakdowns the guards became ative and some of them became sadistically aggressive due to the extreme responses of the prisoners and guards after 6 days the study was ended early zimbardo claimed that his study demonstrates that the situational power of the prison environment can make otherwise mentally healthy individuals act out social roles that lead them to highly aggressive behaviors Zim's prison study evaluations let's start with some positive evaluations we can praise the sb's methodology in terms of the initial setup the participants were carefully selected suggesting none of the particip ANS were naturally highly aggressive and the participants were randomly assigned to be prisoners or guards this high level of control reduce the likelihood of participan variables we can also say that the findings of the Stanford Prison Experiment have been practically applied to understand real life examples of institutional abuse one famous example is the American Military prison of Abu grabe in this prison an environment of few rules and little oversight Iraqi detainees were tortured sexually abused and even killed by American Army Personnel the world found out about this abuse due to the leaking of photographs of military personnel posing for selfies next to their victims after careful consideration I've decided not to show those pictures uncensored however I do think they are historically important and if you'd like to see them they're on the Wikipedia page I've Linked In the video description and the comments zimbardo even appeared as an expert witness of the subsequent trial the findings of the Stanford Prison Experiment are taught in Military and law enforcement settings in an attempt to reduce the likelihood of further abusers now I'm going to move into criticisms firstly due to ethical concerns replications are rare richel and Haslam carried out one of the few attempts at a replication for a BBC documentary with more safeguards I've linked to a video by the open University that uses original footage of the documentary and includes interviews with the researchers I recommend you watch that video after the this but to summarize their findings the participants did not conform to social roles they acted more in line with their personalities and the guards willingly gave up their powerful positions in fact in the Stanford Prison Experiment only 13d of the guards actually showed sadistic aggression the other guards were generally passive these results suggest that social roles have a limited influence on Behavior so you might be wondering what caused the extreme aggression that was observed in the St the prison experiment well a serious criticism of Zim's work is he took on the Dual role of prison superintendent and Lead investigator which likely led to experimental bias the presence of zimbardo likely influenced the behavior of the participants the prison superintendent interacting with the participants really should have been someone who didn't know the aims of the experiment the participants likely worked out the aims of the study and acted according to demand characteristics acting in a way they f zardo wanted them to behave and it actually gets worse than this recent analysis of the records of the Stanford Prison Experiment have found that zimbardo and the other researchers directly instructed the guards to be highly aggressive meaning the conclusion that the guards were aggressive due to adapting to social roles is likely invalid our final evaluation is likely the one that you most expected the participants especially the prisoners really suffered harm as a consequence of taking part in this experiment while the study was called to a stop after 6 days it was continued far beyond the point that the participants show significant distress and many of the prisoners felt they had no right to withdraw if nothing else Zim's work demonstrates the importance of ensuring studies are conducted with ethical safeguards in place I want to thank everyone over on patreon for supporting the channel because of you I've been able to teach part-time me I can make site boost on YouTube for everyone and a special thank you to azy Taylor for supporting at the developer level I do have extra resources our that are exclusive to my patrons so if you do decide to sign up you can grab those over my website these include over 100 exam question tutorial videos of course including questions on the social influence unit I hope this was helpful and I will see you in the next psych Boost video