As a child in primary school (in Lesotho, southern Africa): when a teacher left the classroom everyone was supposed to silently complete work. To enforce this, one student would be appointed "name taker". This person would write down the names of anyone who spoke while the teacher was out. Punishment for being on the list was often physical.
One day I was made the name taker while the teacher was out. Most kids stayed quiet, but two other segments emerged: the scycophants and the outlaws.
The sycophants would attempt to "help" me identify noise makers by pointing them out. In exchange they would hope to be safe from the list, and would use that immunity/privilege to lord over other kids.
The outlaws were kids who, once they were added to the list, talked and joked freely, knowing that they were doomed anyway. They felt they were fearless, and they goaded others to join them.
I've always remembered this experience, for how quickly a group of children organized themselves into social dynamics that echoed human systems more generally.
Oh, that looks familiar. But I still can’t tell if that was a good thing in terms of social experience or just a misuse of our behavior. Neither is it clear if a teacher knew what s/he doing or was just lazy.
I usually refrained from these activities, but most interesting was that physics teacher took few well-learning people from our class and suggested to create homeworks and then evaluate everyone’s success on it (scores were official). Social heat raised pretty quickly and two of us refrained from that openly. The punishment was that we went to the passive group. Obviously we got A’s, since we were good in physics. For a few that seemed like an act of heroism. Though it wasn’t really – we should have say fck it from the beginning.
Another case was that a teacher who knew me personally asked me to watch for another problematic class. I was around 16 back then and it was somewhat clear that once someone’s name is on the list, I couldn’t prevent them from doing anything. Nobody did make it there, but it was a pretty hard game of authority leverages and group behavior. I wasn’t much stressed, but... it is interesting experience since in a school you rarely have tasks that have no clear answer. 2+2 is 4, F is ma, but there is no answer to what you do with people to make them
obey the rules. (edit: grammar)
Thanks for making me remember all that! (And for leaving that neverending zimbardo/milgram discussion at the bottom)
If I were appointed name-taker in that situation, I would never actually take any names, only ever reporting that everyone remained silent.
Reporting someone for punishment, even if deserved, would only ever come back badly on me. (Unless I'm missing some incentive for reporting someone, in which case I need to ask what would deter me from wrongly reporting someone just to get the reward.)
Your suggested approach was exactly what I did when I had gone through a similar system in Myanmar as the OP described above, where lazy teachers leave managing the class to students among themselves.
Stay as neutral as possible so that it doesn't bite back at you when the name-taker is someone else. It worked for the most part because my classmates would start recommending me to be the name taker and in return, I told them to not make too much noise when talking during teacher's absence.
It's not that simple. There are two very different kinds of "ratting out":
1. Reporting a crime to the police so they can check and sort it out if needed. This is extremely prevalent in Western societies and seems predicated on trust in the police to do the right thing. Examples: people reporting screams for help they overhear from a street; drivers reporting erratic behavior of other drivers on the road.
2. Knowingly reporting a thought crime to overzealous authorities that will severely punish for that crime, sometimes knowingly falsely, sometimes for your own benefit. Example: telling your local uchastkovuy that your noisy neighbors were doing anti-soviet jokes in the hope of getting rid of them.
In a lot of post-soviet countries there was a lot the latter and none of the former (in fact, a lot of Russians think the former is "ratting out" and is immoral). In Russia there were numerous cases of people being killed or raped in places where dozens or hundreds could hear the screams for help, with no one actually calling the police. On the other hand, you can be pretty sure that shady stuff happening on a Western city street will lead to police response.
It's kinda hard to tell where the exact boundary between those two kinds of behaviors is, especially lately with all the pushback against drug prohibition (is reporting someone smoking a spliff in Stockholm moral?). But it exists.
The "you don't rat" mentality is also very prevalent in ghettos or "the street" (as well as in left-wing activism circles). A well written account on it is the HBO series The Wire.
I think it's pretty commonly understood that integrity can include not compromising your values in the face of consequences. Often, the value against lying is fairly weak compared to other values. In fact, contemplating lying to authorities to prevent another's (often unjust) punishment is a pretty common topic in explaining different philosophical systems.
It's really just a variation on the trolley problem.
> I've always remembered this experience, for how quickly a group of children organized themselves into social dynamics that echoed human systems more generally.
Which makes perfect sense when you remember than children are, in fact, human.
I had a similar experience in primary school in Spain (though punishment was never phisical).
The incentive is that if the class is made of, say, 30 kids, you are appointed once and then suffer through the appointments of the other 29 kids (a little less in practice since known troublemakers won't be put in 'power' for obvious reasons). There are plenty of opportunities for mob punishment if your mates don't feel you're being fair.
