
The Lifespan of a Lie – Why can’t we escape the Stanford Prison Experiment? - fermigier
https://medium.com/s/trustissues/the-lifespan-of-a-lie-d869212b1f62
======
gringoDan
This is a fascinating article about how much of the famous Stanford Prison
Experiment was a sham.

> The appeal of the Stanford prison experiment seems to go deeper than its
> scientific validity, perhaps because it tells us a story about ourselves
> that we desperately want to believe: that we, as individuals, cannot really
> be held accountable for the sometimes reprehensible things we do. As
> troubling as it might seem to accept Zimbardo’s fallen vision of human
> nature, it is also profoundly liberating. It means we’re off the hook. Our
> actions are determined by circumstance. Our fallibility is situational. Just
> as the Gospel promised to absolve us of our sins if we would only believe,
> the SPE offered a form of redemption tailor-made for a scientific era, and
> we embraced it.

It seems that we fell for the narrative fallacy every time this "research" was
used as an explanation for behavior in the real world.

~~~
firasd
Interesting comments about a similarly famous study with a similar gist, the
Milgram experiment:

"Many other studies, such as Soloman Asch’s famous experiment[1] demonstrating
that people will ignore the evidence of their own eyes in conforming to group
judgments about line lengths, illustrate the profound effect our environments
can have on us. The far more methodologically sound — but still
controversial[2] — Milgram experiment demonstrates how prone we are to
obedience in certain settings. "

[1] [https://www.simplypsychology.org/asch-
conformity.html](https://www.simplypsychology.org/asch-conformity.html) [2]
[https://psmag.com/social-justice/electric-
schlock-65377](https://psmag.com/social-justice/electric-schlock-65377)

~~~
djsumdog
I've watched the whole video of the Milgram experiment. People claim those who
were the teachers knew it was fake, but interviews years later have people
claiming they really thought they killed the person in the other room.

Not to mention his experiment was replicated by several universities around
the world[1], although due to modern ethical standards, it would be impossible
to reproduce ethically at most universities today[2].

I don't think Milgram falls into the same category, especially with all the
work they put in at Harvard in the controls (the learner was a tape recording;
so everyone heard the exact same thing. It was the same professor in the room
with him; always replicating the same dialog).

This is in direct contrast with Vsauce's trolley problem experiment, which had
way too small a sample size, and who forced a response for one person by
changing the conditions of the experiment (there was no one outside when he
tried to get help).

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment#Replication...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment#Replications_and_variations)

[2]: [https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/replicating-
mi...](https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/replicating-milgram)

~~~
JackCh
> _" People claim those who were the teachers knew it was fake, but interviews
> years later have people claiming they really thought they killed the person
> in the other room."_

Some of the teachers undoubtedly thought it was fake, others did not. And
importantly a majority of the teachers were not properly debriefed until
several months later (some never were). The "dehoaxing" most received
immediately following the experiment was itself another hoax which in some
cases was meant to persuade the teacher they had in fact been shocking
somebody (but that the shocks were only very slight harmless shocks.) The
dehoaxing was meant to introduce the teachers to the learner, to demonstrate
that he was alive. Some did not even receive this dehoaxing, presumably
because procedure was violated, which explains why a handful of them might
believe they'd killed somebody.

~~~
djsumdog
> And importantly a majority of the teachers were not properly debriefed until
> several months later (some never were)

No. No. No. That is entirely wrong. Watch the original video. Every one of the
teachers is introduced to the learner after the experiment and they were told
no actual harm came to them. At least in the original Milgram iteration, all
of the teachers knew by the end.

------
pacaro
I’m more interested in the unquestioning belief that people seem to have with
information provided by an authority, especially during the earliest exposure
to a subject.

As the article states, the SPE is often introduced uncritically in
introductory lectures. Uncritically to avoid muddying the waters (presumably)
and in an introductory lecture because it is fascinating and likely to capture
the imagination of a student (presumably).

I’ve encountered unquestioning belief in various degrees of bullshit taught
this way, from the tainted views of history taught in elementary school,
through to stuff like this in undergraduate education.

