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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 "Blum's expose -- based on previously unpublished recordings of Zimbardo, a Stanford psychology professor, and interviews with the participants -- offers evidence that the 'guards' were coached to be cruel,"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."
Has the study been replicated? Have the conclusions been replicated? Looks like a small British study about 15 years ago did; it brought the Stanford experiment results into question, perhaps.
Can someone with more background than mine explain what larges implications this could have for psychology, other than the fact that people are supposed to be corrupted by power and have a bias toward tyranny/oppression, and that prisoners begin to "like" the guards (I believe that was this study)?
Thanks!
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There is a difference between saying it is a sham vs. saying the results weren't true. We can look at Nazi Germany and say with a fair amount of confidence that it was saying something that was true but using results that were falsified to get the result expected. What people will interpret this as saying is that the results themselves were false. Unfortunately (or fortunately) any actual study that could provide a realistic set of evidence on this topic would be considered immoral at this point, so there will be no further data to show that the results could actually be true. Given today's worldwide political climate, I think we need all the reinforcement we can get that good people will do bad things in the right situations and given the right reinforcement. Having this exposed as a fraud now will not help this.
That's not racism, it's a recognition that "tribal" similarities -- skin color and social situation among them -- tend to discourage gratuitous violence against members of the in-group.
The participants acted towards expected behaviors to reinforce the study's foregone conclusion at the coaching of Zimbardo.
It wasn't a scientific study.
You can read about it here. https://www.psychologytoday.co...
One thing I've come to realize is that all of the following should be eliminated from the human race:
* Psychologists
* Religious Leaders
* Lawyers
* Managers
* Executives
* Politicians
* (anyone who claims to have the "Magic Formula" for controlling/leading people)
Excuse me, how much for the rights to all the irony in your post?
Think about how much people don't want to believe bad things and how some will go amazing extents... cognitive dissonance is strong stuff.
Nitpicking a past study which nobody has the guts to attempt to properly recreate (or improve upon.) Many real actual atrocities which rhyme with the experiment is all we need to realize that environmental conditions GREATLY influence human behavior.
There is a mountain of science backing the whole concept and even if you debunk just 1 famous example you accomplish nothing except to give all the deniers something to cling onto to perpetuate similar conditions from which future atrocities are born.
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Times haven't changed at all. People's ability to tell the truth without facing left-wing social repercussions has.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Social experiments are difficult to perform with scientific rigor because they use people. It is generally either impossible or impractical to isolate people from outside influences and from unknown issues that bias the experiment. And thus it's difficult to prove anything. For this reason, physical scientists look down upon social science as "soft science".
Bruce Perens.
I'd say the idea of the experiment wasn't a sham but Dr Zimbardo chose wrong specimens as participants. To young, to be specific. People at college age are not yet fully developed emotionally. I am no expert, just a common man, but during my journey through the educational system I noticed that the younger a person, the more he or she is driven by primal instincts. That's why it's statistically more common for young males to pick up fights or bully one another due. Fighting for dominance, territory and position. Factors which become less important to us as we get older. In my opinion, what we saw in the Standord Prison Experiment is that some of participants, who were placed in an environment where they would suffer no consequences of their primitive behaviour, begun to display those harmful behaviours more prominently than others. Eventually, showing violence became a new measure of position in a group and then everything spiralled out of control. But again, this is only my personal opinion on the matter.
There have been doubts about the validity of the Stanford Prison Experiment since the very beginning, and the weight has probably been on the side of the doubters for years now. The same for the famous MIlgram experiment. Those early experiments are famous because everybody learns about them in Psych 101, but they are so far from meeting modern standards of research quality anyone citing them today, except to question the results, would face serious peer review backlash.
I once saw a tape of Zimbardo telling an anecdote of one of his colleagues dropping by the experiment. Zimbardo showed him around and told him what was going on, but the colleague seemed confused. "What is your null hypothesis?" the colleague asked. The crowd Zimbardo was regaling laughed at that as if it were a silly, obtuse question. Actually it was a very good question, and it points to the reason that the Stanford Prison Experiment will likely never be replicated in its original form. Without a null hypothesis, you have no basis for systematically eliminating experimenter bias.
In a modern experiment -- presuming you could get ethical clearance -- your null hypothesis would be that guards do *not* spontaneously exhibit cruel and dehumanizing behavior; you would then carefully remove any hint of encouragement for them to do so. By just throwing them into a situation and seeing what happens, you don't know whether or not what you are seeing is a result of something you unconsciously made them do.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Bad people tend to become cops or criminals (or DMV employees). The rest of us just try to survive with varying degrees of selfishness and empathy. Where I live now almost no one has empathy for anyone who isn't a family member and often not even then. After living in such an environment for a few years I have become used to it and I try my best to reduce my empathy for them as well. It depends a lot on the culture/country surprisingly. In some places people are really nice to each other. In others not so much. Of course if you have never left your home country except for short vacations you may not realize this.
