Everyone's heard the stories of how it was "fake." How many of you have actually read Dr. Zimbardo's own response to the debunking? https://www.prisonexp.org/response
No one because they want it to be false cuz of neo-romanticism
The Stanford Prison Experiment was hugely influential. We learned it was a fraud (2018)
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Re: The Stanford Prison Experiment was hugely influential. We learned it was a fraud (2018)
#22Everyone's heard the stories of how it was "fake." How many of you have actually read Dr. Zimbardo's own response to the debunking? https://www.prisonexp.org/response
Thank you for sharing, fascinating to understand the study’s intended purpose.
Re: The Stanford Prison Experiment was hugely influential. We learned it was a fraud (2018)
#23> … offers convincing evidence that the guards in the experiment were coached to be cruel.
This was the point of the experiment. That simply coaching people in banal ways to be cruel caused them to be cruel.
Yes the study participants were just doing what they thought the scientists wanted to see… exactly as many humans do in many human organizations.
Perhaps the guards believed deep down there was no real danger to the prisoners. Exactly as many people assume about civil society and the social safety net.
How many people would do things that are quite evil or disastrous to another human’s life if instructed to do so by a company’s performance management system, at risk of losing their job?
Remember the context in the early 70s was the relatively recent discovery of the Nazi’s unimaginably cruel treatment of people, and the unknown question of what could cause humans to behave that way.
It turns out, just some authoritative instructions.
Worth reading the original PIs 2018 response to recent criticism in full. Well written. https://www.prisonexp.org/response
Re: The Stanford Prison Experiment was hugely influential. We learned it was a fraud (2018)
#24While it wasn't popularly debunked until 2018, I actually remember hearing the Freakonomics guys actually talked about this way back in 2014: > LEVITT: Yeah, he said it was real, too. But a lot of times what I’ve found is that that when I try to do experiments as an economist that work great for psychologists, I cannot get them to work. And I really have come to believe that it’s because the people in the study are s…
>To give credit where it's due, Levitt basically made a whole career out of showing the replication problems of psychology experiments.
Ironic, given the many documented mistakes made by the Freakonomics team.
https://www.americanscientist.org/article/freakonomics-what-...
Re: The Stanford Prison Experiment was hugely influential. We learned it was a fraud (2018)
#25Everyone's heard the stories of how it was "fake." How many of you have actually read Dr. Zimbardo's own response to the debunking? https://www.prisonexp.org/response
His response is informative, and should be read against what I believe to be a stronger case than the OP (and linked from it): https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/2019-letexier.pdf
Some of the more damning parts:
>"Of the students tested, 81% accurately figured out the experimenter’s hypothesis (that guards would be aggressive and that prisoners would revolt or comply), and 90% predicted that the guards would be “oppressive, hostile, aggressive, humiliating” (p. 158), thereby supporting the argument that demand characteristics were likely operating in the SPE and that the participants in the SPE would have probably guessed how Zimbardo and his coexperimenters wanted them to behave."
>"Reason 4: The experimenters intervened directly in the experiment, either to give precise instructions, to recall the purposes of the experiment, or to set a general direction. "
>"When he began to get interested in prisons, only 3 months before the beginning of the experiment, Zimbardo already had strong views on the subject. As he would confide later, “my sympathies were heavily with prisoners. I was anti-prisons, anti-corrections, etc.” (Zimbardo, 2009, p. 34)."
Re: The Stanford Prison Experiment was hugely influential. We learned it was a fraud (2018)
#26Everyone's heard the stories of how it was "fake." How many of you have actually read Dr. Zimbardo's own response to the debunking? https://www.prisonexp.org/response
I have read it. He basically doesn’t address any of the criticism, he just reframes to claim that the experiment was actually testing something different than what we’ve all understood it to be.
Maybe that is true. In which case he would be a terrible scientist rather than a fraudulent one. Even so, that still makes the legacy of the SPE false, and one has to wonder why he never corrected the record in the nearly 50 years between the experiment and its failure to replicate.
Re: The Stanford Prison Experiment was hugely influential. We learned it was a fraud (2018)
#27Are there discoveries or theories from the field of psychology that are (a) not obvious and (b) generally regarded as correct?
For example, things like general relativity, continental drift, or evolution from the fields of physics, geology, and biology.
Does psychology have anything like that?
Re: The Stanford Prison Experiment was hugely influential. We learned it was a fraud (2018)
#28> … offers convincing evidence that the guards in the experiment were coached to be cruel. This was the point of the experiment. That simply coaching people in banal ways to be cruel caused them to be cruel. Yes the study participants were just doing what they thought the scientists wanted to see… exactly as many humans do in many human organizations. Perhaps the guards believed deep down there was no real danger to…
> It turns out, just some authoritative instructions.
And even better if the authority tells them "this is for science".
Re: The Stanford Prison Experiment was hugely influential. We learned it was a fraud (2018)
#29This doesn't necessarily mean that the whole principle of unquestioning obedience when it comes to being asked to do immoral/unethical acts is false. Also, we've probably all had bosses who were a bit too drunk with power. And unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), due to new ethics regulations, no such experiment could ever be conducted again- Except in real life, as happens every day in repressive countries around…
> This doesn't necessarily mean that the whole principle of unquestioning obedience when it comes to being asked to do immoral/unethical acts is false. The article didn't claim that the study's conclusion was false. The article only points out that the study was flawed, and therefore cannot be relied upon to draw any conclusions either way. The article is about replication issues in modern science, not about whether…
> The article didn't claim that the study's conclusion was false. The article only points out that the study was flawed
Not "flawed", fraud. Which is a claim that the conclusion is false--and that the author knew it and published it anyway. That's what "fraud" means in this context. That's an extremely strong claim, which the article does not actually justify. Zimbardo's response, which others upthread have posted a link to, is, IMO, required reading to evaluate anything this article says.
Re: The Stanford Prison Experiment was hugely influential. We learned it was a fraud (2018)
#30[deleted]