HomeAboutKnowing OurselvesPsychological Science & Everyday LifeFeeds:PostsComparing Milgram’s Obedience and Zimbardo’s Prison StudiesOctober 8, 2016 by Jeffry RickerThis post corresponds to readings in my online textbook.on two classic social psychology studies:  Stanley Milgram’s Obedience to Authority studies and Phillip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Study. I wrote it to help my students better understand the similarities and differences between the two.Original photo is hereSimilaritiesSimilarity #1. Participants in both studies had a difficult time ending their participation, and most continued all the way until the end. The reasons for this were similar in both studies.By agreeing to take on the roles they had been assigned, it became very difficult for the participants to back out without breaking the implicit social rule I spoke of earlier.The participants did not want to appear inconsistent by refusing to continue something they had already started.The escalation in violence occurred relatively gradually, so that there was no obvious point at which they could say, “that is enough.”Similarity #2. Both Milgram and Zimbardo stated reported the effects of personality differences were very limited. For Zimbardo, the only personality characteristic that seemed to have any effect was authoritarianism; and this characteristic was important only for prisoner behavior. Those prisoners who were high in authoritarianism were best able to handle the oppressive conditions in the prison and, thus, remained there the longest. At least four (and maybe five) of the initial group of nine prisoners, on the other hand, had to be released even before the study was ended because of severe stress caused by the conditions.Based on results such as these, Zimbardo (1975) argued that personality differences were much less important than the social situation. In fact, Zimbardo went even farther than Milgram had by dismissing the importance of personality characteristics for most of our behaviors in everyday life:Individual behavior is largely under the control of social forces and environmental contingencies rather than personality traits, character, will power or other empirically unvalidated constructs. Thus we create an illusion of freedom by attributing more internal control to ourselves, to the individual, than actually exists. We thus underestimate the power and pervasiveness of situational controls over behavior because: (a) they are often non-obvious and subtle, (b) we can often avoid entering situations where we might be so controlled, (c) we label as “weak” or “deviant” people in those situations who do behave differently from how we believe we would. (p. 115)Many social psychologists took this extreme position during the 1970’s. In the next chapter (Note: this chapter does not yet appear on this site), I will discuss why they argued for this position and will try to show why it needs to be modified and softened somewhat. In fact, I