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Please criticise my evaluation paragraph

I'm not sure what makes a good evaluation paragraph, and since I'm trying to make them into flashcards it would be great if I could get some feedback on one I made to I don't make the same mistakes in the future :smile:

P: One strength of ZImbardo’s study (1973) into conformity to social roles is the high internal validity.

E: For example the 24 American male participants were randomly allocated into the role of prisoner or guard .

E: The random allocation minimised individual differences in each condition as Zimbardo and his colleagues were not able to inflict researcher bias into what participants were in each condition. Doing so by chance increases the probability that the characteristics of participants in each condition are similar and therefore the findings of behaviour in each condition are due to the situational factor of a given social role, rather than dispositional factors such as the participants locus of control.

L: This suggests that the internal validity is high as the selection process of random allocation reduces extraneous variables such as individual personality differences across the two conditions, enabling a cause and effect relationship to be established between the behaviour and the social role.

Reply 1

onecw

I think you may have mistaken the use of random allocation in the study. Your sub-point of reducing researcher bias should be the main point while the individual differences point isn't quite as valid. Mostly because what you've described is more similar to an independent group design, where people in each group are obviously not the same and aren't matched, so personality would still affect the result.
TBH it may be easier if you argued that the study lacked internal validity as Zimbardo influenced participants with his words and because it was a participant observation design.

(disclaimer: I'm also a fellow psych AL student so take this advice more as a ref but great detail for such a peel and feel free to ask more if you find this helpful!! :smile:

))