>I had a similar experience in primary school in Spain (though punishment was never phisical).
Same in Italy, though I never recall any actual punishment (not physical nor on paper) was ever administered on the base of these - let's say "opinionated" - reports.
The blackboard was divided in two columns by a vertical chalk line, on the left one would write at the top "good" and on the right "bad".
It was mostly a game (I believe it was intentional to just keep us kids busy while the teacher was briefly away) and a way for the kids to exercise in knowing the names of all the kids and reading and writing them, the "name taker" would start writing all the kids names and surnames on the "good" side.
Then he/she would write among the bad ones someone (for whatever reason), who would try to convince the "name taker" to delete his/her name and re-write it on the "good" side.
After a few minutes the blackboard was full of deletions/rewrites on both sides.
The teacher already knew anyway which one were the "good" and which one were the "bad" ones and at the most made a verbal reprimand (of two types) to the kids that were on the "bad" column finally:
1) "I knew you were going to ...., why don't you stop it for a change" (to the ones re-known as troublemakers)
2) "I am surprised you did ...., you won't go far by doing this" (to the ones re-known as being tranquil)
The N-1 could name-take the name-taker on the same day if they can achieve consensus before the teacher comes back.
The N-1 simply have to wait for the teacher to come back, then explain that the name-taker was abusing his position, hoping the teacher will release them from punishment for name-taking the name-taker. AFAICT, there's no incentive for the N-1 to lie about whether or not the name-taker was taking advantage of them.
What incentive is there for them to unify against the name-taker if the name-taker was being fair? N-1 people aren't just going to cry wolf in synchrony, because they don't trust each other. Can't a set of untrusted nodes still achieve consensus assuming more than half are good players? It's unlikely that over half of the class consists of class clowns.
Am I summarising this right ?
There's an order given by your teacher, some kids break it and will continue breaking it from that point on, some faked cooperation, and the rest of the kids were just silent.
Is this really an organisation, in the sense that one "group" is trying to reach a goal ?
For instance the "fearless" kids don't seem to have anything to care about to me, and don't need to join forces for anything.
Same for the "sycophants" who could be alone or a number of people, it wouldn't change their behaviour.
Or the rest of the kids who could be sleeping, it wouldn't change much for them.
Perhaps to put it in a different way, what was your main takeaway from the situation ? it seems you had more insight that what is conveyed here.
I do vaguely remember "good kings" and "bad kings" ... some kids were forgiving and more than fair, and others were vindictive. So not everyone gravitated towards tyranny and some did report "nothing happened" more or less.
It could be viewed as egoism though, when at specific angles. What win is? That everyone chit-chats instead of learning on a regular basis? Is your teacher a foe? You make friends of who?
It is hard to define a long-term win. In my story above we two refused our position not because we didn't like to create homeworks. In fact, what we did wasn't much different from school books; we even categorized tasks and watched that they weren't too hard, leaving only a couple of pieces that required some thinking. What we didn't like was scoring our friends, non-friends and whatever these relationships were back then. But still I think that seeing how they learn and provide a feedback is, well, a slightly better than just throwing books at them and wait for a success. Our class actually knew some physics as a result. It is a social price that was questionable, not a learning process. Despite being viewed as a 'good guy', now I don't have strong relationships with any of my then buddies anyway. Sum up? Our teacher could be not as unthoughtful as it seemed.
tl;dr while everyone is on their own, someone has to think of the group as a whole. It doesn't mean you all end up in a better place, but at least you tried and had an opinion instead of a denial. People are pretty forgiving if your intents are good-natured.
This seems to understate the deception of the study. Many of the individuals involved in the study have spoke of it. You can find plenty of quotes on the Wiki page [1] and many others elsewhere as well. Everybody was coached on their roles, and even the prisoners also saw it as a sort of improv scenario.
The individual who was famously filmed 'breaking down' claiming "Jesus Christ, I'm burning up inside!" and "I can't stand another night! I just can't take it anymore!" has been framed as an example of a mental collapse from the study. The individual himself however has stated that he thought he would have been allowed to continues his studies as a prisoner - but that was not the case. So he faked a mental collapse to get out of the experiment early (after 36 hours) and get back to his studies.
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As an aside this experiment shows how absolutely crucial objective third parties replicating even keystone studies from reputable institutions is. The one thing that's completely clear is that Zimbardo had predetermined his conclusion and he was going to do anything to get it. That he resorted to something like this (while claiming it was all organic) is far more egregious than an researcher p-hacking or even just outright faking results. That there's no major system for replication means much of what we know about social and even physiological (clinical studies have shown major issues with reproducibility) science could be completely wrong.