I think that students are particularly vulnerable to this at an early phase of
exposure to a subject because they don’t have enough background to be
critical, by the time they get that background this information is ingrained.

~~~
peter303
Certain irony here. Much of education then is a Prison Experiment until
students develop the critic thinking skills to evaluate their professor's
teachings. Not that we have a binary evaluation here, i.e. the prof is totally
right or totaly wrong. More like shades of gray where some stuff is more
believable than others.

------
KKKKkkkk1
Here's the true experiment:

 _In surveys conducted in 2014 and 2015, Richard Griggs and Jared Bartels each
found that nearly every introductory psychology textbook on the market
included Zimbardo’s narrative of the experiment, most uncritically. Curious
about why the field’s appointed gatekeepers, presumably well-informed about
the experiment’s dubious history, would choose to include it nonetheless, I
reached out. Three told me they had originally omitted the Stanford prison
experiment from their first editions because of concerns about its scientific
legitimacy. But even psychology professors are not immune to the forces of
social influence: two added it back in under pressure from reviewers and
teachers, a third because it was so much in the news after Abu Ghraib._

~~~
dalbasal
In other words, the field just has very low standards for truth, in a
scientific sense.

This seems to go up and down the field... From academic publishing
(replicability crisis) to undergraduate teaching. Psychology just doesn't have
a scientific perspective on truth and knowledge.

Instead of a need (Abu graib and timely relevance) for knowledge triggering
research and the accumulation of knowledge, it triggers the field to accept
bogus knowledge because they need something.

~~~
paidleaf
> In other words, the field just has very low standards for truth, in a
> scientific sense.

The field has little to no scientific sense. It's why psychiatry/psychology is
a soft science. It isn't based on the scientific method or reproducibility and
testing. It's mostly based on consensus driven by a handful of powerful
practitioners.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_science](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_science)

What sigmund freud did wasn't science. His oedipal complex theory isn't a
scientific theory. There is no scientific test to refute it. You just accept
it or not.

The biggest problem of our generation is the conflation of science ( hard
science ) with pseudoscience ( soft science ). Because both has the word
science in it, people give soft sciences far more credit than it deserves.

If anyone is interested, Richard Feynman had a very interesting interview
about it.

[https://youtu.be/tWr39Q9vBgo](https://youtu.be/tWr39Q9vBgo)

~~~
nerfhammer
Psychiatry and psychology rejected Freud as an unscientific laughingstock a
long, long time ago. This shouldn't be trotted out as a an example of how
these fields operate today.

They do attempt the scientific method, they just aren't doing a very good job
of it much of the time apparently. If you think Freud, psychiatry and
psychology are so synonymous that they can be referred to interchangeably, try
picking up a current psychology textbook.

~~~
JackCh
> _" Psychiatry and psychology rejected Freud as an unscientific laughingstock
> a long, long time ago."_

In my experience few laugh at him. Most respect him, even if they don't
believe him.

~~~
nerfhammer
laughingstock was a not a perfect choice of words. People will still loosely
refer to his more well known ideas casually. Some could be said to respect him
to some degree, others not. But hardly anyone is confused about exactly how
scientific his output was, and neither would any textbook published in the
last 40 years.

------
wruza
Watching this thread from yesterday, I feel that HN tries to dismiss not an
experiment and its conclusions (which are indeed falsely true and inexact if
argumentation against it is true). It tries to dismiss a phenomenon and fix
this forever as in “no, we are not like that”. But what Zimbardo seemed to try
to conduct is resembling a typical SU prison-camp. Where all the people
inhabitating the entire area were given some rules (both law and “thief law”,
perverted and mostly uncontrolled) and began to create a social mess. It
wasn’t sadistic or directly harmful, but in these conditions people do smart
or dumb moves that lead to big trouble (often referred to as “get into the
odd”) to themselves or someone other, thus having a power impossible to have
in a regular society, along with all long going implications.

While most SU prisons were not insane hell movie-likes _at first sight_ , it
is still a wrong move to state conditions and effects similar to Zimbardo’s as
disproven in a wide sense simply because he messed this one up.

