Social Identity Theory And The Minimal Group Paradigm

Social identity theory and the minimal group paradigm shows why people need little excuse to start forming into groups and discriminating.

Social identity theory and the minimal group paradigm shows why people need little excuse to start forming into groups and discriminating.

Social identity theory helps to explain why people’s behaviour in groups is fascinating and sometimes disturbing.

People gain part of their self from the groups they belong to and that is at the heart of social identity theory.

It explains why as soon as humans are bunched together in groups we start to do odd things: copy other members of our group, favour members of own group over others, look for a leader to worship and fight other groups.

Just glance at Sherif’s Robbers Cave experiment for proof of how easy it is to provoke war between groups.

In-groups and out-groups in social identity theory

But think about the types of groups you belong to, or ‘in-group’ as social identify theory has it, and you’ll realise they differ dramatically.

Some groups are more like soldiers in the same unit or friends who have known each other from childhood.

Long-standing, tight-knit, protecting each other.

Perhaps it’s not surprising people in these groups radically change their behaviour, preferring members of their own group over others, referred to in social identity theory as an ‘out-group’, in many ways.

Other groups, though, are much looser.

Supporters of a large sports club, for example, or work colleagues only together on a project for a few months or even a group of people in an art gallery appreciating a painting.

Minimal group paradigm and social identity theory

It seems impossible that people stood together for only 30 seconds to look at a painting can be said to form a group in any measurable way.

Surely it’s too fleeting, too ephemeral?

This is exactly the type of question social psychologist Henry Tajfel and colleagues set out to answer in the development of social identity theory (Tajfel et al., 1971).

They believed it was possible for a group, along with its attendant prejudices, to form at the drop of a hat.

In fact they thought a group could form even when there was no face-to-face contact between members, none of the people knew each other and their ‘group’ behaviour had no practical consequences.

In other words, they had absolutely nothing to gain (or lose) from this barely existent group (although social identity theory shows this statement is not quite right).

Forming a ‘minimal group’

Tajfel and colleagues came up with a neat solution for testing their idea, which is referred to as the minimal group paradigm.

From this experiment and others like it Henry Tajfel developed social identity theory.

Participants, who were 14 and 15 year-old boys, were brought into the lab and shown slides of paintings by Klee and Kandinsky.

They were told their preferences for the paintings would determine which of two groups they would join.

Of course, this was a lie designed to set up the idea of ‘us’ and ‘them’ in their minds.

The experimenters wanted two groups of boys with not the faintest idea who was also in their own group or what the grouping meant or what they had to lose or gain.

After this setup, the boys were taken to a cubicle, one at a time.

Each was then asked to distribute virtual money to the other members of both groups.

The only information they had about who they were giving it to was a code number for each boy and that boy’s group membership.

There were a series of rules for the distribution of the money that were designed to tease out who the boys favoured: their own group or the other group.

The rules were changed slightly in different trials so that it was possible to test a number of theories.

Did the boys distribute the money:

  • Fairly?
  • To obtain maximum joint profit?
  • For maximum ingroup (own group) profit?
  • For maximum difference between groups?
  • Using favouritism? This involves a combination of maximum ingroup profit and maximum difference?

Findings from the minimal group paradigm

From the way the virtual money was distributed, the boys did indeed demonstrate the classic behavioural markers of group membership predicted by social identity theory: they favoured their own in-group over the other out-group.

And this pattern developed consistently over many, many trials and has subsequently been replicated in other experiments in which groups were, if you can believe it, even more minimal.

When I first came across this experiment, my first reaction was to find it startling.

Remember, the boys had no idea who was in their group ‘with them’ or who was in the other group.

But, the most puzzling aspect of this experiment is that the boys had nothing whatsoever to gain from favouring their own group – there didn’t seem to be anything riding on their decisions.

Out in the real world there’s a good reason to favour your own group – normally it is also advantageous to yourself.

You protect yourself by protecting others like you.

Social identity theory

What Tajfel argued, though, was that there was something riding on the decisions the boys made, but it was something very subtle, yet incredibly profound.

Tajfel argued that people build their own identities from their group memberships.

For example, think of each of the groups you belong to: say at work, or within your family.

Part of who you are is probably defined by these groups (an important component of social identity theory).

Putting it the other way around: the nature of your group memberships define your identity.

As our group membership forms our identity, it is only natural for us to want to be part of groups that are both high status and have a positive image.

Crucially though, high status groups only have that high status when compared to other groups.

In other words: knowing your group is superior requires having a worse group to look down upon.

Seen in the light of social identity theory, then, the boys in the experiment do have a reason to be selfish about the allocation of the virtual cash.

It is all about boosting their own identities through making their own group look better.

Criticisms of the minimal group paradigm

No experiment can, or should, be automatically taken at face value.

Questions have to be asked about whether it is really telling us what the authors claim.

There are two criticisms often levelled at this experiment and its interpretation in light of social identity theory:

  1. The participant’s behaviour can be explained by simple economic self-interest. But: in another experiment only symbols were used rather than ‘virtual’ money and the results were the same.
  2. The participants were responding to what they thought the experimenters wanted (psychologists call this ‘demand characteristics’). But: Tajfel argues it is unclear to the participants what the experimenters wanted. Recall that the rules for distributing money frequently changed. Also, the participants were encouraged to think that choosing whose paintings they liked (the ‘first’ experiment) was unrelated to the allocation of virtual money (the ‘second’ experiment).

