Zimbardo experiments also commonly known as Stanford prison experiment because it was conducted at Stanford University in 1971. The research was an attempt to investigate the effects of psychology on perceived power, concentrating on the struggle between prison officers and prisoners. Philip Zimbardo, a psychology professor, was determined in discovering whether the cruelty reported among guards in United States prisons was as a result of the sadistic behavior of the guards in what is known as dispositional. It also had more to do with the environment of the prison, i.e., situational condition (Reicher & Haslam, 2006). For instance, guards and prisoners may have different behaviors that make dispute inevitable, with guards being aggressive and domineering and prisoners lacking respect for law and order. Alternatively, guards and prisoners may have brutal behavior due to their fixed power system of the social environment in prisons. If both guards and prisoners conduct themselves in a non-aggressive way, this will encourage the dispositional theory, or if they hold themselves the same manner as individuals do in the real prisons, this will promote the situational explanation.
After only six days, the experiment was stopped due to significant adverse psychological impacts of a number of the participants. According to Zimbardo including his colleagues, the Experiment conducted at Stanford Prison demonstrated the vital duty that the situation can play in the behavior of the human being. Since the guards were stationed in a position of power, they started to behave in a manner they would not often act in their daily lives or other situations. The prisoners, positioned in a case where they had no actual control became depressed and passive.
The Milgram experiment was carried out by Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University. In 1963, the psychologist experimented by aiming at the conflict between personal conscience and obedience to authority. Participants were 40 males; they were paired into a learner and a teacher. The student was tied to a chair with electrodes. After learning a list of word pairs given to him to determine, the teacher tested him by naming a word and asking the learner to recall its partner from the list of four possible choices. The teacher was requested to control an electric shock every time the student made a mistake, intensifying the level of excitement each time. The results were that two-thirds of the participants, that is, the teacher continued to the highest level of four hundred and fifty volts. All participants advanced to three hundred volts. The lesson drawn from the experiment was that ordinary people are likely to follow orders given by a figure in authority, even to the extent of killing an innocent human being (Gibson,2013) Obedience to authority is natured in human beings from the way they were raised up. Therefore, the degree of accuracy of the results of society depends on adopting the most appropriate method. Every research method has its advantage and disadvantage; however, some of the problems can be avoided if the research his made aware of the risk encountering them.
To conduct intensive sociological research, three primary methods were used namely surveys, experiments, and ethnography. Among the various methods of data collection for research purposes, the survey method is opted by several researchers as a result of its multiple benefits, strengths, and advantages. However, surveys also have their weak points and disadvantages that need to be considered. The forces of this method are that it makes possible the efficient collection of data on a large number of individuals. Since the research was conducted in the 19th century, it was challenging to incorporate the use of modern technology in the research. As a result prisoners and guards were randomly selected from the volunteering university students to participate in “a psychological study of prison life,” some participants created their duties as the guards and incorporated strict regulations and eventually subjected some prisoners to psychological torture (King, 2015). The two groups thus interacted one on one or instead face to face to make it possible to collect the data. Also, by the fact that a good number of prisoners temporarily accepted psychological torture and by officers permission, actively harassed other prisoners who tried to incorporate. Secondly, survey method allows for precise comparisons to be made among the answer of the respondent. For instance, out of 70 participants who showed up for the experiment only 24 of them were selected who were judged by mentally and physical health two of the prisoners drop out in mid-experiment and the entire exercise was disqualified after six days following the objection of Christina Maslach, a graduate student whom Zimbardo was dating and later married.
The limitations of using survey method are that material gathered may be superficial. If the questionnaire is highly standardized, the critical difference among respondents’ viewpoints may be glossed over, and that is what contributed to research being abandoned mid-way Zimbardo experiments. Another weakness is that response may be what people profess to believe rather than what they believe. This was evident when critics indicate that the research lacks generalizability due to numerous factors. The unrepresentative illustration of participants’ mainly white and middle-class males makes it tough to include results to a broader population.
The second method that was used in the research is the experiments. The impact of operations is demonstrated in the Milgram Experiment. Stanley Milgram experimented aiming at the dispute between personal conscience and obedience to authority. The strength of the research is that the investigator can control its influence of specific variable. For instance, volunteers were invited for a laboratory experiment investigating learning such as ethics deception. The volunteers included 40 males, aged between 20 and 50 whose careers ranged from professionals to unskilled from the area of New Heaven. They were compensated $4.50 for just showing up. Secondly, the strength of the method is that experiment is usually easier for subsequent researchers to repeat that is why it was immensely more comfortable for Stanley Milgram at intervals of up to the fourth procedure. During the experiment, many participants indicated signs of tension in which three participants encounter a “full-blown and uncontrollable seizures.
Although a good number of subjects was tensed participating in the experiment, all forty subjects obeyed up to 300 volts. However, out of 40 items, 25 of them continued to complete to issue shocks until the maximum level of 450 volts was attained all that process makes it easier for different research to conduct the study and accomplish slightly similar results.
However, some of the limitations of this method are that many aspects of social life cannot be brought into the laboratory. This means that it may be slightly confusing to manage all extraneous variables. The health, mood and all experiences of the test subjects may influence their reactions, and those variables may not even be known to the researcher (De, 2010). Another weakness of the method is responses of those of those studied may be affected by the experimental situation. This was evident when the ethical issues of the experiment were questioned regarding the protections of the participants, deception as well as the right to withdrawal.
Ethnography is the third method. It is the study of social interactions, behaviors, and perceptions that happens within communities, organizations, teams, and groups. Ethnography aims to provide rich, holistic insight into people`s view and action, as well as nature of location they inhabit, through the collection of detailed observations and interviews. Ethnographer must record the culture, practices and the perspective of the people in a particular setting. The aim is to establish how each views the world (Card, 2010). The vital features of ethnographic research are that it puts a firm emphasis on exhausting the nature of a particular social phenomenon as opposed to setting out to the test theories concerning it. Secondly, it tends to operate mainly with unstructured data, that is, data that has not been coded at the stage of data collection as an open set of analytical categories. Thirdly, this method can only research a small number of cases at a time.
References
Card, C. (2010). Confronting evils: Terrorism, torture, genocide. Cambridge University Press.
De Vos, J. (2010). From Milgram to Zimbardo: The double birth of postwar psychology/psychologization. History of the Human Sciences, 23(5), 156-175.
Gibson, S. (2013). Milgram's obedience experiments: A rhetorical analysis. British Journal of Social Psychology, 52(2), 290-309.
King, J. L. (2015). Humans in computing: Growing responsibilities for researchers. Communications of the ACM, 58(3), 31-33.
Reicher, S., & Haslam, S. A. (2006). Rethinking the psychology of tyranny: The BBC prison study. British journal of social psychology, 45(1), 1-40.
