Ah yes, the Stanford Prison Experiment, which makes serious psychologists sigh and roll there eyes. Putting aside ethical considerations, it was so confounded as to be completely useless.
Zimbardo’s Rebuttal Against Recent Criticisms of the Stanford Prison Experiment
41–50 of 130 posts
Re: Zimbardo’s Rebuttal Against Recent Criticisms of the Stanford Prison Experiment
#42If anything, this whole debacle has revealed to me how pathetic the whole "science" of psychology is in its current state. I mean, the emblem of its field can't even acknowledge any flaw in his experiment. I'm not saying it was bogus, but it's pretty obviously biased and flawed in many ways. Even if executed with perfect methodology, which it clearly wasn't, that sample size and the bias in participants literally pro…
I am not going to describe the multitude of advances due to psychological sciences. I'd just like to point out that while the Stanford Prison Experiments got a lot of press, these experiments occurred a long time ago in a particular subfield of pschology, and has very little to do with the validity of psychological sciences as a whole.
With so many to choose from coming up with one you thought would survive scrutiny here should have been as easy as giving the blithe dismissive answer you did.
Re: Zimbardo’s Rebuttal Against Recent Criticisms of the Stanford Prison Experiment
#43What's there to debate? Run it 2 or 3 times again. Publish the results. Is that not the definition of Science?
I think that the experiment would struggle to pass ethical review these days, so this might never be possible.
In the US and other countries with similar ethical standards.
It might be doable in other countries that have different ethical standards.
Re: Zimbardo’s Rebuttal Against Recent Criticisms of the Stanford Prison Experiment
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think that’s an accurate characterization of the criticism. The Milgram study, and its numerous replications, have pretty conclusively shown that most folks will do something they know is wrong if a perceived authority instructs them to. That’s not really in dispute. The allegation is that Zimbardo orchestrated his project in order to produce a more dramatic narrative of spontaneous cruelty that wasn’t scient…
Most of the people in the Milgram experiment knew it was fake. https://digest.bps.org.uk/2017/12/12/interviews-with-milgram...
So did a lot of Nazis who enabled the Holocaust. Isn’t that the point?
That’s maybe too flippant. “This is fake” is a way someone can rationalize doing something that they know is wrong. It’s important that they came up with that idea themselves, in response to a seemly inappropriate demand from an authority.
Notice:
The most common explanation was that they believed the person they’d given the electric shocks to (the “learner”) hadn’t really been harmed. Seventy-two per cent of obedient participants made this kind of claim at least once, such as “If it was that serious you woulda stopped me” and “I just figured that somebody had let him out“.
It doesn’t seem that there was anything evident in the room to make participants believe that it was anything besides what it appeared to be. They’re not saying “the screams were obviously acted.” Not “I could see that the box wasn’t connected to anything.” Definitely not “the experimenter told me it was staged.”
What led them to that belief was the social and cultural context. They believed the experiment was fake primarily because they believed that the authority figure would not make or let them actually harm someone. They transferred responsibility for their own actions to the authority figure; “I knew it was fake” is merely the mechanism.
At least, that’s a coherent theory we could put together based on the evidence. If Milgram had sneakily passed participants a note under the table, it would be a foregone conclusion that participants would believe it was fake, the evidence collected would therefore be meaningless, and the experiment generally worthless. That’s why this allegation is so damning to Zimbardo’s project.
Re: Zimbardo’s Rebuttal Against Recent Criticisms of the Stanford Prison Experiment
#45If anything, this whole debacle has revealed to me how pathetic the whole "science" of psychology is in its current state. I mean, the emblem of its field can't even acknowledge any flaw in his experiment. I'm not saying it was bogus, but it's pretty obviously biased and flawed in many ways. Even if executed with perfect methodology, which it clearly wasn't, that sample size and the bias in participants literally pro…
> If anything, this whole debacle has revealed to me how pathetic the whole "science" of psychology is in its current state.
What? How an academic being defensive of his study, conducted in 1971, an invalidation of "current" psychology? That's 40 years ago.
> I mean, has the field of psychology given us anything of value? I'm asking genuinely.
What an extreme leap, and an odd generalization for me to have to argue against. How about Milgram, Asch, Cognitive Dissonance? Studies of memory, vision, neurons can inform the development of AI. Things like IQ tests have helped detect and prove that leaded gasoline was damaging the intellect of a generation. Psychology is THE field to give clarity to question such as what gender dysphoria is about (research shows it is usually correlated with a brain that is more structurally similar to the gender one identifies as [1]).
