What it takes to stand up to authority

Even non-conformists conform. It's just a blind spot because you don't know how to actually see that you are continuously behaving in a particular way, that rigorously adheres to some behavior that has yet to be described or defined. I can be a non-conformist by always doing the opposite of what everyone I observe does. I'm still conforming to a pattern, that's capable of being studied, followed, predicted, and eventually, that pattern will have to change too, to remain true to some spirit of non-conformity, if that's my highest value.

Thankfully it's not. But authority, conformity, group think, individuality. There's more than one way to see it. Psychology is a sloppy science because people can always change these things. Just have to analyze it enough, detect the pattern of being detected, and override it.

People being able to be individuals without an all seeing eye of meticulous study is important to me. That can be mentally fatiguing for plenty of people. I don't know if it matters how important their belief in the study is, if the means contradicts the intention. Life is ridiculous.

The $64 billion dollar question, though, is whether anyone in society will see it as reasonable to expect themselves or anyone else to abandon their intuition which tells them to follow without question, the 'natural' and 'automatic' response that they identify most strongly with their 'self', and train themselves to contradict and contravene that part of themselves. As is so often the case, you can't fix the flaws that your emotional and intuitive processing of the world brings about if you venerate intuition and emotion and denigrate any attempts to change it.

But more relevantly, this experiment was not attempting to "demonstrate" the effect. It was attempting to better understand the effect. That, in particular, is research that we badly need.

(PS: I'm defending the idea of performing this sort of experiment, not the specific experimental protocol followed. In particular, I question whether applying negative judgements to people is actually a valid proxy for causing harm.)

b) The Stanford Prison Experiment has always been under a ton of scrutiny, and is a good example of flashy events heavily covered in intro psych courses that are viewed with a lot more skepticism in the professional community (so I have read, anyway).

c) More info recently came out about it recently, actually: https://cosmosmagazine.com/social-sciences/new-evidence-show...

d) Repetition of scientific findings is one of the main pillars of science. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

The discomfort is partly because you can make yourself like or hate people you don't know personally and trying to come up with bad/good things to say about them is one approach how to do it. You start process insulting them and you can see yourself starting to feel differently and some might feel good about the process and where it leads.

You know how people close themselves into bubbles that says only bad things about some outside group and then become to genuinely hate that outside group? It is the same, but is small scale, temporary limited and easier to detect.