Discussion questions
- What social identities are important to you?
- Are different group memberships important to you in different situations?
- How does social context affect the importance of particular groups to you?
- Is it the case that identification with a particular group necessarily leads people to be antagonistic towards other groups?
- Why do participants in psychological research rarely challenge experimenters?
- How does surveillance affect behaviour? Does the identity of the audience matter and, if so, in what ways?
- Why do the outcomes of the SPE (i.e., evidence of abuse by Guards and passivity from Prisoners) seem more plausible to many commentators than those from our study (i.e., evidence of stress on the part of Guards and resistance from Prisoners)?
- Are there any general lessons to be learnt from our study about the effects of different strategies in managing relations between groups of different power? In particular, consider relations between teachers and students or between managers and workers.
- To what extent do the processes which led participants towards tyranny in our study correspond to processes that lead people to promote tyranny in society at large?
What do you think about the various ideas that we tried to explore in the study?