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

> One of three guards on a shift that day left the area during a prisoner count and wasn't even requiring prisoners to follow orders issued by the other guards, so David Jaffee, acting as the SPE Warden, took this guard aside and asked him to become more active, involved, and "tough" in order to make the experimental setting seem more like a prison. Here are his exact words: > "We noticed this morning that you weren't really, you know, lending a hand, and I was wondering if there's anything's wrong… We really want to get you active and involved because the guards have to know that every guard is going to be what we call a “tough guard”… what I mean by tough is [that] you have to be firm, and you have to be in the action… It’s really important… for the workings of the experiment [because] whether or not we can make this thing seem like a prison—which is the aim of the thing—depends largely on the guards’ behavior."

Okay, so if you tell people the experiment requires they be strict rather than lenient, and correct them when they don't follow this, then they act strict. Sure, this is a more accurate representation of prison, but I thought the point was to argue that this was some sort of inevitable dynamic, not just "technically possible"?

> 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.

This sounds like more evidence that the intensity of behavior is proportional to the amount of pressure. Pressuring people harder makes them respond more strongly; I still don't see how this is somehow a validation of his thesis.

> With each passing night, he became more creatively evil in ways that went beyond being a tough guard. Indeed, he later said that he began to think of himself as a “puppeteer” who made prisoners do whatever he chose. In an extreme perversion of his experimentally assigned role, he devised an unthinkable way to humiliate all prisoners on the fifth night of the study...Fortunately, I had earlier decided to terminate the experiment the next morning.

That's kind of a ridiculous defense on his part. His timing somehow coincided exactly with particularly brutal abuse of some of the experimentees ostensibly in his care, but of course he couldn't have been actively monitoring it or else he'd be culpable for not intervening...so he somehow managed to have the idea to pull the plug exactly at the time that saved him the most face but also at the subdued level of urgency for the entire incident to play out? Either he was grossly negligent in taking care of the experimentees, or he was complicit by choosing not to intervene; there's no middle ground here that makes any sense, despite him clearly wanting to pretend there is.

> Blum portrays the case of Doug Korpi, alias Prisoner 8612, as an instance of me being duped into believing that a prisoner was having an emotional breakdown when in fact the prisoner was simply faking a breakdown in order to leave the study early...For reasons I cannot fathom, Korpi’s story has changed several times over the past 47 years: from genuinely losing control of his emotions, to getting out of the study so that he could lead an insurrection and liberate the other prisoners, to faking a breakdown just to get out early and study for an upcoming Graduate Record Exam, to other reflections and memory distortions.

I don't find it hard to believe that someone's memory of something might shift over nearly half a century and them not intentionally lying. If it was actually an emotionally harrowing experience, it would almost be more surprising if their understanding of how they felt evolved over time, and if it wasn't, it's still pretty mundane for people to remember things incorrectly after decades. Given that any one of their explanations would individually make sense (I would certainly not be surprised if I had a mental breakdown in a situation like this, and if I didn't but had to get to an exam and genuinely didn't think that I would be allowed to get to an exam I needed to take without lying, I wouldn't hesitate to lie to get out because that sounds like _real_ imprisonment, not an experiment), either their memories just being faulty like most people's are or them actually having an emotional breakdown seem far more like than, I don't know, predicting that this would be a famous experiment and deciding to try to make a name for themselves in it?

Is your thinking that a prison guard (or analogous) would be told to be kind and forgiving, or not given any direction at all on the “right” way to behave?

The study itself described what they thought it might be able to demonstrate. The fraud is Zimbardo's. He was pretty clear that he was testing the hypothesis that the guards would become tyrants. He told the guards to become tyrants.