The worst part about choreographing scientific experimentation to comport with what you suspect is true is that in the not-so-distant-future, the negation and dismissal of your results can serve as evidence that your hypothesis was inaccurate.
In summary, it's highly counterproductive. Don't be this guy...
Normally, in science, reproducibility is an important qualifier. If an experiment cannot be reproduced its significance to science is low. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproducibility
People can come up with all kinds of personal reasons to qualify or disqualify an experiment that can never be reproduced, but these reasons are often not scientific and not related to the merits of the experiment.
Then I will rephrase to say that in science an experiment gains superior trust and credibility when it is reproducible. Experiments that cannot be reproduced have less or no credibility.
It would be good if this were true, but this is just another shibboleth. Nothing done in the Large Hadron Collider is reproducible. Theoretically, yes. In practice, no. Only the LHC itself can run those experiments again, and there's always other new things to do.
Ultimately, one major factor is the credentials of the experimenters. We may not like it, but some of the major experiments done today do boil down to "proof by authority".
I am tired of hearing about this study when there are so many valid criticisms of its methods and conclusions, and it has never been replicated. In particular (as this article highlights) there's strong evidence that Zimbardo explicitly coached the "guards" into treating the "prisoners" harshly, as opposed to the meme narrative that everybody fell hard into their roles organically.
Ignoring the ethical questions (which are many), this is just straight up asking experimental subjects to help you reach a conclusion, which is . . . a no-no, experimentally speaking.
Sure but to be clear it's the experiment that's never been replicated (because there's no ethics board on the planet that would green-light nowadays), not the conclusions.
This doesn't in any way invalidate the conclusions, and while criticism of the method is entirely valid we have to acknowledge that this is a data set of one.
Often conversations around this progress from "never been replicated" to "must be the opposite of what true" although I realize that is not what you're saying. Seems like people want to be able to dismiss the experiment or, even better, use it to prove the opposite, because it's conclusions are uncomfortable to contemplate.
The two closest further studies (as in the wikipedia article, BBC and Third Wave) produced conclusions one largely correlating, one mostly in disagreement.
Anybody who has ever served in a military will tell you just how absurd the Stanford experiment is. People in the military wear uniforms with rank and responsibility that is visibly apparent. Yet, these behaviors don't exist.
I can vaguely remember my time in Army basic training which was somewhat like a prison environment with captives. Even in extreme cases the behaviors of the Stanford experiment are absent. Drill sergeants who are artificially made to be mean and are visibly separated by rank and uniform aren't like the guards in the experiment. Some of the privates who display criminal-like behaviors don't behave like the prisoners in the experiment.
Perhaps the experiment cannot be reproduced because it simply doesn't represent human behavior. Perhaps people are more rational than that even when forced to behave in ways suggestive of the experiment.
> The administration of George W. Bush asserted that these were isolated incidents, not indicative of general U.S. policy.[8][9] This was disputed by humanitarian organizations such as the Red Cross, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch. These organizations stated that the abuses at Abu Ghraib were not isolated incidents, but were part of a wider pattern of torture and brutal treatment at American overseas detention centers, including those in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay.[9] Several scholars stated that the abuses constituted state-sanctioned crimes.[8][9]
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisone...)
If it's true that the abuse at Abu Ghraib was state-sanctioned (and AFAIK this pretty much considered fact), then I'd say a comparison to what the SFE was all about doesn't make too much sense.
Of course people will torture their prisoners if they're encouraged/told to do so.
I think Zimbardo argued as an defence witness in Lyndie England's trial that the lack of proper guidelines and laissez faire leadership, vulnerability of the camp and the guards in a hostile city, combined with the harsh interrogation methods used by the non-military spooks, created a local "group dynamics" accepting violence and abuse.
The point was to show that England was not a freak, and it could happen to anyone.
I'm inclined to agree that writing nice policies on a paper won't be enough when running a prison camp in a war zone where some higher ups are waterboarding the prisoners...
Also, it's a well-understood principle that soldiers are more comfortable actually killing the enemy if you actively dehumanize the enemy. Humans are generally very unwilling to actually kill other humans even in war so teaching them not to consider their enemies humans is an easy way to make them more efficient. Not surprising what happens when they then take the same mindset to POWs while being given free reign to "interrogate".
The question isn't whether England was a freak. The question is how we could allow this to happen after Lidice (Germany), Nanking (Japan) and My Lai (US). That no-one was tried for Abu Ghraib as a war crime is unsurprising but abhorrent.