Main problem here is that one probably cannot make such an experiment without
actually building a prison and hurting people (and that they know their deeds
will not be punished). The only reliable sources are 20th century books on
civil wars and prison camps, but these are a read too long for HN format, and
a common knowledge on that is so vague that isn’t even worth discussing.

~~~
watwut
According to article, researchers themselves pushed guards toward being more
aggressive on multiple occasions. E.g. resulting behavior was not just what
emerged in absence of external control, but what emerged when you authority
explicitly pressures guards to be tough and legitimize or praises that
behavior.

That is pretty big difference in terms of meaning of results.

~~~
ZainRiz
How different is that from a new prison guard being pressured by their
supervisor or co-workers to be tough on prisoners? It indicates that a bad
situation can be created by bad management, and a new person introduced to an
existing bad system can turn bad as well.

------
PhilWright
I do not understand why a single experiment is considered good enough for
research results in the social sciences. A single experiment with unexpected
outcomes must be backed up by replication in order to start becoming
interesting.

Even if you took the SPE at face value when it was first conducted, surely you
have to repeat it before deciding if it is valid. What if the outcome only
occurs once in every 100 times and they got lucky that first time? Surely that
is somewhat important to know.

The most disappointing outcome is that nothing has really changed even after
all this time. Each researched is only one great result away from making their
career.

~~~
bakhy
The outcome was not entirely unexpected. The article mentions that this is
what Zimbardo originally intended. But I think even more important in this
story is the great story-like quality of the result. It's a great story, and
it "makes you think", as they say. One professor in this text is quoted
actually saying that the story is bigger, meaning presumably more important,
than the science. I remember similar reactions when some of Gladwell's
shenanigans was uncovered. It just doesn't matter if it's true, if it makes a
nice story. In fact, it's probably even better if it's not true.

~~~
xamuel
Reminds me of religious parables. No-one objects to Jesus's parables on the
basis of their being factually untrue--they're obviously fiction and that's
not a mark against them. On the other hand, the SPE is marketed as empirical
science, not spiritual revelation!

~~~
bakhy
Yes. And the fact that, being taken as serious science, it actually affected
penal policy, makes it particularly ugly.

------
empath75
There were a whole bunch of ‘studies’ done after World War Two that purported
to show how it was possible that ‘good people’ could be induced to do bad
things.

I think the ones that gained wide currency were the ones that most excused
truly horrific and servile behavior by individuals.

I don’t believe for a second that someone who would torture or abuse or kill
someone on the orders of someone else was ever a ‘good person’.

Don’t tell me that someone who is talking someone’s child from them right now
is a good person. I quit a job just recently working for dhs just because I
didn’t want to participate in that kind of behavior even tangentially.

~~~
LarryL
> I don’t believe for a second that someone who would torture or abuse or kill
> someone on the orders of someone else was ever a ‘good person’

That's easy to say. But context matters a lot!

What about this: your family is held hostage, or you live in a dictature where
disobedience means at best prison, and often retaliation against your family.
Real example: I've met a guy -a political refugee- at work whose daughter was
ABDUCTED by the police of his country to put pressure on him! Can you imagine
his anguish? Now, you are ordered to go in this room and "extract a
confession" from someone or to kill them. What would you do? (Knowing that
there are NO CHANCES that you can escape/run without awful consequences at
least on your family, it's not a movie).

Same for going to war. Many times in history have the poorest been forced to
go to war under pain of death (and possible retaliation on their family). What
would you do in such a situation? Especially when you are poor and without
"connections".

Truth is that it's very easy to force people to do awful things by the use of
force/coercion. Very few will want to be martyrs or put their family at risk.

~~~
the_af
Do note that historically, in most cases of torture the torturers weren't
themselves under threat, and their families weren't either. This hypothetical
doesn't happen in practice.

I tend to support the parent commenter's opinion that torturers were never
good people to begin with. I can understand murderers, but not torturers, and
especially not torturers of people who haven't directly wronged them (e.g.
when it's an "interrogation").

Extreme examples such as "but what if your daughter was raped and murdered by
your prisoner" tend NOT to be the case of real life scenarios where torture
actually happens.

------
harry8
I think I'm at the point now where i will consider the whole of psychology a
castle of dishonest and incompetent studies until proven otherwise. The usual
benefit given to scientists of the assumption that is not Alchemy had to go
for psychology. It's too important and the abuse is too widespread. It really
seems pervasive in the discipline at this point.