Despite these criticisms, Tajfel and colleagues’ findings have stood the test of time.

The experiment, or something like it, has been repeated many times with different variations producing much the same results.

Group membership in social identity theory

Social identity theory states that our identities are formed through the groups to which we belong.

As a result we are motivated to improve the image and status of our own group in comparison with others.

Tajfel and colleagues’ experiment shows that group membership  in social identity theory is so important to us that we join the most ephemeral of groups with only the slightest prompting.

We will then go out of our way to make our own group look better compared to others.

The simple fact of how important group membership is to us, and how easily we join groups, often without realising it, is both a subtle and profound observation about human nature.

→ This post is part of a series on the best social psychology experiments:

  1. Halo Effect: Definition And How It Affects Our Perception
  2. Cognitive Dissonance: How and Why We Lie to Ourselves
  3. Robbers Cave Experiment: How Group Conflicts Develop
  4. Stanford Prison Experiment: Zimbardo’s Famous Social Psychology Study
  5. Milgram Experiment: Explaining Obedience to Authority
  6. False Consensus Effect: What It Is And Why It Happens
  7. Social Identity Theory And The Minimal Group Paradigm
  8. Negotiation: 2 Psychological Strategies That Matter Most
  9. Bystander Effect And The Diffusion Of Responsibility
  10. Asch Conformity Experiment: The Power Of Social Pressure

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How Can Selfish People Live With Themselves? It Is Down To Memory

How selfish people justify their behaviour to both themselves and others.

How selfish people justify their behaviour to both themselves and others.

Selfish people tend to forget their selfish acts, research finds.

It is a psychological mechanism that helps the selfish maintain a positive view of themselves.

However, only a minority of people are selfish and this bias only applies them.

The majority of people are generous and recall their behaviour accurately.

The conclusions come from a study motivated by the question of how selfish people can live with themselves.

The answer, it emerges, is partly through self-deception.

People who are selfish often justify their selfish behaviour to both themselves and others.

For example, they might justify giving a small tip by saying the service was poor.

However, selfish people also rely on ‘motivated misremembering’ to deny that it even happened.

Dr Molly Crockett, study co-author, said:

“When people behave in ways that fall short of their personal standards, one way they maintain their moral self-image is by misremembering their ethical lapses.”

For the research, five separate experiments that tested generosity were carried out on 3,190 people.

Across the studies, stingier people tended to recall giving more than they actually had.

This was despite being motivated to tell the truth by the offer of financial reward.

In a twist, two of the studies sometimes instructed people to be less generous.

Then, selfish people tended to recall exactly how much they had given.

The reason is that this time they were not morally responsible for the choice, so there was no need to ‘forget’ their selfish behaviour.

Mr Ryan Carlson, the study’s first author, said:

“Most people strive to behave ethically, but people sometimes fail to uphold their ideals.

In such cases, the desire to preserve a moral self-image can be a powerful force and not only motivate us to rationalize our unethical actions, but also ‘revise’ such actions in our memory.”

The study was published in the journal Nature Communications (Carlson et al., 2020).

Above-Average Effect: Why People Feel Better Than Average

The above-average effect or better-than-average effect explains why some people consider themselves superior at everything.

The above-average effect or better-than-average effect explains why some people consider themselves superior at everything.

The above-average effect, sometimes known as illusory superiority or the better-than-average effect, is a finding in social psychology that people tend to overestimate their abilities.

Whether it is driving ability, estimating IQ, health, memory, relationships and even happiness, people consistently rate themselves as better than others.

For example, 93 percent of people think their driving abilities are better than average.

Naturally, we cannot all be above average — unfortunately, by definition some of us have to be below average.

Above-average effect vs. below-average

People do not always assume themselves to be above average, though.

When a task is particularly difficult, such as a mathematical problems or playing chess, people assume they will do worse than average (see: worse-than-average effect).

Suddenly, instead of overestimating their abilities, people start underestimating their abilities.

This creates an apparent contradiction: how can people assume they are better-than-average, but suddenly lose their confidence when the task is difficult?

Better than average

A study seeks to resolve this contradiction in the above-average effect by surveying runners about how they expected to do in an upcoming and challenging race (Engeler & Häubl, 2021).

Their estimates were then compared to their actual times.

The results showed that some of the runners showed the better-than-average effect: they thought they would do better than others.

The better-than-average effect was mainly driven by overconfidence, they predicted they could run faster than they really could.

The runners who underestimated their ability, though, were mainly driven by their expectations about other competitors.

In other words, they assumed other runners would be faster than they actually were.

Professor Gerald Häubl, study co-author, said:

“Our work identifies two distinct sources of bias or two different reasons for why people might not be well calibrated: they can be biased in their self-assessment, and they can be biased in their assessment of others.”

Overconfidence vs. under confidence

Fascinatingly, the runners who were worst were also the most overconfident.

This is another demonstration of the Dunning-Kruger effect, the findings that the poorest performers are unaware of their shortcomings.

Put more crudely, it is why the incompetent don’t know they’re incompetent.

Overconfidence, or the above-average effect, is not always bad, it depends on the circumstances, said Professor Häubl:

“Some of humankind’s greatest achievements were probably fuelled by some form of overconfidence.

