Assigned roles and situational pressure can rapidly elicit abusive behaviour; the study's methods and conclusions are heavily contested.
Methods, demand characteristics and conclusions are all heavily criticised. Recordings released later show Zimbardo's team coaching guards toward harshness, so the finding is closer to instructed than emergent behaviour.
In practice
- Staff asked to role-play a disciplinary hearing, and told the exercise depends on realism, produce a harshness that surprises them afterwards.
- A junior given the job of enforcing an unpopular rule applies it more rigidly than the manager who wrote it, and the lanyard is doing some of the work.
- Possible explanations
- One explanation offered at the time was situational: roles and uniforms license behaviour the same people would refuse as themselves. Another, from the recordings, is instruction, since guards were told what was expected of them, which makes the result closer to conformity to an experimenter than to a role.
- In its favour
- The broader claim that situations shape behaviour more than observers expect has support elsewhere, including the obedience studies and field research on institutions.
- Against it
- There was no control condition, participants were self-selected, guards were coached, and later attempts to repeat it produced different results, so the study cannot carry the conclusion attached to it.
- Standing
- Methods, demand characteristics and conclusions are all heavily criticised.
- Subject
- Psychology & Behavior
- Essay
- Theories of the mind, from the lab to the bookshop