~~~
Karunamon
There's also the reproduction crisis[1], if you weren't aware of it already.

When your field can only have less than half of its top papers reproduced in
full, something is _very_ wrong with your field. It's to the point where one
can safely assume that any psych paper (but _especially_ social psych) is
garbage until such time as it's been replicated a time or two.

[1]: [https://www.nature.com/news/over-half-of-psychology-
studies-...](https://www.nature.com/news/over-half-of-psychology-studies-fail-
reproducibility-test-1.18248)

~~~
c3534l
Not only is the replication crisis not solely about psychology, the numbers
are far worse than half for fields like chemistry, biology, and physics[0].

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#Overall](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#Overall)

~~~
TangoTrotFox
This is completely incorrect, and that Wiki page has been written to be highly
misleading to lead people to the same mistaken comparison as they're comparing
entirely different numbers that look directly comparable.

What that says is that e.g. 69% of scientists working in physics and
engineering had failed to replicate some experiment at least once in their
career. In other words if they performed 1000 replication attempts of other
scientists' experiments and failed to reproduce the same results once, they
would be counted in that survey. By contrast in psychology, one hallmark
experiment tried to replicate the findings of 100 key studies in psychology
from highly regarded psychology journals. And it was unable to replicate the
findings of 64% of the studies. What's that number for physics? No idea other
than that it's going to be _much_ lower.

Make sense? Wiki is, almost as a rule, just completely awful for contemporary
or potentially controversial topics and this is a textbook example of that.

------
neonate
Be sure to read to the end where the author brings up his own family's
tangential involvement in the Zimbardo saga.

------
patkai
The narrative of the original experiment may be a "lie", but in what way is a
Medium article the "truth"? It would be very important to educate and remind
ourselves about how science actually works. It does not work with simple lies
and truths, it is a path we follow and where we make many missteps. Even if
Zimbardo did everything wrong - experiment, documentation, publishing,
narrative, conclusions, influence - it is perfectly all right, the big river
of science will slowly but steadily float it in the "right" direction.

~~~
FranzFerdiNaN
No its not alright. The idea of science is that things are reproducible and
that scientists at least try to be honest about what, why and how they do
their experiments. You say that scientists might as well just stop doing
anything and just write fake reports. It's all the same after all!

~~~
patkai
You are right, it is not OK to deliberately lie. What I meant is it's OK from
the point of view of science and science will correct these kind of "lies" in
the same way it corrects erroneous measurements, documentation errors,
misunderstandings, whatever. Scientific papers are actually full of these, and
I dare not guess how many of them are written due to publish-or-perish (which
are also some sort of lies, as the writer has not much to say, or only
something with negligible importance). We could even think about lied about
results as viruses which the immune system will handle.

~~~
royjacobs
What? There's a definite difference between "Whoops, I accidentally measured
this wrong back in the day, sorry" vs "I'm covering up that I'm measured this
wrong".

~~~
patkai
From a moral point of view there is. My point is that from the point of view
of science the same self-correction should work in both cases, so the bigger
story to "somebody lied" is that "in case of this attractive lie the self-
correction didn't work well".

------
patkai
Could we think about this experiment as a meta-experiment? Zimbardo
experimenting on the research community and the public how long we keep
something like alive just because it is an attractive story? (I am not
defending him!)

------
tptacek
This is a bananas article and kind of makes a case for Zimbardo as a sort of
Alex Wakefield of psychology.

~~~
Game_Ender
Who is Alex Wakefield?