But then, so were some of humankind’s most spectacular failures.

In very general terms, well-calibrated confidence, based on an accurate assessment of both one’s own and others’ abilities, is what people should strive for.”

In contrast, under confidence has more obvious disadvantages:

“The problem with under confidence, however, is that it can prevent people who actually have the potential to excel at something—a particular job or career—from even trying, because they falsely believe there are many others who are better than they are.”

The study was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Engeler & Häubl, 2021).

Why People Say One Thing But Do Another

Research in the psychology of attitudes reveals why people say one thing, but do another.

Research in the psychology of attitudes reveals why people say one thing, but do another.

The word for when someone says one thing but does another is hypocrisy.

But why are people often so hypocritical?

It’s only natural to think a person’s attitudes and behaviours are directly related.

If someone says, while truly believing it, that they’re not a racist, you’d expect them to behave consistently with that statement.

Despite this, psychologists have found that the link between a person’s attitudes and their behaviours is not always that strong.

People frequently say one thing but do another.

In fact, people have a nasty habit of saying one thing and then doing the exact opposite, even with the best of intentions.

You see it all the time:

  • People say they’re worried about global warming and yet they drive around in a big gas guzzler.
  • They say that money isn’t their God, yet they work all the hours.
  • They say they want to be fit but they don’t do any exercise.

Say one thing, do another

The discovery of the extent of people’s blatant hypocrisy goes back to 1930s America and the work of a Stanford sociology professor, Richard LaPiere (LaPiere, 1934).

In the early 30s he was on a tour across California with some close friends who happened to be Chinese.

LaPiere was worried that they would encounter problems finding welcoming restaurants and hotels because of his Chinese friends.

At that time in the US there had been lots of stories in the media about how prejudiced people were against Chinese people.

LaPiere and his friends were, therefore, pleasantly surprised to find that out of the 128 restaurants and hotels they visited, all but one served them courteously.

Nowadays the fact that one place refused to serve them would rightly be considered an outrage – but those were different times.

So it sounds like a happy ending: perhaps the papers had just exaggerated people’s negative attitudes towards Chinese people?

The gap between attitudes and behaviour

But when LaPiere got home he started to wonder why there was such a gap between what the newspapers were reporting about people’s attitudes and their actual behaviour.

Why do people say one thing, then do another?

To check this out he decided to send out a questionnaire to the restaurants and hotels they had visited along with other similar places in the area.

The questionnaire asked the owners about their attitudes, with the most important question being: “Will you accept members of the Chinese race in your establishment?”

The answers they could give were:

  • Yes.
  • No.
  • Depends upon the circumstances.

Incredibly, 90 percent of respondents answered, no, they wouldn’t accept members of the Chinese race into their establishments.

Imagine LaPiere’s surprise when he looked at the results.

People genuinely did say one thing and do the complete reverse.

They didn’t even select ‘it depends’.

What on Earth was going on?

Problems with the study

LaPiere himself argued that the problem lay in the questionnaire.

The questions themselves cannot represent reality in all its confusing glory.

What probably happened when people were asked if they accept Chinese people was that they conjured up a highly prejudiced view of the Chinese which bore little relation with what they were presented with in reality.

Here was a polite, well-dressed, well-off couple in the company of a Stanford University professor.

Not the rude, job-stealing, yobbish stereotype they had in mind when they answered the questionnaire.

This study has actually been subsequently criticised for all sorts of reasons.

Nevertheless its main finding – that people say one thing and do another in many situations – has been backed up by countless later studies, although in more sophisticated fashion.

The question is: why?

Snapshot of prejudices

Many psychologists effectively agree with LaPiere that it all depends on how you ask the questions and what stereotypes people are currently imagining when they give their answers.

In some ways an attitude is like a snapshot of the prejudices the respondent has available to memory just at the moment they are questioned.

This has led to a whole raft of studies and theories searching for connections between people’s attitudes and their behaviour.

Many a lengthy tome has been dedicated to explaining the divergence.

Some of the factors that have been found important are:

  • Social norms.
  • Accessibility of the attitude.
  • Perceived control over behaviour.

Despite these findings, the picture is extremely complicated and frustratingly inconclusive.

Perhaps as a result interest in this area has been waning amongst psychologists.

The exact way in which people’s attitudes and behaviour are connected remains a mystery.

All we can say with certainty is that people are frequently extremely inconsistent.

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The Secret To Amazing Lie Detection Is Not Body Language

The process of lie detection has nothing to do with supposed ‘tells’ like avoiding eye-contact or sweating.

The process of lie detection has nothing to do with supposed ‘tells’ like avoiding eye-contact or sweating.

Despite all the advice about lie detection going around, study after study has found that it is very difficult to spot when someone is lying.

Previous tests involving watching videos of suspects typically find that both experts and non-experts come in at around 50/50: in other words you might as well flip a coin.

A study published in Human Communication Research, though, has found that a process of active questioning yielded almost perfect results, with 97.8 percent of liars successfully detected (Levine et al., 2014).

The process of lie detection has nothing to do with supposed ‘tells’ like avoiding eye-contact or sweating, and everything to do with the way the suspect is questioned.

The Reid Technique

In the series of studies, participants played a trivia game in which they were secretly offered a chance to cheat.

In one experiment 12 percent cheated and in another 44.9 percent chose to cheat.