Some people really enjoy hurting other people to a degree that is almost sexual (law enforcement particularly in the US). Others just don't care if they hurt other people. Some people, often female people, have very strong feelings of empathy toward others. Having seen mean but ultimately cowardly bullies grow up to be cops in the US I can sense those kinds of souls just by looking at them for a few minutes. It is just so clear that they are mean and stupid and sadistic and will never be anything else. It is written all over their pig-faces. Everything that they are is all about that: hurting and controlling and dominating others. I really think they were born that way and will die that way. That is why I never fully trusted the results of this experiment. It just didn't reflect what I have observed of human behavior over many years. Yes many humans are bad people but we are not interchangeable. Some people are born to be guards and torturers. Others can only ever be a prisoner and could not accept the other role at all.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
What would be an interesting experiment is to have the same set up of prisoners and guards, but have all the prisoners and one of the guards in on the experiment. The one guard treats the prisoners exceptionally cruel and against the stated rules of the experiment. How would the other guards (the actual participants in the study) respond? Do they identify with and try to copy or protect someone who is nominally their peer, or will they try to protect the prisoners?
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
I keep forgetting that people still take the Stanford Prison Experiment seriously. It has been known for a long time that the actual events did not live up to the pop-culture image of them.
In 1971, official racism was mostly illegal, but yes, there was definitely racial tension. Kids very much tended to hang out with their own racial group. It shouldn't surprise anyone that people at that time were aware of race.
This was ten years before Barak Obama was in college and, according to his autobiography, carefully avoiding being seen with white friends. Instead he made sure to be seen with "the more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists."
Is that a threat ? Is that what Slashdot is now ?
5 out of 6 people enjoy Russian Roulette & 6 out of 7 Dwarfs are not Happy
Ok so let's say I'm a white guard. The black guy is behaving himself and the white guy isn't. You think I'm not going to go tune on the white guy just because he's white? Or that I'm going to hurt the black guy just because he's black?
FFS that is some messed up logic. No doubt some people would think that way, but that in no way is universal. Anyone with a shred of decency would only punish where it's deserved.
You need to study history a lot more.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
In other words: some people will commit atrocities in the name of some nebulous 'Greater Good'
We all should know how bad science reporting is. This is the kind of thing that needs to prompt corrections quietly without the science reporters talking about it because they will greatly amplify the damage as now the masses who hear this dispel the whole topic as a fraud... further distorting the "science reporting."
Furthermore, the biases created in the study do undermine it's conclusions to a degree; some of the critique implies one would have to secretly study a real world situation where bad things actually happen for real --- and remove all the protections created to avoid such things. Almost nobody is going to ever do that and creating a simulated situation is already nearly impossible to be allowed for an experiment.
Finally, the bigger points that the study STILL makes is how it turned out -- bad behaviors still were produced and so what if a drama queen caused it to end early? The study always had to be taken with a grain of salt because it was a simulated environment and all the people knew it and no matter how good you make it, they will know it until they get fed up and are unable to quit early (which would be a legal problem if you didn't allow them to say the safe word.) If you poke up people to act badly and they do... remember Milgram's experiment? This wasn't that... but because it went more in that direction doesn't make it completely worthless. Welcome to politics... sometimes the famous example needs to be left alone; yes, for the greater good. No, that is not an absolutism sometimes it actually is good policy and other times it's just an excuse which is why politics is HARD. Psychologists need to know more; the ignorant public can remain ignorant on this one; no, not censorship just don't advertise it... the ignorant masses have many more things they need to learn that are more important than celebrity / reality TV gossip.
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psychology has fads and trends, it's a "soft science"...and all of it could be a sham
There was no Control, in the experimental sense.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Wasn't Abu Grahib a real-life demonstration of the "Lucifer Effect"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The specific criticisms voiced there are quite known. I'm basing this on my psychology class and the book Zimbardo wrote about it. He freely admits in the appendix that one of the mistakes he made was to interfere with the experiment actively (he took the role of the "prison warden") instead of standing aside as a neutral observer.
And one of the findings of the experiment was precisely that despite "guards" were forbidden to physically assault "prisoners", they anyway found ways to torture them psychologically. And "prisoners", despite knowing about this rule, did not always feel safe.
Every experiment has critics, and that is a good thing. Don't treat science the same way you treat B-star gossip stories. Few experiments are perfect, and criticism is a good way to figure out better ways of doing them.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
**ALL** 'studies' using college kids as the base are a sham unless it's specifically designed to test things impacting college kids. Even then, as the kid said "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,"
It's not like they check out their brains at the door and forget it's a friggin' experiment (unless the focus is on Social Studies types).
What a friggin' pedantic SJW. The "human race" is a long-term and very well know phrase. Where you been all your life?
They knew the nature of the situation then. They were all *informed* it was a play up front and how their roles were to be displayed. It was not a test. It was a production.