~~~
pvg
Person who published the original (bad) study that set off the anti-vaxers. He
just promoted him to an Alex from an Andrew.

~~~
tptacek
Ugh. Sorry!

------
conjecTech
I'd just like to reemphasize what conclusions you should and shouldn't draw
from an experiment being invalidated. If an experiment is run that says the
sky is blue, then its invalidation does not mean that the sky is not blue. It
means we no longer have evidence for that conclusion. The correct answer then
isn't the negation of the original study's conclusion. The correct conclusion
is that we don't know or aren't sure.

Likewise, if the SPE is invalid, it doesn't imply that average people aren't
capable of horrific behavior - it simply means we have less evidence to
determine that than we thought we did.

~~~
whiddershins
Well, the message people got was that students who were knowingly
participating in a college psych study became spontaneously sadistic within
just a day or two.

That feels intuitively ridiculous, and has no evidence I know of to support
it, except this study.

~~~
CamperBob2
The idea behind the study was to try to understand how an entire nation -
Germany - could go berserk with hatred and sadism. Scientific or not, the
burden of proof lies with those who dispute Zimbardo’s (and Milgram’s)
findings, because they have been borne out so many times in so many different
contexts. Their work has never been more relevant than it is now, as we
witness the rise of Trumpism.

What alternative explanations would _you_ propose?

~~~
shkkmo
1) Milgram's and Zimbardo's findings are very different. Milgram's have been
backed up by many replications and are often mis-understood.

2) We have both experimental and factual evidence that shows that Zimbardo's
findings were lies.

3) The entire nation of Germany did not go berserk with hatred and sadism.

4) Name one instance where Zimbardo's findings have been born out is "so many
different contexts"?

The rise and success of Nazism (like most social movements, including
'Trumpism') was the result of a confluence of a number of factors. To pretend
that it was just "how people are" is do both people and the truth a
disservice.

~~~
JackCh
> _" Milgram's have been backed up by many replications"_

From _Behind the Shock Machine_ by Gina Perry:

> _On the recording, a much younger Hannah sounded perky and confident as she
> talked to Williams at the beginning of the experiment. But you could hear
> her confidence getting shakier once the learner started to give incorrect
> answers, and it became clear that his memory was not reliable. By the third
> shock, 45 volts, she was stumbling over the words. At the fifth shock, 75
> volts, when the learner made his first sound of discomfort, there was a
> pause._ Then I heard the following exchange.

> _Hannah: [to Williams] Is he all right? [into the microphone] The correct
> one was "hair". [to Williams] Is he all right?_

> _Williams: Yes, please continue._

> _Hannah: All right._

To put it lightly, the Milgram experiments were trash. It was measuring trust
in scientists not compliance to authorities. What undergrads are taught about
Milgram is that the experimenter would ask the teacher to _" Please continue"_
but what actually happened here is the experimenter assured the teacher
(Hannah) that the learner was all right. The experimenters played fast and
loose with the procedure, saying whatever they thought was necessary to get
the teacher to continue. And sometimes it wasn't even measuring trust in
scientists; there is at least one learner who recalls the experimenter, in
response to their protests, asking if they'd like to swap places with the
learner (essentially threatening the teacher to get them to comply.) The
experimenters and _particularly Milgram_ knew what results they wanted before
the experimentation even began, and made sure they got those results.

~~~
shkkmo
It's been a while, but my understanding was that the results of the Milgram
studies have been fairly widely replicated with consistent results.

Now, what those results mean / what is being measured by them is another
issue.

------
bakhy
Is it possible that Zimbardo is now legally responsible? He influenced policy
in this way, with what seems to be obvious malicious intent, and he also
apparently testified in many court cases. Can he be prosecuted for this?

~~~
JackCh
> _" He influenced policy in this way, with what seems to be obvious malicious
> intent"_

Actually he probably thought he was doing a good thing. He didn't intend to
harm people, but to help people (by creating a fraudulent narrative that would
work towards the greater goal of prison reform), with enough fame and personal
profit to sweeten the deal. It seems likely to me that Zimbardo believes the
ends justify the means.

Still, it would be satisfying to see him prosecuted for this fraud.

~~~
bakhy
I may have overstated it, but it seems he's been intentionally lying,
including in court... Just that should suffice, regaddless of his reasons.