Participants were then interviewed using a variety of active questioning techniques.

One group were interrogated using the Reid Technique, which is employed by many law enforcement professionals in North America.

It involves tactics like presuming the suspect is guilty, shifting the blame away from the suspect and asking loaded questions like “Did you plan this or did it just happen?”

This technique was 100 percent effective with all 33 guilty participants owning up to their ‘crime’.

A second group were interviewed by US federal agents with substantial experience of interrogation.

They were able to detect 97.8 percent of people that cheated — in reality all but two of 89 people.

Bear two things in mind, though:

  • The Reid Techniques’ detractors say that it can lead to false confessions.
  • Participants in this study did not have that much to lose by admitting their guilt. It wasn’t as if they’d murdered their spouses.

Active questioning

Across the different types of interrogation, though, the important factor was that the questioning was active and of the kind used in real interrogations.

Professor Timothy Levine of Michigan State University, who led the study, said:

“This research suggests that effective questioning is critical to deception detection.”

Asking bad questions can actually make people worse than chance at lie detection, and you can make honest people appear guilty.

But, fairly minor changes in the questions can really improve accuracy, even in brief interviews.

This has huge implications for intelligence and law enforcement.”

Presumption of honesty

Professor Levine believes lies are partly so difficult to detect because in normal, everyday life we have a presumption of honesty.

“The presumption of honesty is highly adaptive.

It enables efficient communication, and this presumption of honesty makes sense because most communication is honest most of the time.

However, the presumption of honesty makes humans vulnerable to occasional deceit.”

The key, then, to detecting lies may be to assume someone is lying and then question them on that basis.

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The Study Of Personal Space In Middlemist et al. (1976)

Middlemist et al. designed a psychology experiment to test how men’s urination in public was affected by invasions of personal space.

Middlemist et al. designed a psychology experiment to test how men’s urination in public was affected by invasions of personal space.

Here’s a weird study that sometimes gets a mention in ethical discussions about psychology, and it’s not hard to see why.

Middlemist, Knowles & Matter (1976) designed an experiment to test how the speed and flow of men’s urination in a public lavatory was affected by invasions of personal space.

Personal space

To gather some preliminary data on men’s toilet habits, a pilot study stationed an observer in a public toilet at a US university.

He was instructed to look like he was grooming himself in the mirror, but was actually keeping a record of which urinals men stood at and their patterns of urination.

Timing them on his wristwatch, our intrepid toilet researcher measured the onset delay in micturition along with persistence of flow.

If you’re wondering how our correspondent measured these, it was by sound – which must have been no mean feat when there was multiple micturition in progress.

Sure enough the pilot study revealed men prefer not to stand next to each other in the urinals, and the closer other men are to each other, the longer it takes for them to begin urinating, and the shorter the persistence of their stream.

Spot the ethical issues

Middlemist et al. were not satisfied with this observational data, however, and decided to carry out a proper psychology experiment.

For this they required a more complicated setup, and a little covert action.

They forced unknowing urinators to spend their pennies in one (out of three) urinals that was closest to a single stall.

A confederate (who was in on the experiment) then either stood directly next to the various experimental subjects, one urinal away, or was not present at all.

Hidden in the stall was our urine measurement officer (grad students get all the best jobs).

Chief amongst his weapons was a specially designed periscope hidden in a stack of books so that the stream of urine could be directly observed.

The experimental version of the pilot study confirmed earlier findings.

With no one present, unselfconscious urinators’ average onset was 4.8 seconds, with a confederate present one urinal away, mildly self-conscious urinators’ average micturition onset was pushed up to 6.2 seconds.

Finally, with the confederate in the next urinal, it was 8.4 seconds before our bashful toilet-goer’s blessed relief began.

Urination and personality?

Rather than being left with the feeling, as you may be, that this was not only distasteful but also a bit of a waste of time, the psychologist in me comes out.

I’m wondering about personality correlates and personal space.

For example, is neuroticism positively correlated with increasing micturition onset, while extroversion is negatively correlated?

The problem is then you’ve got to get urinators to fill in a personality measure on the way out, which will expose all the periscope business, which in turn may lead on to a variety of uncomfortable conversations — both with participants and with ethics committees.

Perhaps we’ll just leave this one as it is.

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Vocal Fry: What It Is And Whether It’s Attractive

Vocal fry is the creaky voice sometimes used by young women — research explores whether it is attractive and how others perceive it.

Vocal fry is the creaky voice sometimes used by young women — research explores whether it is attractive and how others perceive it.

From Meredith Grey in Grey’s Anatomy, through Britney Spears, the Kardashians and Katy Perry.

They all do it, but how is vocal fry perceived?

In fact, ‘Vocal fry’ — a vocal affectation of young American women — may be hurting people’s job prospects and reducing their attractivity, according to research.

Vocal fry has become popular across the US in the last decade, especially among young women.

It’s often paired with ‘uptalk’, where the voice goes up at the end of the sentence as though the person is asking a question.

What is vocal fry?

Here is a YouTube user giving a perfect demonstration of vocal fry:

Vocal fry is supposedly associated with more educated, upwardly mobile people, but now psychologists have found the perception may not be so positive.

Is vocal fry attractive for men or women?

In a study published in the journal PLOS ONE, 800 people (half men, half women) listened to a young man and a young women saying “thank you for considering me for this opportunity” (Anderson et al., 2014).

