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Zimbardo’s Rebuttal Against Recent Criticisms of the Stanford Prison Experiment

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Re: Zimbardo’s Rebuttal Against Recent Criticisms of the Stanford Prison Experiment

#71

Post by dorfsmay »

schizoidboy wrote: post #9

Previous 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…

Or he might just not react at all until you actually publish it. A real life Cunningham's law of sort.

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law

Re: Zimbardo’s Rebuttal Against Recent Criticisms of the Stanford Prison Experiment

#72

Post by frankquist »

bunkydoo wrote: post #56

Does anyone even get that hacker news is the epitome of 'fake news' ? This study was done years ago, read tbe lucifer effect and move on fellas.

As it is phrased your comment is not helpful. Besides the huge generalization (how is hacker news fake news?), you barely provide any arguments for your points. Can you elaborate on how this post is 'fake news'? (I'm not going to go down a 'hacker news is fake news' rabbit hole but am interested in your criticism of this post specifically)

Re: Zimbardo’s Rebuttal Against Recent Criticisms of the Stanford Prison Experiment

#73

Post by iandanforth »

madhadron wrote: post #41

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.

Apparently these serious psychologists were busy in 2002 when he was elected president of the APA.

Re: Zimbardo’s Rebuttal Against Recent Criticisms of the Stanford Prison Experiment

#74

Post by [deleted] »

albedoa wrote: post #64
EthanHeilman wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the people in the Milgram experiment said they knew it was fake which isn't the same thing as actually knowing. On one hand of course they knew it wasn't a real prison, they were told it wasn't a real prison and it clearly wasn't. Did they believe they weren't hurting "the prisoners"? That is far less clear and plenty of people have used the excuse that they didn't think they were actually hurting the other p…

The Milgram experiment did not involve a prison, real or otherwise.

[deleted]

Re: Zimbardo’s Rebuttal Against Recent Criticisms of the Stanford Prison Experiment

#75

Post by phobosdeimos »

Anyone who is criticizing this experiment I challenge to go undercover as a prison guard or go work for ICE. In fact many journalists have done this in the past.

Dehumanization of the other mixed in with a bit of fear and poof civilization is out the window. Hello Colonel Kurtz.

Re: Zimbardo’s Rebuttal Against Recent Criticisms of the Stanford Prison Experiment

#76

Post by mindgam3 »

Zimbardo is a disgrace. There are legitimate results in the field of psychology, but the Stanford Prison Experiment is not one of them. All it ever proved was that Zimbardo's ethics was highly compromised.

In the final paragraph, he claims to be "promoting what is best in human nature. That in [sic] my current life mission." In reality the only thing he's ever been good at promoting is himself. And I know this is trivial and stupid, but he couldn't even avoid a typo in the last line of his rebuttal? Come on.

Re: Zimbardo’s Rebuttal Against Recent Criticisms of the Stanford Prison Experiment

#77

Post by Nokinside »

phobosdeimos wrote: post #75

Anyone who is criticizing this experiment I challenge to go undercover as a prison guard or go work for ICE. In fact many journalists have done this in the past. Dehumanization of the other mixed in with a bit of fear and poof civilization is out the window. Hello Colonel Kurtz.

The effect the experiment attempts to demonstrate can be true while the prison experiment itself can be complete sham.

Re: Zimbardo’s Rebuttal Against Recent Criticisms of the Stanford Prison Experiment

#78

Post by AstralStorm »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #11
scotty79 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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. But as I pointed out in the other thread ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17289154 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17289386 ), Milgram has his own detractors. His conclusions were far from obvious to many, and are still…

If you want to run experiments on soldiers, then run them on soldiers.

If you're trying to prove a more general point, you do have to be much more careful. After all, if you do train your subjects to be soldiers or to blindly follow orders this does not prove the general point anymore.

If you additionally filter your experimental group (as typicalsoldier training does) then the point is even less general.

So you're missing the point. Now, a study on how effective military training is at instilling blind obedience is still very useful and important.

Re: Zimbardo’s Rebuttal Against Recent Criticisms of the Stanford Prison Experiment

#79

Post by Nokinside »

nostrademons wrote: post #52
dp141 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's largely about who gets to control the narrative. If you give a quote to a journalist, they control the narrative - they can choose how to piece it together with other quotes, and where to put it in the article, and how to spin it, and with what emotional tone. If you say "no comment" to the journalist and then post your own version of the narrative on your blog later, you control the narrative from start to fini…

Basic journalist practice is that you can read the piece and suggest corrections, especially if you set it as a condition before being interviewed. You can have your own recording equipment, and someone else taking notes. You can require that you have an option to give your own response in the same page as the story (ask certain number of words). Write everything agreed down, have a record + witness.

In TV all bets are off. I fully understand why people come in the front of TV cameras and spout only canned responses that say noting. Even the most innocent you say can be edited in a way that changes the narrative completely. Joe Nobody should never volunteer to be in the front of cameras if they are the source of bad news. It's completely adversarial setting and editing can change everything.

Re: Zimbardo’s Rebuttal Against Recent Criticisms of the Stanford Prison Experiment

#80

Post by AstralStorm »

alexandercrohde wrote: post #45
didibus wrote: post #17

If 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 ag…

You're mixing up psychology with psychiatry and neuroscience... These are intertwined to about 80s. Not anymore, hopefully.

The hardest of these is probably neuroscience and produces very micro results, but at least they are known to be valid.

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