------
fukuro
The SPE is kind of like the milgram experiment in the way that people tend to
do things they would otherwise not have done when given the green light from
an authority.

It reminds me of a short story illustrating this beautifuly.

(From The Way of Kings) [http://www.kurt-
anderson.com/main/2036/media/reading/derethi...](http://www.kurt-
anderson.com/main/2036/media/reading/derethil-and-the-wandersail)

------
LoonyBalloony
> According to Alex Haslam and Stephen Reicher, psychologists who co-directed
> an attempted replication of the Stanford prison experiment in Great Britain
> in 2001, a critical factor in making people commit atrocities is a leader
> assuring them that they are acting in the service of a higher moral cause
> with which they identify

The drug war in a nutshell ladies and gentlemen.

------
everdev
> But Eshelman, who had studied acting throughout high school and college, has
> always admitted that his accent was just as fake as Korpi’s breakdown. His
> overarching goal, as he told me in an interview, was simply to help the
> experiment succeed.

There are countless other quotes of guards and prisoners saying they were
"just acting". But isn't that equally as powerful? I'm not sure it matters so
much why you're locking someone in a closet for 6 hours (just acting, wanting
the experiment to succeed, wanting to please your teacher, having sadistic
tendencies, etc.), it's that you followed through and performed that action.
The fact that you did something you wouldn't normally do might be even more
significant. It's one thing if the guards and prisoners all know they're
acting, but that doesn't appear to be the case. It sounds as if individuals
were acting on their own accord, but unaware what behaviors and instructions
were real vs. not real.

Even in real life, how many people in the hierarchy of a dictatorship are
"just trying to please" the dictator vs. really "buying in" to the philosophy?
I guess it matters in terms of trying to change the system in the future, but
it doesn't matter that much in evaluating the harm done to the powerless in
the past.

I don't think power always veers towards dangerous dominant/submissive
behavior, but history seems to have an amply supply of evidence that that
certainly can be the case, regardless of why it gets there.

~~~
da_chicken
When I was in middle school in the late 80s, our social studies teachers
coordinated a mock segregation experiment. 1 out of every 8 students was
identified as an "Other". We were told that the "Others" were less deserving
of respect and that it would be okay to make fun of them. The "Others" would
always be last in line, would be required to use "Others"-only restrooms, etc.
Teachers were told to favor the regular students and not the "Others." There
were no prisoners and guards. The distinction was those with privilege and
those without.

The experiment was planned to last three days. It was stopped after less than
a day and a half. I remember the principal coming on over the PA and
announcing that the experiment was ending immediately and that treating any
"Others" any differently from then on would result in a suspension. There were
students showing up in the office crying about it. Not just complaining.
Literally in tears.

The problem, primarily, was that it was a middle school. There's _already_ a
group of students that all the other students mistreat or pick on or don't
respect as well. There's _already_ a social pecking order. When some of those
low social rank students were assigned to the "Others" group, they _really_
got bullied by people. What I remember being the most shocking was how several
_teachers_ were bullying and treating students badly. Yelling at them or
punishing them for no reason at all. Just because they had a paper sign that
said "Other" on their shirt.

The thing that this drilled into me is how vile people can be to each other
when they think they deserve it or otherwise aren't deserving of basic respect
or equality. The older I get the more I look back on this little experiment
and am shocked by what happened. Xenophobia and sectarian divisiveness is a
remarkably easy way to dehumanize and strip other people of basic human
rights. It's really quite terrifying how easy it was and how quickly it
happened. How all the students and staff just readily accepted the new social
order because that's what the authority said was true. How people abused that
social order for no good reason. How people who were ostensibly pretending
were actually acting in horrific ways. It's difficult to know in the moment
what's acting and what isn't when it's a stranger doing it.

~~~
teddyh
It’s a consistent phenomenon with people. As soon as someone finds out that
it’s socially acceptable to behave badly towards some group, many otherwise
nice people have no problem being absolutely terrible towards complete
strangers.