So I'm not sure where a wholesale indictment of a field could really come from.
Re: Zimbardo’s Rebuttal Against Recent Criticisms of the Stanford Prison Experiment
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most of the people in the Milgram experiment knew it was fake. https://digest.bps.org.uk/2017/12/12/interviews-with-milgram...
So did a lot of Nazis who enabled the Holocaust. Isn’t that the point? That’s maybe too flippant. “This is fake” is a way someone can rationalize doing something that they know is wrong. It’s important that they came up with that idea themselves, in response to a seemly inappropriate demand from an authority. Notice: The most common explanation was that they believed the person they’d given the electric shocks to (th…
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Re: Zimbardo’s Rebuttal Against Recent Criticisms of the Stanford Prison Experiment
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am not going to describe the multitude of advances due to psychological sciences. I'd just like to point out that while the Stanford Prison Experiments got a lot of press, these experiments occurred a long time ago in a particular subfield of pschology, and has very little to do with the validity of psychological sciences as a whole.
With so many to choose from coming up with one you thought would survive scrutiny here should have been as easy as giving the blithe dismissive answer you did.
As blithely dismissive as grandparent who dismissed a whole field of science based on one scientific study (and hand waves at unnamed others)? Are you serious?
If you want a 'practical' set of findings, just take a look at all the psychological tricks learned and now applied to increase social media addiction, gambling addiction, etcetera.
Cognitive biases research have often proven robust under repeated tests and paradigms. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
I have in my own research examined and confirmed a number of the memory error biases listed on that page.
Re: Zimbardo’s Rebuttal Against Recent Criticisms of the Stanford Prison Experiment
#48The criticism that the participants were just doing as they were told has always seemed to me as rather missing the point. What better demonstration is there of the human capacity for cruelty than a bunch of Stanford undergrads torturing other students because a professor told them to?
Depends on what you are trying to prove. If that "ordinary men following orders and under expectation can be total bastards" then it's just Milgram's experiment all over again which result is itself obvious for any historian. And if you are trying to prove that "ordinary men in position of power in jail setting spontaneously become total bastards" then the experiment is crap for that purpose if guards were encouraged…
Being encouraged to be "tough" and creating rituals of humiliation are different IMO.
Re: Zimbardo’s Rebuttal Against Recent Criticisms of the Stanford Prison Experiment
#49Previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17287319 I have no strong opinions either way, but one meta-point I personally find interesting is: why don't journalists send a final draft of an article to the people involved and get a final round of comments? That just seems fair. Zimbardo claims some facts in the article are simply wrong, and either 1) those errors would be corrected, or 2) Zimbardo's…
Having worked as a journalist previously, it's funny how this is often almost impossible in practice. Most of the time subjects don't want to comment, ignore, or responses are handled by a PR person who doesn't provide adequate comment. Then, when you do publish and you get X detail wrong they blast you, or the subject themselves bemoans how they were never given the opportunity to comment. Not that journalists are a…
Given the way my study description has on occasion been mangled by misunderstandings, I'd love a chance to comment on the draft before publishing.
Re: Zimbardo’s Rebuttal Against Recent Criticisms of the Stanford Prison Experiment
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem, from where I sit, is that certain types of experiments have a built error detection or safety rails and psychology doesn't have this. For instance if a physics experiment has a result which appears to violate conservation of momentum or has information being sent faster than the speed of life, then it is likely that there is a flaw in the experiment. Unfortunately many of the social sciences don't have t…
But there are methods to deal with more or less all of these problems, that is why social scientists learn research design/methodology separately so much. In my opinion being able to replicate results should still be required to accept a theory. My problem with this case is that things that I consider basics for the scientific method (replication or even a control group) are obviously missing.
To the people downvoting my comment I'd be genuinely interested in hearing why people see my comment as damaging to the discussion.
>But there are methods to deal with more or less all of these problems
There are methods to deal with designing experiments poorly, but even the best experiment could have some unknown unknown issue that skews the results. Physics has an inherent advantage that experimental mistakes often lead to results which contradict theory to such an extent that the experimenter can be fairly sure the experiment is in error.
> In my opinion being able to replicate results should still be required to accept a theory.
Strongly agree, however replication often becomes harder to achieve as the complexity of the system you are measuring increases. Photons are simple in ways that humans just aren't. For example various mental disorders only appear in certain cultures, the culture of a photon isn't a problem a physics experimenter needs to worry about. With studies on humans there are so many more places for failure to occur both in the original study and in the replication. Training matters, but the task is significantly more difficult.