In this assignment, you will read about a famous social psychology experiment: either the Robber’s Cave experiment of the 1950s or the Stanford Prison Experiment of 1971. Both studies looked at social interactions in group settings – a place where psychology and sociology intersect.
As you read about your chosen experiment, think about what you’ve learned about research design, methods, and ethics in the Introduction and Appendix of your textbook. You’ll also need to think about replication of research, which is an important but often overlooked step toward building strong scientific theory. Replication usually refers to repeating the exact experiment with the same population. More commonly, however, researchers will make small changes to existing studies to test whether the results are similar. For instance, an experiment conducted with only male participants might be repeated to include all genders, or you might conduct the same research in urban and rural settings to compare populations.
Initial Post Instructions
1) Summarize the study’s research methods and outcomes in 1-2 paragraphs. Why is this study important?
Not sure what to include in a summary? Answer these questions: What question was being asked? Was a hypothesis tested? If so, what was it? What did the researchers or research participants DO? What results were found?
Remember: some classmates did not read about the same study as you. Your goal in these paragraphs is to explain the basics of this study to those classmates.
2) Based on what you have learned about ethics in sociological research, was this study conducted in an ethical way? Be specific in explaining why or why not, using terms from our textbook and examples from your reading about the study. (2-3 paragraphs)