A relatively recent example is the “it’s OK to punch nazis” meme, but there
are many others. (If you haven’t heard about this, it’s the idea that it’s
perfectly good and admirable to walk up to people and physically assault them
merely because of their stated horrific political opinions.)

It’s difficult to even talk about this, because the backlash is so strong. If
someone is against punching nazis (for instance), are they defending nazis?
Are they also then, by extension, a nazi, and deserving to be punched? As soon
as there is an actual “Other” group which _is_ unprotected by social norms,
any discussion is almost pointless.

~~~
pofilat
"It's perfectly acceptable to beat up gays" is probably a better example of
this troubling phenomenon than "It's perfectly acceptable to beat up people
who have publicly declared their membership in a murderous conspiracy"

------
dalbasal
I think that this needs to be understood in the context of the "replicability
crisis" which is particularly critical in the field of psychology. The real
question is what other bogus science is being taught to psychology students
today.

Psychology has always played in multiple ponds. Expirement based social
_science._ Explicitly unscientific^ theory (eg Freud). Quite a lot in the
practice/medical aspects. A lot of philosophical approaches.

Overall, I think this has added up to a result where when people in the field
say "we know X to be true," it's hard to know what they mean, nevermind if
they're correct. Do they mean it in the sense that a literary critic means
something, or the way a chemist means something.

For example: Atlas Shrugged & Animal Farm are both works of fiction _and_ of
political "science". This is fine in the frame of what political science is, a
non scientific field. No one since Marx has really claimed otherwise.

When Marx claimed his theories to be scientific, the discussion that followed
actually resulted in very important pieces of modern epistemology: what is
science. The critics of Marx were also critics of Freud and the criticism was
identical.

Psychology though.. it has remained in a sort of no man's land. I know that I
at least have really lost confidence in psychology, as an academic field.
Practice/therapy is a completely different story. I think there's been a lot
of advancement in therapy. I can't help but wonder though, how much it is
hindered by bogus "science."

^in the Karl Popper sense

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ConfusedDog
The true experiment is how people come to willingly believe the Stanford
Prison Experiment.

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Bromskloss
Um, what was the lie again?

~~~
mrlyc
Zimbardo was an evil man who tried to justify his behaviour by setting up a
sham experiment to "prove" that everyone can be evil, given the right
circumstances.

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forkLding
Not the first time for Psychology, I remember my professor dismissing Freud
and etc. even though we learnt about him in our textbooks.

Not saying that Freud is a fraud (or even Jung or Maslow), but their theories
are hard to replicate and have been gradually phased out as a real explanation
of events and furthermore their psychiatric/psychotherapy diagnoses are not
effective to diagnose actual psychological illnesses, their treatment
techniques on the other hand have been invaluable
([https://www.mentalhelp.net/articles/mental-health-and-the-
le...](https://www.mentalhelp.net/articles/mental-health-and-the-legacy-of-
sigmund-freud/)). Psychology is definitely going thru a replication crisis.
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#Psychology_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#Psychology_replication_rates))

~~~
SubiculumCode
Freudian "theory" was not science, it was a catchy narrative.

~~~
Uhhrrr
When I was assigned "Civilization and its Discontents" in college, I already
knew Freud's theories were poorly supported, but it was still pretty
convincing while I was reading it.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
That says something about the quality of the writing, but not about the
quality of the ideas.

~~~
Uhhrrr
Exactly.

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Sangermaine
>> The appeal of the Stanford prison experiment seems to go deeper than its
scientific validity, perhaps because it tells us a story about ourselves that
we desperately want to believe: that we, as individuals, cannot really be held
accountable for the sometimes reprehensible things we do. As troubling as it
might seem to accept Zimbardo’s fallen vision of human nature, it is also
profoundly liberating. It means we’re off the hook. Our actions are determined
by circumstance. Our fallibility is situational. Just as the Gospel promised
to absolve us of our sins if we would only believe, the SPE offered a form of
redemption tailor-made for a scientific era, and we embraced it.

This is odd because it's the exact opposite of the way I usually here the SPE
narrative discussed: it's not a tale of redemption, it's a condemnation of
humanity that purports to show how any of us have monsters inside of us that
come out if given the chance.

