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> so what? It affects subject behaviour and contaminates the experiment.
If the outcome of the experiment is obvious and predictable, how can you make it unpredictable? And how it demonstrates failure to reproduce? This sounds like a generic argument against psychological experiments, because you can't have them in perfect conditions, you have to see through imperfection.
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> there is no record of Zimbardo taking a single step in that direction You must be joking. In addition to the peer-reviewed papers he published, he gave media interviews, he testified in Congressional hearings, he published an article in the New York Times Magazine, he published a popular book, he made a PBS series, he made all of the study materials publicly available, he was an expert witness in three trials... It…
And yet he did not use any of those opportunities to correct the most common perception of his work. How is that supposed to be convincing?
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>> 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…
Zimbardo’s claim was “normal people could behave in pathological ways even without the external pressure of an experimenter-authority.” In fact what the experiment showed is that people can behave in pathological ways when Phil Zimbardo coaxes them into it.
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My instructions to the guards, as documented by recordings of the guard orientation, were that they could not hit the prisoners but could create feelings of boredom, frustration, fear, and "a sense of powerlessness—that is, we have total power of the situation, and they have none." We did not give any formal or detailed instructions about how to be an effective guard.
Asking a person role-playing a guard in a prison simulation to be "firm" and "in the action" is mild compared to the pressure exerted by actual wardens and superior officers in real-life prison and military settings, where guards failing to participate fully can face disciplinary hearings, demotion, or dismissal. Although the research team asked all guards to be actively involved and firmly in control of the prisoners, it never instructed guards to employ brutality, and it explicitly banned the use of physical force.
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> 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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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 ge…
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Zimbardo’s claim was “normal people could behave in pathological ways even without the external pressure of an experimenter-authority.” In fact what the experiment showed is that people can behave in pathological ways when Phil Zimbardo coaxes them into it.
He didn't coax them to pathological behavior: -- My instructions to the guards, as documented by recordings of the guard orientation, were that they could not hit the prisoners but could create feelings of boredom, frustration, fear, and "a sense of powerlessness—that is, we have total power of the situation, and they have none." We did not give any formal or detailed instructions about how to be an effective guard.…
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Those 1000 people were heavily coaxed into it. They were subject to years long propaganda painting ennemy as evil danger. That includes literal school system teaching them this. Propaganda had many facets including the idea that manly men must be without empathy toward enemy, that empathy is weakness and cruelty is strength. A lot of those so-call normal people were literal Nazi party members who became such voluntar…
"They were subject to years long propaganda painting ennemy as evil danger." This only applies to Altreich citizens, who lived in Germany as of 1933. But the Holocaust involved a lot of people who weren't Altreich citizens. Austria was only annexed in March 1938, and yet supplied its share of war criminals to the Nazi effort. The Trawniki men, who guarded a lot of the concentration camps in the East, were Ukrainians…
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Those 1000 people were heavily coaxed into it. They were subject to years long propaganda painting ennemy as evil danger. That includes literal school system teaching them this. Propaganda had many facets including the idea that manly men must be without empathy toward enemy, that empathy is weakness and cruelty is strength. A lot of those so-call normal people were literal Nazi party members who became such voluntar…
Guards are coaxed to be tough: if you handle a dangerous criminal in a relaxed manner, they can try to escape killing you in the process.
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
Thank you for sharing, fascinating to understand the study’s intended purpose.
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“Many of Milgram’s participants believed it to be impossible that the prestigious Yale University experimenter would allow real harm to be inflicted on an experimental subject. Although Milgram claimed that 75% of his participants thought they were administering painful shocks, Perry’s re-analysis of the data showed that “It’s more truthful to say that only half of the people who undertook the experiment fully believ…
That's still a shocking (no pun intended) percentage of people willing to inflict what they think is pain on another human based merely on the orders of an authority which they are not truly obliged to follow. I imagine the percentage of willing participants would be even higher if they had a real reason to follow the orders, e.g. it was actually their job and/or they would be punished in some way for failing to foll…
And I have my doubts that any of those 6 actually completey believed that a Yale psychology experiment was allowed to dangerously shock students, or that the student actors were all that believable.