Stanford Prison Experiment Conformity Study

Social groups have specific characteristic; they consist of two or more people who interact in an ordered fashion, share specific values and norms and have at least some sense of unity and common goals. One of the main influence that groups exercise over their members lives in their capacity to induce conformity the process through which modify their behavior to comply with the groups norm or decision.

In this essay, we discuss some of the group conformity related experiments and their reflection in society.

The Stanford Prison Experiment was a landmark psychological study of the human response to captivity, in particular to the real word circumstances of prison life. It was conducted by in 1971 by Philip Zimbardo of Stanford University.

Experimenters led by Solomon Asch asked students to participate in a "vision test." In reality, all but one of the participants was the shill of the experimenter, and the study was really about how the remaining student would react to the confederates' behavior. The participants (the real subjects and the confederates) were all seated in a classroom where they were told to announce their judgment of the length of several lines drawn on a series of displays. They were asked which line was longer than the other, which were the same length, etc. The confederates had been prearranged to all give an incorrect answer to the tests. Many subjects showed extreme discomfort, but most conformed to the majority view of the others in the room, even when the majority said that two lines different in length by several inches were the same length. Control subjects with no exposure to a majority view had no trouble giving the correct answer.

The Asch experiments may provide some vivid empirical evidence relevant to some of the ideas raised in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. As G. Orwell put in his book “A party member is required to have not only the right opinions but the right instincts. (Page 174) G. Orwell appeared to have anticipated conformity when he described the main character Winston as feeling relaxed and happy after conforming to postulate that two plus two equals

Conformity may be much less salient than authority pressure. Would ordinary people, under the direction of an authority figure obey just about any order they were given, even to torture? It’s a phenomenon that’s been used to explain atrocities from the Holocaust to the Vietnam War’s My Lai massacre to the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. What is the degree of self-responsibility practiced by a person under the authority affects their level of obedience to unjust