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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)

#111

Post by scotty79 »

EA-3167 wrote: post #20
AlbertCory wrote: post #15

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 always wonder how people square "It's a fraud" with "It's a fraud that fits the reality of power and abuse incredibly well." I get the sense that some people really just don't like to talk or think about the banality of evil.

It's a fraud because if guards were pressured or knew the experimenters expectation then it's just yet another Milgram's experiment that is apparently enough to explain banality of evil as a result of few bad apples in various places of power with complacent masses willing to do amoral things when ordered. Nothing that should make Zimbardo world famous.

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

#112

Post by alan-crowe »

In the original understanding of the Stanford Prison Experiment, the public policy take away is the anti-prison argument: you can try to set up a prison system that treats the prisoners in a kind, reforming way, but the guards will treat the prisoners in a brutal, deforming way because that is what humans with power do automatically.

The kind of experiment that would provide convincing evidence would have a pro-prison psychologist trying to rig the experiment by tipping off the guards that they are supposed to show the best side of human nature and treat the prisoners in a kind, reforming way; but it all goes horribly wrong when the guards ignore the push from the experimenter and are brutal anyway.

What do we expect would be the outcome of an experiment where the pro-prison psychologist running it tips off the guards about how they are supposed to behave? Zimbardo's work is rather ambiguous. Perhaps it generates the expectation that the guards will be brutal. Perhaps it generates the expectation that the guards will conform to the clues and hints injected by the psychologist running the experiment. The work suffers from a fundamental wrong way roundness in relation to the public policy controversy.

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

#113

Post by jhbadger »

nomel wrote: post #13
legitster wrote: post #11

While 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…

> so keen on doing what the researcher wants them to do, and they think that the psychologist wants them to behave in one way This was the dark conclusion of the Milgram experiment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

True, but even that experiment has some of the same problems as the prison experiment. We all think we know what the Milgram experiment says -- that people generally follow orders even if the orders are unethical. Except the problem is that when Milgram (and others) repeated the experiment, sometimes they rebelled - in some cases more often than they obeyed. This rarely gets mentioned because it goes against the "meaning" of the experiment.

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

#114

Post by charles_f »

rgrieselhuber wrote: post #54
AlbertCory wrote: post #15

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.

Yeah, anecdotal evidence, and the resulting structure of capitalism as a whole, seem to point to that

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

#115

Post by pmarreck »

superduperer wrote: post #5
pmarreck wrote: post #3

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. 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…

Yes it does.

No it doesn't.

Quod grātīs asseritur, grātīs negātur (aka Hitchens' Razor)

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

#116

Post by watwut »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #87
watwut wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which is something different then what happened in German camps.

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

#117

Post by overstay8930 »

beenBoutIT wrote: post #51
adastra22 wrote: post #26

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…

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.

> doesn't qualify as any sort of actual science.

That could be said about plenty of psychologists and sociologists. I hate that the general public thinks of the social sciences on the same level as other branches of science.

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

#118

Post by watwut »

inglor_cz wrote: post #88
watwut wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The original claim was made about "large number of normal Germans". By the time of WWII, Ukraine was subject of genocide from two sides. And again, local camps guards were especially selected, coached and punished if they were not cruel enough.

OP referred to supposed process in which people spontaneously become super cruel. The claim that "it is possible to make people cruel by authorities" is something completely different.

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

#119

Post by SubiculumCode »

spicymapotofu wrote: post #95
SubiculumCode wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Is that kind of organizational prevention the one that involves having subjects count down mentally? I really enjoyed learning about memory. The visuospatial sketchpad holds a place in my heart.

all sorts of techniques. manipulation during encoding/learning can be as simple as not letting them know there will be a memory test. Using items that are novel and hard to provide a label.

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

#120

Post by SubiculumCode »

spicymapotofu wrote: post #95
SubiculumCode wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Is that kind of organizational prevention the one that involves having subjects count down mentally? I really enjoyed learning about memory. The visuospatial sketchpad holds a place in my heart.

I wrote this chapter primer on these aspects: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/229525331_Children'...
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