81–90 of 130 posts
This guy is completely unethical. In addition to his famous 'Prison Experiment' he engaged in relations with one of his graduate students. Psychology is full of hucksters like Zimbardo.
ETA: I've added sarcasm tag.
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…
> “Now, okay,” Zimbardo corrected himself on the phone with me. He then acknowledged that the informed consent forms which subjects signed had included an explicit safe phrase: “I quit the experiment.” Only that precise phrase would trigger their release.
> “None of them said that,” Zimbardo said. “They said, ‘I want out. I want a doctor. I want my mother,’ etc., etc. Essentially I was saying, ‘You have to say, “I quit the experiment.”’”
> But the informed consent forms that Zimbardo’s subjects signed, which are available online from Zimbardo’s own website, contain no mention of the phrase “I quit the experiment.”
If the transcript of that phone discussion is thruthful and accurate, then Zimbardo lied with regards to that issue.
I believe this is a huge issue. The original article makes the accusation that this was probably criminal action ("false imprisonment"). Yet it is not listed in the "Contentious Issues" section of the rebuttal. I didn't read the entire piece, but searching for certain keywords didn't turn up anything new, either.
(Edit: just to be clear, claiming to be contractually entitled to hold people against their will unless they use an "explicit safe phrase" is nonsense to begin with, which is why I was hoping the rebuttal would address that argument.)
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.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/05/01/us/report-says-america...
This guy is completely unethical. In addition to his famous 'Prison Experiment' he engaged in relations with one of his graduate students. Psychology is full of hucksters like Zimbardo.
Sure, Psychology isn’t much of a science, but the list of college professors who didn’t sleep with students in the 70s has to be very, very, short.
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…
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…
Psychology isn't falsifiable. It is not science.
Not necessarily. In an ideal world psychology could be scientific. In this world, however, we observe that the Behaviorists, who were uniquely concerned with holding psychology to strict scientific standards, where ganged up upon and hounded out of the field. The hounders can't be trusted.
Earlier 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...
Even if they didn't see through the experiments; they still believed they were helping to advance the state of science. Milgram's Experiments are often casually tossed around as proving that people blindly follow orders, but they actually showed the opposite. Teachers complied when they believed they shared a common cause with the experimenter (advancing science.) When this common cause was taken away, compliance rat…
This doesn't debunk anything. The thesis was that people would unquestioningly obey "an authority figure". What your observation shows is that people don't attach the same authority to scientists with less eminent affiliations which makes perfect sense.
I'm not saying that Milgram's experiment isn't flaweed, it most certainly is [0] but your analysis is weak.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/01/rethinkin...
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…
> that's the whole idea behind prison guard training! If you insist on studying these scenarios in a sterile, painstakingly-ethical
Thing is though, when the behaviour emerges you can't see if it's to do with the training, or the mere adoption of the prison guard role.
When you "condition" your participants to behave in a particular way then that can become a confounding factor and then when it comes time to appraise the results you can be left scratching your head.
Precisely what you want to understand when an Abu Ghraib scenario occurs is whether it could be the training or innate characteristic emerging from the role.
Of course you could do a between-groups study where some were conditioned and some weren't but what would that prove? That the conditioning had the expected effect?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's taken seriously enough to be taught in every university survey course on psychology and sociology, and that wouldn't still be happening if the "serious" people in those disciplines wanted to stop.
I was taught it.... in a way to say "this is not how to research things and if you heard about this you should probabbly rethink anything you think about it".
Yes, this is how it was taught to me also.
An example of "how not to do it" and something that would never pass the ethical review board in modern academia.