Conformity In The Stanford Prison Experiment

In recent years, many experiments have been conducted on conformity, such as the Asch, Stanford Prison, Sherif’s autokinetic effect, and Milgram experiments. Despite strong criticism, all of these experiments yielded similar results. Every one of them showed strong social conformity in its participants. Conformity is defined as, “behavior in accordance with socially accepted conventions or standards.” There are six main types of social conformity: normative, informational, compliance, internalization, ingratiational, and identification. These types were identified by Man and Kelman during the nineteen hundreds. Sherif’s autokinetic effect experiment was based on the phenomena where, when a light is shone in a dark room, it appears to …show more content…
This type of conformity is known as identification, and refers to “conforming to the expectations of a social role” (). In this famous experiment, twenty-one Stanford students agreed to participate in a simulation of prison life. Eleven of them would be guards and ten of them would be prisoners. The guards had complete control over food and treatment of the prisoners. The experiment was meant to run for two weeks, but after six days, when his girlfriend threatened to call the police, Zimbardo shut the experiment down. After only 36 hours from the start of the experiment, one of the prisoners had had an emotional breakdown, screaming and crying; he had to be released. He was found to be in the early stages of deep depression. The guards were beating the prisoners, forcing them to clean toilets with their bare hands, and having them do petty and useless tasks which the guards proceeded to undo and force the prisoners to complete again. All of the participants had previously been judged to be emotionally stable and normal. Afterwards, both the guards and prisoners had been shocked at their cruel and submissive behavior, respectively. This experiment demonstrates extreme identification conformity, as participants conformed to the assumed social …show more content…
Normative conformity is most commonly referred to as peer pressure, and is prevalent in our present society. Four of the “participants” were actually in on the experiment. Participants in a group of five were presented with a paper with three different sized lines on it. Another paper was placed next to it, with a line of equal length to one of the lines on the first card. The first three participants answered clearly incorrectly, and the fourth, the only real participant, would often answer incorrectly as well. They did this for two reasons. The first was normative; the participant did not want to be thought peculiar or unusual. The second was informative; the participant honestly thought the other three participants were better informed than they were. Even though the answer given by the first three “participants” was clearly incorrect, the actual participant