Half the time it was spoken in their normal voice and the other half used vocal fry.

When asked who they would hire for a job, 80 percent preferred people speaking in their usual voice, rather than the vocal fry.

Casey A. Klofstad, one of the study’s authors and an associate professor at the University of Miami College of Arts and Sciences, said:

“Our results show that the vocal fry fad is a hindrance to young women who are trying to find work.

Lack of experience due to their younger age, a historically poor economic environment, and sex discrimination are all barriers to labor market success for this demographic.

Given this context, our findings suggest that young women would be best advised to avoid using vocal fry when trying to secure employment.”

Those listening to the voices were also asked about the speaker’s attractivity, competence, education and trustworthiness.

Of these, vocal fry had the largest effect on reducing the speaker’s perceived trustworthiness.

Klofstad speculated on why vocal fry may have such a negative effect on people’s perceptions:

“Humans prefer vocal characteristics that are typical of population norms.

While strange sounding voices might be more memorable because they are novel, humans find ‘average’ sounding voices to be more attractive.

It is possible that speakers of vocal fry are generally perceived less favorably because vocal fry is accompanied by a dramatic reduction in voice pitch relative to normal speech.”

So, the answer is that vocal fry is not attractive to people:

“Previous studies show that when women try to lower the pitch of their voice they are perceived as less attractive.

You could view the results we found as an extension of this to an economic context, whereby deliberate lowering of voice pitch in a sex-atypical manner by women through vocal fry results in negative perceptions by potential employers.”

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Stanford Prison Experiment: Zimbardo’s Famous Social Psychology Study

The Stanford prison experiment was a social psychology study which demonstrated the horrors people can inflict on one another.

The Stanford prison experiment was a social psychology study which demonstrated the horrors people can inflict on one another.

The Stanford prison experiment was run to find out how people would react to being made a prisoner or prison guard.

The psychologist Philip Zimbardo, who led the Stanford prison experiment, thought ordinary, healthy people would come to behave cruelly, like prison guards, if they were put in that situation, even if it was against their personality.

It has since become a classic study, studied by generations of psychology students and recently coming under a lot of criticism.

What was the Stanford prison experiment about?

The Stanford prison experiment asks timeless questions about human nature, like what makes a person evil?

Can a good person commit evil acts?

If so, what can make people cross the line?

Is there some set-point which when crossed unleashes the evil?

Or is it something about the situations in which people are placed that determines our behaviour?

The famous ‘Stanford Prison Experiment’ – argues a strong case for the power of the situation (Zimbardo, 1971).

Not only that but the experiment has also inspired a novel, two films, countless TV programs, re-enactments and even a band.

More on that later, first the experiment.

The procedure of the Stanford prison experiment

The idea was simple: to see how ordinary men, chosen to be the most healthy and ‘normal’ would respond to a radical change to their normal roles in life.

Half were to become prison guards, the other half their prisoners. In this experiment there were no half-measures, for it to be effective it had to closely approximate the real experience of prisoners and guards.

These participants in the Stanford prison experiment were in for the ride of their lives.

‘Prisoners’ were ‘arrested’ by a police car with sirens wailing while they were out going about their everyday business.

Then they were fingerprinted, blindfolded and put in a cell, then stripped naked, searched, deloused, given a uniform, a number and had a chain placed around one foot.

The other participants were made into guards who wore uniforms and were given clubs.

A prison was mocked up in the basement of a Stanford University building.

And so the Stanford prison experiment began.

Rebellion crushed

All was quiet until the second day when the ‘prisoners’ rebelled against their incarceration.

The guard’s retaliation was swift and brutal.

Guards stripped the prisoners naked, removed the beds from the prison, placed the rebellion’s ringleader in solitary confinement and began harassing all the ‘prisoners’.

Soon the ‘prisoners’ began behaving with blind obedience towards the prison guards.

After only a few day’s realistic role-playing participants reported it felt as though their old identities had been erased.

They had become their numbers.

So too had the ‘guards’ taken on their roles – taunting and abusing their prisoners.

Even the lead researcher, Philip Zimbardo, admits he became submerged in his role as the ‘prison superintendent’.

In fact, Zimbardo believes the most powerful result of the Stanford prison experiment was his own transformation into a rigid institutional figure, more concerned with his prison’s security than the welfare of his participants.

Other members of the experimental team became engrossed in their new role.

Craig Haney, like Zimbardo, explained he became completely engaged in the day-to-day crises they were facing in running the ‘prison’ and forgot about the aim of the Stanford prison experiment.

Playing the roles

It was only when one of his colleagues intervened that the Stanford prison experiment was finally stopped.

In total it only lasted six of the planned 14 days.

Young men previously found to be pacifists were, in their roles as guards, humiliating and physically assaulting the ‘prisoners’ – some even reported enjoying it.

The ‘prisoners’, meanwhile, quickly began to show classic signs of emotional breakdown.

Five had to leave the ‘prison’ even before the experiment was prematurely terminated.

The psychological explanation for the participant’s behaviour was that they were taking on the social roles assigned to them.

This included adopting the implicit social norms associated with those roles: guards should be authoritarian and abuse prisoners while prisoners should become servile and take their punishment.

Inevitably the Stanford prison experiment has attracted criticism for being unethical, involving a small sample size, lack of ecological validity and so on.

