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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)

#51

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

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…

For the record, Zimbardo is a fraudulent pseudo scientist. Even in a best case scenario Zimbardo's work doesn't qualify as any sort of actual science.

Re: The Stanford Prison Experiment was hugely influential. We learned it was a fraud (2018)

#52

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

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…

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Re: The Stanford Prison Experiment was hugely influential. We learned it was a fraud (2018)

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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He doesn’t. The points he addresses are straw men.

Re: The Stanford Prison Experiment was hugely influential. We learned it was a fraud (2018)

#54

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

I’ve seen enough in the last 22 years to know how people behave when given arbitrary power over others.

Re: The Stanford Prison Experiment was hugely influential. We learned it was a fraud (2018)

#55

Are 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?

Sure, but not that you'll hear about it if you do a search for "replication", and I suppose it also depends on whether you include brain science with psychology, as I do.

In my field (psychology/neuroimaging): injuries to the hippocampus obliterates the ability to form memories for associations between items/events (e.g. between multiple pieces of information in an episode space, time, items). However, it will not generally impair memory for individual items or features.

Children will often have worse memory than adults, but these differences are attenuated when you prevent adults from using or benefiting from organizational strategies at encoding and retrieval.

Re: The Stanford Prison Experiment was hugely influential. We learned it was a fraud (2018)

#56

I'm guessing most ted talks reference ""science"" that can't be replicated as well. It's ironic that this of happening immediately before we enter the ai fueled post-truth era.

TED talks are like LinkedIn posts: Cringey and nothing you can do about it.

Re: The Stanford Prison Experiment was hugely influential. We learned it was a fraud (2018)

#57
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 “oppre…

>> 81% accurately figured out the experimenter’s hypothesis so what? Did they get a grade on their participation? I'd bet not. So why would they care what the hypothesis was? >> 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. PZ says they said, "We noticed this morning that you weren't really, you kn…

> so what? Did they get a grade on their participation? I'd bet not. So why would they care what the hypothesis was?

- If you were a subject in an experiment, wouldn't you be curious about the experiment design and the hypothesis being tested?

- If you had a good guess as to the tested hypothesis, could that influence your behavior?

Re: The Stanford Prison Experiment was hugely influential. We learned it was a fraud (2018)

#58
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 81% accurately figured out the experimenter’s hypothesis so what? Did they get a grade on their participation? I'd bet not. So why would they care what the hypothesis was? >> 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. PZ says they said, "We noticed this morning that you weren't really, you kn…

> so what? Did they get a grade on their participation? I'd bet not. So why would they care what the hypothesis was? - If you were a subject in an experiment, wouldn't you be curious about the experiment design and the hypothesis being tested? - If you had a good guess as to the tested hypothesis, could that influence your behavior?

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Re: The Stanford Prison Experiment was hugely influential. We learned it was a fraud (2018)

#60

Are 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?

Isn't that everything? We used to divine personality from the stars, or from bumps on the skull. We use to stab patients' brains and sever connections.

Everything is not obvious until you start applying some scientific method.

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