I'm inclined to believe that this was explicitly allowed to happen by those in power, and most of the 'shock' and perhaps even the 'well, look at stuff like the SFE to see how people can go wrong' is really just covering up for the ugly truth of torture that quite a few people in positions of power are really quite okay with.
I mean, considering the history of the US government, or the behavior of its various three-letter agencies, does it make any sense to give them the benefit of the doubt?
Well, considering the US now officially is a country that's using torture (on principle, even if we accept the wordplay around defining waterboarding and solitary confinement as "not torture"), I wouldn't be surprised.
You're right, I mixed up the SFE with Milgram. I always found the SFE a lot less interesting/remarkable so I'm not too surprised to find out it's sketchy at best.
I believe that is commonly described as toxic leadership or ethics violation. The failures there didn’t necessarily happen because they were prophesized by a stereotype, but they did happen because necessary management controls were absent.
I don't find that inconsistent. The Standford experiment showed that people act out the stereotypes of the roles they are assigned.
My stereotype of a drill sergeant is yelling a lot, but fundamentally devoted to 'making unruly young boys into men' through bullying, disrespect - it seems to me that the conclusions predict that a quiet person who is assigned the role of a drill sergeant would suddenly start yelling a lot or a otherwise respectful person would become disrespectful.
The stereotype of a prison guard is much different. Rather than 'unruly boys' it's 'hardened criminals' - the difference in reaction to being assigned a role can be explained by the differing stereotypes of the roles, as an alternative to the experimental conclusion being wrong.
My experience is that stereotypes exist because most humans are lazy and prefer to see patterns where there aren't any (or are weakly there) than critically examining the world around them, including assuming stereotypes are true instead of getting to know actual people.
I was under the impression the conclusions were actually quite suspect nowadays. And it doesn't make sense that conclusions can be replicated. How? Only by further experiments, no?
Do I think that the study being flawed proves it's opposite? No. But I don't think you can cling to conclusions from a flawed study. At best, you can cling to the questions.
> it's the experiment that's never been replicated, not the conclusions
> This doesn't in any way invalidate the conclusions, and while criticism of the method is entirely valid we have to acknowledge that this is a data set of one.
The scientific method moves from hypothesis to experiment to conclusions. If repeated experiments do not support the hypothesis, then there are no conclusions.
> This doesn't in any way invalidate the conclusions, and while criticism of the method is entirely valid we have to acknowledge that this is a data set of one.
A data set of one is worthless - no better than random. The number of successful experiments needs to be statistically significant to support the hypothesis.
Hold on, maybe I'm missing something from my understanding of the process of an experiment, but I thought the process (cutting out some non-relevant steps) was hypothesis -> Experiment -> Conclusion.
If nobody has done number 2 since, how can it be valid for everyone to arrive at a conclusion despite there being no experiment?
He's saying the truth of the conclusion is independent of the means used to demonstrate it.
This is correct, but a rather confused observation.
Since the question isnt whether the conclusions is true or not, but whether we are justified in believing it is true.
And we are not justified. The experiment engineered its results; and no subsequent experiment has demonstrated the conclusion. So if it is true, we have not yet discovered that it is.
This does not make sense. Are you asserting that just because a study was done its conclusions must be held true, even if it is not reproducible or its methods later shown to be flawed? This is not science.
Presuming and asserting 'what people want' is not scientific. There is a process of peer review and reproducibility and if your study can't pass that process it is dismissed as false. This has nothing to do with what 'people want'.
Who knows. The point is that what was reported isn't what happened so the original findings of the study are invalid and cannot be trusted.
To answer your question you'd want to do a new study where your question and the methodology is defined in advance. Defining the questions after an experiment has ended leads to bad conclusions because you are biased by having already seen what has happened and likely to fit your question to match the results.
The electric shock experiment (https://www.simplypsychology.org/milgram.html) seems similar to your question showing a willingness for people to go further than they normally would when asked to do so by an authority figure.
There's quite a bit of criticism of that experiment too:
> In 2012, Australian psychologist Gina Perry investigated Milgram's data and writings and concluded that Milgram had manipulated the results, and that there was "troubling mismatch between (published) descriptions of the experiment and evidence of what actually transpired." She wrote that "only half of the people who undertook the experiment fully believed it was real and of those, 66% disobeyed the experimenter".[19][20] She described her findings as "an unexpected outcome" that "leaves social psychology in a difficult situation."[21] In the journal Jewish Currents, Joseph Dimow, a participant in the 1961 experiment at Yale University, wrote about his early withdrawal as a "teacher", suspicious "that the whole experiment was designed to see if ordinary Americans would obey immoral orders, as many Germans had done during the Nazi period."[22]
I can only speak as a psychology student who read about 'classics' such as Milgram and SPE, and participated in a number of experiments myself. I remember even when I read about the Migram experment, I figured that while I probably wouldn't have administered the severe shocks or participated at all, just in case, there's a chance I might have done so assuming it was all faked.
