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Was the Stanford Prison Experiment a Sham? (nypost.com)
Frosty Piss writes: The Stanford Prison Experiment was conducted in 1971 by psychology professor Philip Zimbardo using college students to investigate the psychological effects of perceived power by focusing on the struggle between prisoners and prison officers. In the study, volunteers were randomly assigned to be either "guards" or "prisoners" in a mock prison, with Zimbardo serving as the superintendent. The results seemed to show that the students quickly embraced their assigned roles, with some guards enforcing authoritarian measures and ultimately subjecting some prisoners to psychological torture, while many of the prisoners passively accepted psychological abuse and, by the officers' request, actively harassed other prisoners who tried to stop it. After Berkeley graduate Douglas Korpi appeared to have a nervous breakdown while playing the role of an inmate, the experiment was shut down. There's just one problem: Korpi's breakdown was a sham. Dr. Ben Blum took to Medium to publish his claims. "Blum's expose -- based on previously unpublished recordings of Zimbardo, a Stanford psychology professor, and interviews with the participants -- offers evidence that the 'guards' were coached to be cruel," reports New York Post. "One of the men who acted as an inmate told Blum he enjoyed the experiment because he knew the guards couldn't actually hurt him."
"There were no repercussions. We knew [the guards] couldn't hurt us, they couldn't hit us. They were white college kids just like us, so it was a very safe situation," said Douglas Korpi, who was 22-years-old when he acted as an inmate in the study. The Berkeley grad now admits the whole thing was fake. Zimbardo also "admitted that he was an active participant in the study, meaning he had influence over the results," reports New York Post. According to an audio recording from the Stanford archive, you can hear Zimbardo encouraging the guards to act "tough."
"There were no repercussions. We knew [the guards] couldn't hurt us, they couldn't hit us. They were white college kids just like us, so it was a very safe situation," said Douglas Korpi, who was 22-years-old when he acted as an inmate in the study. The Berkeley grad now admits the whole thing was fake. Zimbardo also "admitted that he was an active participant in the study, meaning he had influence over the results," reports New York Post. According to an audio recording from the Stanford archive, you can hear Zimbardo encouraging the guards to act "tough."
While I agree that people need to be aware of how easily they can be manipulated and coerced, at least in the short-term, into doing things in the not-too-distant-future that are against their values now, bad science is bad science and should be exposed and retracted as soon as possible.
There are other, more subtle studies that show how people can be influenced by grooming, contextual cues, peer-influence, etc.. The CIA spent decades trying to "deprogram", AKA "brainwash", people without success (Their experiments were not ethical or legal). Additionally, there's a lot of research on the influence of mass media on public values and sentiments; effects can be strong but are usually short-lived and need intensive reinforcement. How values emerge and change in societies is still a complex subject and it's difficult to manipulate in targeted ways.
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
This so called "study" is BS! You want to see the real deal? Check out the USAF Survival School at Fairchild AFB WA, and talk to anyone that has been through it. There were ~30 others in the group when I attended, and at the end of the POW course there was not a dry eye among us when they raised the American Flag signifying the end of the POW experience. Every single one of us was convinced we were in a real POW camp and would never see home again. It lasted less than 48 hours, and was the most intense experience of my life.
Here's the site: http://www.fairchild.af.mil/About/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/238992/us-air-force-survival-school/
And this is how they currently describe it : "Finally, students are returned to Fairchild and receive Code of Conduct training in evasion and conduct after capture".
A subtle way to describe an experience that drove me to attempt to kill the guards, and others to collaborate with the enemy. One guy was even guarding the rest of the prisoners with a (unloaded) gun, he had a massive breakdown at the end of the camp when he realized what he had done. I never saw him again. Talk to any alumnus, don't take my word.
It's also possible that this is precisely why there is an attempt to discredit this experiment now - because the far right have risen in recent years and are desperately trying to re-write history and discredit all the evidence that far right politics has never been anything but an utter catastrophe for the world.
The powers behind the resurgent far right, such as Bannon, backed by Russia in an attempt to destabilise the West have been quite open in stating that the only way you can change politics is by changing culture, and that's exactly what him and his kin have set out to, and are doing - by erasing evidence of all the bad things that have happened under his chosen political ideology he aims to turn culture in the hope that we[ll repeat the mistakes of the past, with only people like him being the winners from it as him and his ilk become the grand dictators and democracy fizzles out, at least until the natural order of the world inevitably results in the fight back.
Ideally though, we'd just not have to go through that again, and tell the Bannons, Trumps, Putins, and Farages of the world to go fuck themselves because we don't want what they're selling because it's a massive detriment to humanity on every level.