Despite this it’s hard to deny that the experiment provides important insights in to human behaviour, perhaps helping to explain the abuses that occurred in situations like the Abu Ghraib Prison.

Conclusions of the Stanford prison experiment

The Stanford prison experiment showed how people are ready to conform to the roles they are given and expected to play.

They lost their identity within the group, taking the cue from what other people were doing.

The situation of the prison turned guards into sadists and reduced their sense of identity and personality responsibility.

The prisoners were also surprised how much it changed their behaviour.

Even assertive types became submissive and weak when placed in the role of a prisoner in the Stanford prison experiment.

In this sense it showed that the situation was more powerful in guiding people’s behaviour than their personality.

Is the Stanford prison experiment realistic?

Does this Stanford prison experiment mirror what occurs in real prisons?

Probably.

Writing in Inside Rikers: Stories from the World’s Largest Penal Colony, Jennifer Wynn interviews prison guards from New York City’s largest penal colony, Rikers Island.

One captain explained that guards easily become used to the level of violence inflicted on inmates – it’s part of the job and they soon become immune.

Some can’t understand how they become different people at work.

Levels of violence against prisoners were so bad in one unit, called the ‘Central Punitive Segregation Unit’ of Rikers’, that almost a dozen guards were officially charged with assaulting inmates in 1995.

Eventually the inmates won $1.6 million dollars in compensation.

This is just one example.

Criticism of the Stanford prison experiment

Other the years, many criticism have been thrown at the Stanford prison experiment, including:

  • The guards later claimed they were acting in the Stanford prison experiment: psychologists refer to this as the demand characteristics of the study.
  • The prisoners and guards were playing a role so you cannot generalise to real life. Different factors may affect people’s behaviour in real life. The Stanford prison experiment’s prison itself was not that realistic and people knew they were not in prison.
  • Because of its ethics, the study could not be conducted nowadays. It would not pass any standard psychological ethics committees. For example, participants did not agree to be ‘arrested’ at their homes.
  • Subsequent studies have cast doubt on the validity of the Stanford prison experiment, suggesting that participants ‘faked’ their behaviour and tried to help the experimenters (Texier, 2019).

Popular culture and the Stanford Prison Experiment

The study is now so well-known it has crossed over into popular culture. It has inspired a novel, Das Experiment by Mario Giordano, which was later filmed, and a new movie by the writer of the Usual Suspects is slated for filming.

The experiment has also been covered or recreated in countless TV shows, most notably on the BBC.

Not only this, but the experiment has even inspired the name of a band.

‘Stanford Prison Experiment’ released their first eponymously titled album in 1994, following up a year later with ‘The Gato Hunch’.

What other psychology study can say it’s got a band named after it?

→ This post is part of a series on the best social psychology experiments:

  1. Halo Effect: Definition And How It Affects Our Perception
  2. Cognitive Dissonance: How and Why We Lie to Ourselves
  3. Robbers Cave Experiment: How Group Conflicts Develop
  4. Stanford Prison Experiment: Zimbardo’s Famous Social Psychology Study
  5. Milgram Experiment: Explaining Obedience to Authority
  6. False Consensus Effect: What It Is And Why It Happens
  7. Social Identity Theory And The Minimal Group Paradigm
  8. Negotiation: 2 Psychological Strategies That Matter Most
  9. Bystander Effect And The Diffusion Of Responsibility
  10. Asch Conformity Experiment: The Power Of Social Pressure

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Fundamental Attribution Error: Example And How To Avoid It

The fundamental attribution error is when we assume people’s personality explains their behaviour and forget about the situation they are in.

The fundamental attribution error is when we assume people’s personality explains their behaviour and forget about the situation they are in.

The fundamental attribution error is an error we often make when judging other people.

It is assuming that other people’s behaviour mainly reflects their personality.

Unfortunately, this ignores another major influence on how people behave staring us right in the face: the situation.

Our personalities certainly have an influence on what situations we get into and how we deal with them, but situational factors — even relatively subtle ones — can completely obliterate the effects of personality.

Example of the fundamental attribution error

The fundamental attribution error, sometimes called the correspondence bias or over-attribution effect, helps explain why people blame others for things over which they have no control.

For example, people who have been the victim of an assault are frequently blamed by others for not taking precautions or failing to foresee the calamitous event, even when there was nothing the victim could do about it.

Don’t take my word for it, though, consider a modern take on an ancient bible story.

The fundamental attribution error and the good Samaritan

Prominent social psychologists Darley & Batson (1973) were interested in what influences people’s helping behaviours and decided to test the parable of the good Samaritan.

The parable is about a Jewish man travelling to Jericho who has been attacked by bandits and lies half dead at the side of the road.

A priest and temple assistant pass him by before finally a Samaritan (who stereotypically hated Jews) stops to offer his assistance.

The moral of the story is clear enough but, wondered Darley and Batson, have we judged the priest and the temple assistant too quickly, perhaps they were just in a hurry?

Taking the ‘Good Samaritan’ test

In their classic social psychology study the experimenters recruited 67 students from the Princeton Theological Seminary and told them it was a study about religious education and vocations.

They were asked to fill in some personality questionnaires and told they were going to give a brief talk in a nearby room.

Some were asked to give a short talk about the types of jobs that seminary graduates would be suited for, while the others were asked to talk about the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan’.