In fact, I'd argue this 'disconnect' from reality, if anything, is a much more interesting phenomenon. I've been part of various hazing rituals, some of them in hindsight quite irresponsible, and I think what made those 'work' wasn't that 'good people turned bad' or 'a few bad apples abused the mechanism', but rather that everyone involved just went along with the prank to an irresponsible degree.
One could argue that this supports the idea that people will do horrible things when told to do so by an 'authority', but I can't help but feel that the reality as I've experienced it doesn't fit the narrative of the Milgrams and Zimbardos.
tl:dr; I can't help but feel that many of these types of experiments are evidence of flawed reality more than morality. it's less going through some kind of moral reasoning and deciding to trust the lab coat, but more a flaw in our mental heuristics that leads us to construct an alternate reality. things like the bystander effect would support that view, and while it might seem like splitting hairs, I feel they're quite different interpretations.
I think what made those 'work' wasn't that 'good people turned bad' or 'a few bad apples abused the mechanism', but rather that everyone involved just went along with the prank to an irresponsible degree.
This is an important point. I guess this is kind of of a difficult thing to control for while still staying within the boundaries of experimental ethics.
As a side note, personally I think this idea of 'going along with a prank to an irresponsible degree' also goes quite a long way towards explaining the current political situation in the US...
What Zimbardo's SPE apparently did, was really more of a replication of Milgram's earlier experiments showing that people will do bad things if an authority figure tells them to. Which is interesting and important...and not new. It wasn't even new when Zimbardo did it. Milgram's experiment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment) was well known even when Zimbardo was planning his, and while this would be supportive of the conclusions from Milgram's earlier work, it wouldn't break any new ground.
As I heard in https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/bad-show , Milgram's study is actually much more nuanced but insightful. The participants given an absolute order to administer the highest shocks are the ones who refused! Instead of showing that people do whatever they are told by authorities, the results showed that people go along up to the point where they feel they are still in control and choosing to go forward. When it's an absolute order, they rebel!
The difference being Milgram used actors as there was no actual suffering, only the intent to cause suffering on-command. Milgram's experiment proved what atrocities like the Holocaust and Armenian Genocide already made clear: most people are cowards, will happily turn you over to butchers, if not murder you themselves, if directed.
I think part of it is that they were kind of told they were doing something morally good by helping make the case against prisons and advancing a certain version of social justice. One takeaway could be that social justice ideology can be used to perpetrate horrific things, as long as the ends appear to justify the means.
"Will participants refuse the instructions of the experiment administrator?" is a different question than "will participants naturally fall hard into their fictitious roles?", which was the ostensible goal.
Well... It's easier to nudge people into doing something than asking or demanding. They then think it was their own decision.
e.g. "It's important that you act naturally at all times and only within the limits of what you are comfortable with. For the purposes of the experiment you should also carefully consider your role as guard and what those duties might entail. Sometimes you may need to speak confidently in your role for people to listen to you."
Or some such thing. I am by no means a master of nudging but you get the point. You can ask a thing with out actually asking.
I think many people do this without even realising.
“What we want to do”, Zimbardo’s Warden told the Guard, “is be able to go to the world with what we’ve done and say “Now look, this is what happens when you have Guards who behave this way … But in order to say that we have to have Guards who behave that way.”
There's parallels to normalization, ie, cult indoctrination.. look at how Scientology enslaves people, takes their money and their dignity to feed the egos of Tom Cruise and Muscaviage.
This is yet more evidence of the reproducibility crisis and raises serious questions of the quality of peer review.
Clearly the system needs urgent reform, especially studies that present controversial or extraordinary findings.
For decades this study has been used in discussion 'as fact' and while there is no evidence it was used in formulating policy given policy drafters and makers frequently refer to research it is quite possible it was and that is a dangerous end result.
I would throw in a long term view here. Karl Poppers work on scientific epistemology created a big chunk of the modern, working scientific method.
His big concern was unfalsifiable theories. The two big targets he was aiming at were Marx & Freud. Marxism (also other political theories) became more philosphically oriented and stopped calling their theories scientific.
Psychology/psychiatry adopted more scientific methods of enquiry. Still, we have serious quality issues in the field(s).
I have two very rule-testy boys aged 6 and 8 and it would be fascinating to watch them wheel and deal for what they want if it weren't so GD frustrating at the same time.