Except this really isn't bad science. Just some of the details of the experimental environment were omitted. There's no difference between what they're saying the professor did and what they did in the Milgram experiment, or any other similar experiment that showed a good percentage of people willingly engaging in horrible acts because of social pressure.
However, because of the omission, it doesn't quite show what is often claimed — that power inherently corrupts — but rather that people who are not used to power, who are given power, and who are then encouraged to abuse it, tend to do so. It's a subtle distinction, though, and largely empty when you really think about it, because in practice, there will always be someone or something encouraging people with power to abuse it. Expecting otherwise borders on pure fantasy.
More to the point, we've essentially seen this experiment reproduced in actual prisons without an experimenting professor encouraging the guards to be abusive. The results have still often been appalling.
So the burden of proof falls on the people making the accusation here to prove that the interference resulted in an invalid experiment from which nothing can be learned. I'm not convinced that this is the case. I'm also not convinced that it would be ethical to attempt to replicate the results, unfortunately, which makes it nontrivial to prove or disprove any such argument either way. Perhaps a similar experiment could be devised that involves an environment less extreme than prison. *shrugs*
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I have no doubt there were sincere tears at the flag raising, however I have heard from another graduate of SERE training (Navy/Marine, 5 day course?, non-aircrew, high risk ground combat roles) that knowing the time limit helped him endure the physical and psychological pain. In particular being "boxed" (12hr? 24hr? not sure, I don't accurately recall). Bent at the knees and waist so as to be in a compact fetal like position and then sealed in a wooden box barely large enough to fit into. Locked into that position, unable to move, having to endure cramps but the psychological fear being even worse. He was not sure how he could have endured being "boxed" without knowing and counting down in his mind to the time limit.
SERE training is mentally and physically painful, none of us civilians can understand it as graduates do. However everyone there knows it is training, at least subconsciously if their mind gets muddled and they get deep into the role playing. Its invaluable training. But as civilians cannot truly understand SERE training, SERE school graduates cannot truly understand being actually captured and actually tortured. SERE is not the real thing, physically nor mentally, and everyone knows it down deep, even if temporarily muddled. SERE gives you the tools to work from should you one day really become a real captive, not unlike infantry training gives you the tools to work from should you one day really find yourself in combat. But training is only training and everyone knows it down deep.
I appreciate your 2 day SERE training perspective. However as a teenager I read Everett Alvarez Jr's book on his 8+ year POW experience. LTJG Alvarez was literally shot down at the very start of the war, at the Gulf of Tonkin. He and his peers could end up in single torture sessions that lasted most of or longer than your entire SERE course and they had the full and complete knowledge that it was real and no time limit existed. I'm sorry, but your training lacked the latter, even if your conscious became befuddled, down deep you knew it. If you had mentally broken so deep you did not you would probably have been removed and not seen again as the guard you mentioned. If you did temporarily loose it and genuinely try to kill a guard they must have mistaken it for a "normal" assault, if your attempt had been recognized as such its hard to imagine you not failing the course.
I am sorry but even SERE training, like the university imprisonment studies, is "unrealistic" in the sense that participants know its not "real". And again I am basing this on a SERE graduate who was "boxed" for 12-24 (?) hours during a 5 (?) day course. And again, I fully recognize that despite not being "real" SERE training is realistic in its limited sense (abuse levels and time) and that the physical and mental pain and stress is quite real and that graduates of SERE training deserve to be highly regarded.
Any study that actually removed the barriers between the guards and the inmates would be inherently immoral.
Which raises some interesting questions about advancing certain areas of medicine and science.
Vaccines are one example that immediately springs to mind. There are anti-vaxxers who are against the combined MMR vaccine. Supposing that someone wanted to go about studying that in a clinical trial, how would it be done morally? A typical medical clinical trial would involve a control group and one or more experimental groups. To preserve the integrity of the study, the recipients cannot feasibly know to which group they belong. Additionally, MMR is a childhood vaccine, so the parents would have to make the decision to participate on behalf of the child. Would our society tolerate a study where the parents voluntarily subject their children to a possibility of unknowingly what is essentially a required vaccine (required for the health of the individual child as well as the public health in general).
Another area might be studies of pain tolerance. It might be a bit different because that would be one where the participant makes a decision for himself or herself, but it would still be questionable.
Yet another is designer drugs which seem to be gaining popularity. I do not recall the specifics, but there was a recent case of a BioTech company founder that injected himself with some untested drug or some such that he had developed. As I recall, he died not long after. However, would his results have been considered valid if he had succeeded? I believe it is considered highly questionable from a medical ethics standpoint to experiment on yourself or someone to whom you are closely related.
There is a reason why experiments carried out at Nazi concentration camps advanced medical knowledge in ways that are simply not possible when morality and life are respected in a manner to which we in modern society have become accustomed.