~~~
empath75
It’s a dispersion of guilt and it allows people who do bad things to go along
because the think others would do the same in their position.

Lots of people in the world have died rather than to go along with things they
felt were wrong.

Don’t think that we all have monsters inside because we don’t.

~~~
partiallypro
Everyone has a different threshold and it seems to largely be a collective
behavior, when outside of a group, people may think more critically.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_model)

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walterstucco
Matteo Salvini is trying to reproduce the experiment on a mass scale in Italy
by tricking the population into thinking we're being invaded and you now are a
soldier defending your country, and he's having some success

I think that says a lot about the real nature of us italian, and I'm
profoundly ashamed to be born one

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some_account
We can't escape that behavior because we are extremely encouraged to care what
others think about us.

The entire western culture is about ego, and ego loves to feel part of some
team or group. Standing alone is very hard for most people.

~~~
JackCh
Did you read the article? It's about how the SPE was a basically one big lie.

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skate22
The NSA employees are wrong to spy on us! They should be held accountable!

Brb though, my manager wants me to put clicktale on our website. My burndown
chart is gonna look so good this week

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Zooper
But the study's already been repeated all over the world in prisons, so it's
reproducible.

~~~
ALittleLight
A confounding factor with real prisons is that (hopefully) most of the
prisoners have antisocial tendencies which led to their incarceration and the
prisoners and guards are under credible threat of violence from both parties.

In other words, are the guards behaving like jerks because their power has
corrupted them, or because behaving nicely is likelier to lead to them getting
attacked by prisoners?

Another consideration is that while I'm sure abuse in prisons is rampant
hopefully it's still far from the majority of guards behaving poorly. If
that's true, then real life prisons might be evidence against this conclusion
as most (hopefully) prison guards wouldn't be jerks.

~~~
thefifthsetpin
> A confounding factor with real prisons is that (hopefully) most of the
> prisoners have antisocial tendencies which led to their incarceration and
> guards are under credible threat of violence from both parties.

I suppose we could look at jails, then. They'd mostly be full of people still
presumed innocent, and most of those who are guilty aren't guilty of a violent
offense. If you just wait a while, you can find out which of those presumed
innocent people people were found not guilty. It'd be interesting to see how
the guards treated those people.

~~~
SketchySeaBeast
The SPE was full of actually innocent people - you had to make a mental leap
to imagine their guilt. People in jail are there because someone assumes
they've done something wrong - it's (unfortunately) a mental leap to assume
they are innocent, even though the law says that they are.

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otakucode
Why can't we? Simple. Psychologists refuse to recreate it. They refuse to
prove that anything would ever be different. I really find the example of the
dude 'faking' and trying to get out of the study an insanely poor choice to
try to undermine its credibility. Prisoners, brace yourself for this shocker,
don't want to be in prison. That makes it a more legitimate test, not less. If
you could make sure every single person participating was missing out on some
critical part of their life, and they would go to great lengths to try to
escape, that would be an effective experiment of what prison would be like if
not filled with criminals but average people under the same pressures.

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yeukhon
SPE is a great experiment. I am certainly an outcast from most psychologists
to believe that SPE should be allowed. But that’s my belief. The darknest part
of a human nature can only be revealed by an experiment like SPE. If you watch
the documentary on SPE, you will see the changes. I am fascinated with the
minds of humans in the most direct way possible.

~~~
FearNotDaniel
Did you read the article, in full? Carefully, and with a scientific mind?
There are several points where the author refers to selective editing,
critical facts left out, of documentaries and news reports, in order to
support the false narrative. If you watch the documentary, you will see what
its authors want you to see; that's not necessarily the same as the truth.

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petermcneeley
Im under the impression that this kind of modern experimentation (like
Milgram) is considered unethical making future interesting scientific trials
impossible. Once we finish "debunking" the poorly orchestrated experiments of
the past we will finally be left with the zero knowledge apex of
deconstruction that our age so highly prizes.

~~~
smogcutter
Rather than being "debunked", the milgram experiment has been pretty widely
replicated.