My 8 year old is very much my way or the highway and will fight tooth and nail. The 6 year old, from dealing with his quick to fight older brother, is much more open to negotiation but very sly and manipulative.
I consider it karma realignment because they're exactly like I was as a child. My poor mother has asked me more than once ".. now do you understand?" Heh
8 or 9 is old enough to just talk about this behavior? "We fight about everything like such and such. What can we do instead of that? If we continue to fight, will our relationship get better or worse?"
A friend of mine in my UNSW class was in this experiment ( 1973/4), and he told me afterwards that he always knew he could leave at any time. Of course, other Psych departments ( especially Skinner ) did not like social Psych, to put it mildly, and visa versa.
We have research publishing requirements in academia these days, which puts quantity over quality of research. I think we should swap those with required replication studies of published results.
This article summarizes Zimbardo's response to them (Reicher et al) as:
> How has Zimbardo responded this time? [By reasserting that](http://www.prisonexp.org/response) 'none of these criticisms present any substantial evidence that alters the SPE’s conclusion'. And at the same time that he berates his critics (without engaging with their arguments), he reworks his story to now say that, yes, Guards were told to be tough, but not how to be tough. For Zimbardo, then, this is all just fake news. Except that it plainly isn’t.
Here is Zimbardo's response from that link:
> From the time of being recruited with national ads to be actors in a "university-backed social science experiment to be shown on TV," every participant knew their actions and voices (from lapel mics they had to wear always) would be seen and heard on national TV by family and colleagues. Any similarity to the intense build-up of emotional confrontations between SPE guards versus prisoners, 24/7, was diluted by the daily itinerary of the British research team (Alex Haslam and Stephen Reicher). These researchers frequently intervened, made regular public broadcasts into the prison facility, administered daily psychological assessments, arranged contests for the best prisoners to compete to become guards, and as in many “reality-TV” shows, created daily "confessionals" for participants to talk directly to the camera about their feelings. Ironically, the results of this show could be interpreted as further evidence of the “power of the situation,” although in this case the “situation” was that of reality-TV.
> Among the participants in this BBC-TV prison show, several of whom had contacted me afterwards, was Philip Bimpson, the ringleader of a prisoner rebellion against the hapless guards. He said, in part:
> > The prisoners won because they had organized themselves quicker than the guards; their subversive actions and organizational skills outwitted the guards who were disorganized in their new surroundings. They did not understand that they had to organize themselves and form a set of rules that they all agreed on… I think the group is being exploited by the BBC for commercial gain. Me and my new friends in the group joined the experiment for the furtherance of science & not to be used as a form of cheap entertainment." (Personal email communication, 26 Feb. 2002; supplemented by my subsequent visit in Glasgow, Oct. 10, 2004)
> I therefore reject the use of this “replication” as a scientifically valid challenge to results from the SPE (for a more detailed response to this criticism, please see my article in the British Journal of Social Psychology, 2007, Vol. 127.).
Though the experiment appears to have been rigged am I wrong when I say that Abu Ghraib, the torture sessions at Guantanamo and the CIA dark sites and Arizona's isolation units pretty much concur with the SPE results?
From wikipedia:
On August 20, 1971, Zimbardo announced the end of the experiment to the participants.
"... According to Zimbardo's interpretation of the SPE, it demonstrated that the simulated-prison situation , rather than individual personality traits, caused the participants' behavior. Using this situational attribution, the results are compatible with those of the Milgram experiment, where random participants complied with orders to administer seemingly dangerous and potentially lethal electric shocks to a shill.[21]..."
"... The experiment has also been used to illustrate cognitive dissonance theory and the power of authority...."
The experiment attempted to show what mechanisms cause abuse like Abu Ghraib to happen. The theory was that the power disparity in a prison in itself lead to abuse and not individual personality traits of the abusers. This apparently have not been proven. Other explanations are possible. For example that it was actually deliberate policy to abuse prisoners and that the guards sympathized with this policy.
As for the Nazi concentration camps it is important to realize that not everyone were treated equally bad. For example prisoners of war from USSR where treated much worse then prisoners from the western allies. This cannot be explained the Zimbardos theory, but can be explained by deliberate policy and Nazi ideology.
"...The abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the report says, “was not simply the result of a few soldiers acting on their own” but grew out of interrogation policies approved by Mr. Rumsfeld and other top officials, who “conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees.”..."
"...WASHINGTON — The American Psychological Association secretly collaborated with the administration of President George W. Bush to bolster a legal and ethical justification for the torture of prisoners swept up in the post-Sept. 11 war on terror, according to a new report by a group of dissident health professionals and human rights activists. ..."