Unknown to the study’s participants, they were to experience their very own ‘Good Samaritan’ test.

For, after filling out their questionnaires and while making their way to the other office to give their talk, they would encounter an experimental confederate lying in a doorway, doubled over, eyes closed and coughing.

Participants would have to pass the apparently highly distressed man, but would they stop to help?

The situation affects behaviour

The experimenters thought it would depend on how much participants were hurried, so they manipulated this by giving them a map and one of the following three instructions:

  1. “Oh, you’re late. They were expecting you a few minutes ago. We’d better get moving…”
  2. “The assistant is ready for you, so please go right over.”
  3. “…It’ll be a few minutes before they’re ready for you, but you might as well head on over…”

This created three conditions: high, medium and low hurry.

So some students left the office thinking they needed to go quickly, others less so, while some were relaxed.

Each of these conditions was also split into two: half about to deliver a talk on the Good Samaritan, the other half on job prospects for seminary graduates.

This meant that the experimenters could assess both the effect of hurry as well as the talk they were giving on the students’ helping behaviours.

Would having a relevant parable uppermost in their minds nudge participants into helping?

Before I give you the results try to predict them for yourself.

How many future priests do you think would stop to see if the man was OK?

Would you stop?

What will be the effects of the situation compared with the individual personalities of the seminarians?

Situation beats personality in explaining behaviour

Here’s what happened.

On average just 40 percent of the seminary students offered help (with a few stepping over the apparently injured man) but crucially the amount of hurry they were in had a large influence on behaviour.

Here is the percentage of participants who offered help by condition:

  • Low hurry: 63 percent
  • Medium hurry: 45 percent
  • High hurry: 10 percent

The type of talk they were giving also had an effect on whether they offered help.

Of those asked to talk about careers for seminarians, just 29 percent offered help, while of those asked to talk about the parable of the Good Samaritan, fully 53 percent gave assistance.

What these figures show is the large effect that subtle aspects of the situation have on the way people behave.

Recall that the experimenters also measured personality variables, specifically the ‘religiosity’ of the seminarians.

When the effect of personality was compared with situation, i.e. how much of a hurry they happened to be in or whether they were thinking about a relevant parable, the effect of religiosity was almost insignificant.

In this context, then, situation is easily trumping personality.

Fundamental attribution error

Before I asked you to imagine what the results might be, were you close?

Perhaps you were surprised by how little effect personality had on whether the seminarians stopped?

That is what catches most people out because of what psychologists call the ‘fundamental attribution error’.

This is the tendency to assume that other people’s behaviour reflects on their personality rather than on the situation they are in.

Contrary to our instincts, however, studies such as this one demonstrate that it is frequently the situation that controls our actions more strongly than personality.

If you saw the trainee priest stepping over the moaning man, what would you think?

Perhaps time for them to switch to a career in investment banking?

Maybe, but in the light of the fundamental attribution error it’s probably unfair on the priest (and the investment bankers) because we all of us have situational pressures on us that can easily drown out the influence of our personalities (see also the bystander effect).

‘Bad’ actions don’t necessarily mean ‘bad’ people just as ‘good’ actions don’t issue forth solely from ‘good’ people, or so the fundamental attribution error suggests.

The old adage that a person can be judged on their actions isn’t the whole truth.

Often people’s behaviour, and our own, may say very little about our personalities and much more about the complexities of the situation in which we find ourselves.

Avoid the fundamental attribution error

One way to avoid the fundamental attribution error is to actively think about a similar situation than you have been in yourself.

For example, when judging someone who was in a hurry for not stopping to help, think about how you behave when you are in a hurry.

Is it possible you have acted in a similar way in similar circumstances.

Another way to avoid the fundamental attribution error is to generate alternate explanations for someone’s behaviour.

For example, if someone is rude to you, could it possibly be that they are not a nasty person, but rather are in a bad mood because something that has happened to them.

Alternatively, they may be preoccupied in a busy environment and have simply not seen you.

Finally, simply understanding the fundamental attribution error can help to combat it.

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Milgram Experiment: Explaining Obedience to Authority

The Milgram experiment is a classic social psychology study revealing the dangers of obedience to authority and how the situation affects behaviour.

The Milgram experiment is a classic social psychology study revealing the dangers of obedience to authority and how the situation affects behaviour.

The Milgram experiment, led by the well-known psychologist Stanley Milgram in the 1960s, aimed to test people’s obedience to authority.

The results of the Milgram experiment, sometimes known as the Milgram obedience study, continue to be both thought-provoking and controversial.

The experimental procedure left some people sweating and trembling, leaving 10 percent extremely upset, while others broke into unexplained hysterical laughter.

What finding could be so powerful that it sent many psychologists into frenzied rebuttals?

This study has come in for considerable criticism with some saying its claims are wildly overblown.

Obedience to authority

Stanley Milgram’s now famous experiments were designed to test obedience to authority (Milgram, 1963).

What Milgram wanted to know was how far humans will go when an authority figure orders them to hurt another human being.

Many wondered after the horrors of WWII, and not for the first time, how people could be motivated to commit acts of such brutality towards each other.

Not just those in the armed forces, but ordinary people were coerced into carrying out the most cruel and gruesome acts.

But Milgram didn’t investigate the extreme situation of war, he wanted to see how people would react under relatively ‘ordinary’ conditions in the lab.

