Briefly evaluate one or two limitations of Zimbardo's research into conformity.

One limitation of Zimbardo’s research is that there are major ethical issues within the experiment.For example, when a participant asked Zimbardo to leave, he responded in his role as a superintendent, worried about the running of his prison, rather than a researcher with an ethical responsibility towards his participants and the student truly thought he couldn't leave. As a result of Zimbardo’s ‘duel role’, ethical guidelines were breached, for example, the right to withdraw. The participant in question was later said to become emotionally disturbed, meaning he was not protected against psychological harm which he should have been. Despite the ethical issues, Zimbardo did debrief his participants in an attempt to overcome the deception of the aim of the experiment and any harm caused. A second limitation of Zimbardo’s research is that there was a lack of supporting evidence. In Reicher and Haslam’s (2006) replication of Zimbardo’s experiment, the BBC prison study, it was the participants acting as prisoners who became authoritative and subjected the guards to endless harassment. This suggests that Social Identity Theory is a better explanation of conformity to roles than Zimbardo’s situational theory because it was the groups that identified with their social groups that were able to take power of the situation. However, Zimbardo’s experiment could be applied to the Social Identity Theory because the guards quickly identified as the authority. Therefore, Zimbardo’s experiment and theory of conformity to social roles is not an effective explanation because there is more generalisable opposing research.