The chants were directed at the Maricopa County sheriff, Joe Arpaio, who a few months before had called this outdoor jail close to downtown Phoenix – his own tough-on-crime creation – a “concentration camp” in a speech to political supporters at his local Italian-American club.
When asked about the comment by the Guardian in July, Arpaio brushed it off as a joke. “But even if it was a concentration camp, what difference does it make? I still survived. I still kept getting re-elected,” he said...."
The Stanford Prison experiment goes far beyond the replication crisis. It was a non scientific "experiment" with doctored results. The fact that it was actually taught in the academic field is unbelievable.
I'd argue the best way to root out doctored results is with replication of experiments. It's not just because there might be different segments of populations that might react differently and different approaches to doing the study, but also to protect against something more malicious.
There is no replication attempt necessary. It wasnt a scientific experiment, it was little more then a publicity stunt.
The topic itself is extremely important. If anyone is in the situation to make a study with consenting subjects in those circumstances, which is rather hypothetical, they should much rather stick to original research.
I do agree, the replication crisis is an important topic, but it assumes the studies in question have at least an academic standard. If they dont, and its not publicly acknowledged in the field but instead celebrated, its a failure of the field itself.
Social "experiments" with messy, squishy, meat-monkeys... GFL controlling conditions or repeating "experiments." It's not exactly science, more like philosophy.
Sometimes, I swear psychologists enjoy exploring the same areas of the mind as serial killers. hmm...
It's less about the blame game, more on the changed circumstances around the end results. When the experiment has become a standard and referenced within a field with purportedly incorrect or nonfactual information.
> This all changed recently when both video and audio tapes were deposited in Zimbardo’s online archive at Stanford University. It includes 994 items of which 49 are videos and 54 are sound recordings.
From my experience the issues with this study have been well known for a long time.
A first year Psychology paper I took over 10 years ago was at pains to point out the flaws in the study - not that this was unusual, a good lecturer will critically analyse any scientific study they present.
Perhaps it has more to do with the increasing popular appeal of the study?
Similarly, I was told very early on in my studies that Maslow's hierarchy of needs isn't actually supported by much evidence. And yet I still find it referenced everywhere.
Why do you ask? Do you think it's unusual to question something when new evidence comes to light? Seems entirely reasonable to share updated information on a very well known study.
Why was the evidence covered up for so long? What changed to have it come to the light? It's reasonable to reevaluate with new information, it's also worth questioning why there's new information
Agreed, but that wasn't what OP asked. It just seemed like an odd question given the headline explains that the reason this is being discussed is because there is new evidence available.
Little more, we're basically disagreeing on what the question asked was. How cynical do you have to be to assume the question asker didn't even read the headline?
I believe it’s a controversial topic seeing regular discussion. It’s in vogue to discuss it. I mean, name a freshman psych lecture that doesn’t mention it.
New information has surfaced, so people are going to have new material to add to the conversation.
It seems to me that the main point of the study is to demonstrate the plasticity of human morality. That people will adapt to different situations in ways that are surprising. People will become "bad people" if they are in a situation that rewards it, especially over time.
This is "situationism," as opposed to "dispositionism."
Even if the study is very flawed, and even if the implication that this shift can happen in the course of days rather than longer periods of time is not accurate, I think it is an important concept for people to take in, that can help in everything from crime and punishment, to the design of online forums with automated moderation (a.k.a. "karma systems") so they don't turn toxic, to understanding how voting systems can potentially polarize and divide people, and, extending that last point, to understanding what happens to people at Trump rallies.
I suspect a lot of the people who seem so eager to discredit the study have a bit of an agenda, in that the find the implications of the study so uncomfortable. They want to believe they'd be a good person even if in a situation where badness is consistently rewarded over long time periods.
>>I suspect a lot of the people who seem so eager to discredit the study have a bit of an agenda, in that the find the implications of the study so uncomfortable. They want to believe they'd be a good person even if in a situation where badness is consistently rewarded over long time periods.
People who have a need to "credit" the study also have an agenda. Science, or truth, doesn't care about what you think "feels right."
No. If the study was flawed, there is no real take away. Pretty much period.
Imagine if physics claimed it was ok that they couldn't predict the motion they were trying to describe, because they still had fancy equations. The entire point is the predictive point.
Now, if there are parts that are replicating, then good. We hopefully learned something. But if the study doesn't replicate, you are just pushing an agenda. Odd, as that is what you claim others are doing.
Correct. As a study stands flawed, there is no real takeaway.
However, a flawed study does not mean the original conclusion is false. Merely that the evidence the study provides for it cannot bolster it.
