The Prison Zimbardo

The dispositional hypothesis in the Zimbardo prison study refers to the idea that the violence present in prisons is due to the sadistic nature of the guards and the criminal nature of the inmates, not the structure of the prisons themselves. The situational hypothesis in the Zimbardo prison study refers to the idea that when people are labeled as a guard or a prisoner, they take on that role- they may become a brutal guard or a rebellious prisoner because they are thrown in to a situation where they are playing a role. Zimbardo conducted an experimental simulation and randomly assigned participants to the role of either guard or prisoner. Resistance was defined as any sort of physical resistance such as blocking doors or shoving a prisoner or a guard. Zimbardo’s study did mainly clash with two of the American Sociological Association’s points in their code of ethics. One being the statement “protect subjects from personal harm” and the other pertains to the statement “respect the subject’s right to privacy and dignity.” Both were violated during the guard’s cruel and embarassing treatment of the prisoners.

The research design of the Story of the Year poll represents quantitative data. This survey design data is collected in numerical form, can represent a very large group, and the data can be analyzed by the use of simple statistics. However, the sample is not random. A random sample would have to allow the same chance for every group of people to be represented in the results. Since the people who were surveyed were not selected, there was no control over who was represented in the survey, and it is less than likely that ALL groups were represented in this particular survey. I don’t think this will produce valid results because the people who participated in this survey are not representative of the whole population. In fact, now that this has become an assignment for a rather large class at CU, it seems as though most of the students