Does the study tell us anything about the wider world?
If you take our study as an attempt to reproduce real prison conditions, and think that we were trying to say that what happened in our study happens in exactly the same way in real prisons, then you might quite rightly doubt its relevance to the real world. But as we have explained, that is not what we were trying to do. On the basis of social psychological theory, we were trying to investigate the factors (e.g., social identification, permeability, cognitive alternatives) that determine when people act as group members and how they respond to an unequal social system. With the advantage of that knowledge, we can then identify these factors at work in different social situations and start to predict how people are likely to behave. In other words, we do not seek to generalize directly from the results of our study to the real world. We do this indirectly from the insights that the results give us about psychological processes. In this way, our results have practical implications for m