But now the study is part of the societal conversation, and this means the idea of moral plasticity is something on people's minds, especially in the context of the study.
This isn't the same thing as a rigorous study, but it does prove the point that many people /feel/ that moral plasticity /is/ a thing.
This is not rigorous, but in a way, it gives a weak confirmation of the relevance of the idea. Think of some alternatives: we aren't wondering if the study suggests people will become hyper moral when given the power to act harshly. Nobody talks about that.
It's possible that the notion of moral plasticity has taken hold in part because of this flawed experiment that set out to prove it. That people feel moral plasticity to be a thing in the wake of being systematically lied to the tune of "moral plasticity is a thing!" should not be taken as evidence of moral plasticity. That is at best circular reasoning.
Indeed, by that line of reasoning every religion should be thought to be true simultaneously, as their respective adherents feel them to be true.
The only confirmation I see here is that of squishies being over-eager to fit facts to convenient and familiar narratives.
There is a persistent story that there are "good" people and "bad" people, and that "good people" only do bad things under very extreme circumstances. Everyone wants to believe they would never do that, for various definitions of that. Only real monsters would do that.
There is plenty of evidence that this story is false, yet one sees it constantly.
I sorta agree. A flawed study says nothing about any conclusions. Neither for nor against.
Is it an interesting question? I think so. But right now I see no evidence that I trust one way or the other. Instead, I see a ton of posturing.
This is akin to picking a movie like Shawshank Redemption and claiming it proves something of human nature. No. It doesn't. I feel it helps me relate to and accept some behaviors. But it proves nothing. As it is fiction.
Agreed on that point. I am under the impression that the "well proven" part was under serious consideration now. But it should not be due to this study. Which should not be used to inform either side of the debate.
> Even if the study is very flawed, and even if the implication that this shift can happen in the course of days rather than longer periods of time is not accurate, I think it is an important concept for people to take in, that can help in everything from crime and punishment, to the design of online forums with automated moderation (a.k.a. "karma systems") so they don't turn toxic, to understanding how voting systems can potentially polarize and divide people, and, extending that last point, to understanding what happens to people at Trump rallies.
I find this line of thought interesting. In short, it reads to me "Despite this study being of no value whatsoever, the important thing is that we should walk away with the same conclusion".
To my mind, this has the feeling of a pre-ordained notion untroubled by any evidence or encounters with facts. Which is perhaps the very thing exposed here. Zimbardo set out to tell a story, did so, and trumpeted his success is doing so as proof of some deep truth.
All I see here is proof of how eager we are to fit facts to convenient narratives, instead of hypotheses to facts (to bastardize Doyle).
I'm not suggesting we should rely on the study to prove moral plasticity. I'm suggesting that evidence of moral plasticity is all around us, and it is a shame that the flaws of this one study (that has become associated with it in the public consciousness) seem to be used to refute moral plasticity.
It would be great if there was another study, that maybe took a very different approach that wasn't so likely to have huge ethical problems.
Honestly I'd think that companies like facebook and twitter and quora and the like could study the concept pretty easily, but I'm sure people would complain about the ethics of that as well.
> I'm not suggesting we should rely on the study to prove moral plasticity. I'm suggesting that evidence of moral plasticity is all around us, and it is a shame that the flaws of this one study (that has become associated with it in the public consciousness) seem to be used to refute moral plasticity.
You're absolutely, completely, 100% right. It's an utter travesty that the flaws of this study are used to refute the notion of moral plasticity.
With that said, is it perhaps possible that we see moral plasticity everywhere because we have been taught that it is a thing we can expect to see everywhere? We may be caught in a self-fulfilling prophecy. On the basis of a single flawed study, we know exactly nothing except that Zimbardo was dishonest.
Wiser heads than mine might be well-advised to throw out any notions on the subject whatsoever and begin anew.
No matter what evidence is brought against it, the Stanford Prison Experiment is going to continue to be part of the psych 101 curriculum. It's going to be taught as a revealing experiment about human nature, or an example of poor experimental ethics, or both at the same time.
It's just so deeply ingrained in the way the subject is taught that it's going to stay there even if the conclusions are phony.
One day I was made the name taker while the teacher was out. Most kids stayed quiet, but two other segments emerged: the scycophants and the outlaws.
The sycophants would attempt to "help" me identify noise makers by pointing them out. In exchange they would hope to be safe from the list, and would use that immunity/privilege to lord over other kids.
The outlaws were kids who, once they were added to the list, talked and joked freely, knowing that they were doomed anyway. They felt they were fearless, and they goaded others to join them.
I've always remembered this experience, for how quickly a group of children organized themselves into social dynamics that echoed human systems more generally.