SOC212H1 Lecture Notes - Stanford Prison Experiment, Milgram Experiment, Social Inequality
Document Summary
Deviance - the recognized violation of cultural norms. People become deviant as others define them that way. If we are criminal, it depends on the reaction of others. Both norms and the way people define rule breaking involve social power. Norms and how we apply them reflect social inequality. Rule breaking is unequally applied to people. Defining deviance involves concepts of social power. Included simulation (pg 68): most famous stanford prison experiment by zimbardo. Aim: to investigate how readily people would conform to the roles of guard and prisoner in a role-playing exercise that simulated prison life. Take volunteers, split them into guards and prisoners, study them to see if the nature of a prison guard was because of personality or made this way because of prison. Deindividualization - stripped, personal items removed, uniforms, referred to as a number, lost everything making them an individual. Some guards became to harass prisoners and seemed to enjoy it.