How would people behave when told to give an electrical shock to another person?

To what extent would people obey the dictates of the situation and ignore their own misgivings about what they were doing?

The Milgram experiment procedure

The experimental situation into which people were put was initially straightforward.

Participants in the Milgram experiment were told they were involved in a learning experiment, that they were to administer electrical shocks and that they should continue to the end of the experiment.

Told they would be the ‘teacher and another person the ‘learner’, they sat in front of a machine with a number of dials labelled with steadily increasing voltages.

This was the famous ‘shock machine’ in the Milgram experiment.

The third switch from the top was labelled: “Danger: Severe Shock”, the last two simply: “XXX”.

During the course of the Milgram experiment, each time the ‘learner’ made a mistake the participant was ordered to administer ever-increasing electrical shocks.

Of course the learner kept making mistakes so the teacher (the poor participant) had to keep giving higher and higher electrical shocks, and hearing the resultant screams of pain until finally the learner went quiet.

Participants were not in fact delivering electrical shocks, the learner in the Milgram experiment was actually an actor following a rehearsed script.

The learner was kept out of sight of the participants so they came to their own assumptions about the pain they were causing.

They were, however, left in little doubt that towards the end of the experiment the shocks were extremely painful and the learner might well have been rendered unconscious.

When the participant baulked at giving the electrical shocks, the experimenter – an authority figure dressed in a white lab coat – ordered them to continue.

Results of the Milgram shock experiments

Before I explain the results, try to imagine yourself as the participant in the Milgram experiment.

How far would you go giving what you thought were electrical shocks to another human being simply for a study about memory?

What would you think when the learner went quiet after you apparently administered a shock labelled on the board “Danger: Severe Shock”?

Honestly.

How far would you go?

How ever far you think, you’re probably underestimating as that’s what most people do.

Like the Milgram experiment itself, the results shocked.

The Milgram experiment discovered people are much more obedient than you might imagine.

Fully 63 percent of the participants continued right until the end – they administered all the shocks even with the learner screaming in agony, begging to stop and eventually falling silent.

These weren’t specially selected sadists, these were ordinary people like you and me who had volunteered for the Milgram experiment.

Explanation of the Milgram experiment

At the time the Milgram experiment was big news.

Milgram explained his results by the power of the situation.

This was a social psychology experiment which appeared to show, beautifully in fact, how much social situations can influence people’s behaviour.

The Milgram experiment set off a small industry of follow-up studies carried out in labs all around the world.

Were the findings of the Milgram experiment still true in different cultures, in slightly varying situations and in different genders (only men were in the original study)?

By and large the answers were that even when manipulating many different experimental variables, people were still remarkably obedient.

One exception was that one study found Australian women were much less obedient.

Make of that what you will.

Criticism of the Milgram experiment

Now think again.

Sure, the experiment relies on the situation to influence people’s behaviour, but how real is the situation?

If it was you, surely you would understand on some level that this wasn’t real, that you weren’t really electrocuting someone, that knocking someone unconscious would not be allowed in a university study like this Milgram experiment?

Also, people pick up considerable nonverbal cues from each other.

How good would the actors have to be in the Milgram experiment in order to avoid giving away the fact they were actors?

People are adept at playing along even with those situations they know in their heart-of-hearts to be fake.

The more we find out about human psychology, the more we discover about the power of unconscious processes, both emotional and cognitive.

These can have massive influences on our behaviour without our awareness.

Alternative explanation of the Milgram experiment

Assuming people were not utterly convinced on an unconscious level that the experiment was for real, an alternative explanation is in order.

Perhaps the Milgram experiment really demonstrates the power of conformity.

The pull we all feel to please the experimenter, to fit in with the situation, to do what is expected of us.

While this is still a powerful interpretation from a brilliant experiment, it isn’t what Milgram was really looking for.

The influence of the Milgram experiment

Whether you believe the experiment shows what it purports to or not, there is no doubting that the Milgram experiment was some of the most influential and impressive carried out in psychology.

It is also an experiment very unlikely to be repeated nowadays (outside of virtual reality) because of modern ethical standards.

Certainly when I first came across it, my view of human nature was changed irrevocably.

Now, thinking critically, I’m not so sure.

Milgram experiment repeated

The Milgram experiment has since been repeated by Doliński et al. (2017), with the same weird result.

Of the 80 people in the study, fully 90% went all the way to the maximum level of electrocution after being ‘ordered’ to by the experimenter.

Dr Tomasz Grzyb, a study author, said:

“…half a century after Milgram’s original research into obedience to authority, a striking majority of subjects are still willing to electrocute a helpless individual.”

→ This post is part of a series on the best social psychology experiments:

  1. Halo Effect: Definition And How It Affects Our Perception
  2. Cognitive Dissonance: How and Why We Lie to Ourselves
  3. Robbers Cave Experiment: How Group Conflicts Develop
  4. Stanford Prison Experiment: Zimbardo’s Famous Social Psychology Study
  5. Milgram Experiment: Explaining Obedience to Authority
  6. False Consensus Effect: What It Is And Why It Happens
  7. Social Identity Theory And The Minimal Group Paradigm
  8. Negotiation: 2 Psychological Strategies That Matter Most
  9. Bystander Effect And The Diffusion Of Responsibility
  10. Asch Conformity Experiment: The Power Of Social Pressure

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