The entire setup was so obviously not "real world" that no one could *possibly* think they were assuming real roles, meaning there could be no natural behavior to study. Those college kids suddenly believed they were *really* prisoners and guards? Bullshit. Not even Social Science majors are that clueless.
You neglected to mention that the abusers weren't allowed to actually, you know, *abuse* their 'charges'. It was all a scripted play. It shows nothing about people's real behavior and shouldn't convince you it does unless you're one of those that think playing GTA makes you a cold blooded killer.
I really love the new seasonal definition of racism! It's so hip!
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
You misunderstood what I said, I used "breaking" in the context the original author used it. A complete mental breakdown, failure to recognize one is in training and to delusionally believe one is a real captive in a real enemy's hands, trying to actual kill a guard, etc. That would be a failure.
The "breaking" you refer to is something different, it is the breaking of the will. It is the breaking of the will that leads to cooperation, confessions, revealing information, etc. And yes this breaking of the will is something normal, everyone has a different breaking point. Again SERE is an opportunity to give you tools to help you resist for a longer duration, until your information becomes stale, and to help you avoid having that complete mental breakdown even if your will has been broken.
Also some forms of cooperation are/were considered appropriate at times. I previously mentioned Everett Alvarez Jr's 8+ year POW experience. In his book there was an interesting difference between the "old" POWs and the "new" POWs. The "new" POWs seemed more willing to cooperate, to go on radio and TV to read the captor's statement for example. Some of the "old" POWs had endured weeks of torture before breaking to that point (yet one still resisted by blinking TORTURE in morse code during a TV interview), the "new" POWs were cooperating almost immediately and the "old" POWs were pissed. Eventually they learned that SERE training had changed, the "new" POWs were told to cooperate with the radio and TV statements so that the US military would know they were alive and taken prisoner. The military feared not all captures were being reported, they told trainees to cooperate, that everyone knows the words are forced and are lies, just let us know they have you. I think some of the Gulf War videos from 1991 were similarly motivated to let the US and UK military know their pilots were alive.
Another interesting bit of cooperation from Alvarez's book was an enlisted sailor who "fell" off his ship when in North Vietnamese waters. The NV thought this ordinary seaman must be an idiot to "fall" of the ship. The POWs used that. The ranking POW officers ordered him to cooperate and to accept an early release to the US. Secretly they had the seaman memorize hundreds of names of POWs. Everyone any POW could remember encountering. This ordinary seaman did so and complete his mission by delivering the names off all known POWs. This was critical during later peace negotiation and likely saved lives.
The Navy runs a POW camp for training. Every aviator has to go through it in case they have an un-scheduled landing someplace. They can and they do hit you hard enough you see stars. Sleep deprivation, etc. They are all corps men and you'll be ok. Never the less, it's hell. Put a bunch of those college kids in there for a while. Sign their life away first of course so they can't sue. Then let's see what happens.
Oh look... Someone doesn't agree with reality, choosing to downmod it instead, like a little bitch.
What ever do we do about it? I know! How about repeating what was said?
It's not like there's a shortage of copy/paste?
But the way the experiment was manipulated makes it inadvertently join a large body of evidence supporting a different hypothesis - that people can be manipulated by authority figures into doing things they normally would consider immoral.
Your claim is the equivalent of saying that a staged case of rape, despite being proven fake, "proves" that women are teasing sluts who cause rapes by dressing like sluts.
I.e. Disregarding proof that there's no scientific merit to the "experiment" and choosing instead to view it as a valid proof of a foregone conclusion based on personal bias.
Also, it's not about pleasing authority figures. Nor being manipulated by said figures. You'll find no valid studies supporting that.
It's about people being pushed and badgered. And not even by "authority figures".
It's just about people being pushed and badgered into doing something by a person doing the pushing.
That's why PEER pressure works.
In fact, given familiarity with the "authority figure", most people will start feeling superiority over said "authority figure", distrust towards it and will start to act out in rebellion when ordered to follow the rules.
Hint: Consider the general public opinion of bosses, politicians, police, doctors (those know-nothings), teachers they had in school, their own parents...
That's why soldiers have to be conditioned to follow orders. They don't just start obeying the uniform in the room.
They have to go through grueling, personality breaking, physical and psychological torture-course until it is drilled into them to conform to the group and obey orders - or face punishment.
That's why they all come out singing praises to their "band of brothers". They were conditioned through shared abuse into bonding with the group.
It's just that Zimbardo and Milgram were biased against exactly that kind of authority - so they decided to stage a costumed play with lab coats and prison uniforms to "prove" their point.
In both cases concentrating on supposed proof that manipulation by authority figures works, making people ignore their own moral beliefs.
While ignoring the necessary level of badgering and emotional breakdowns of those who were being pushed, in order to achieve that.
"The guards have to know that every guard is going to be what we call a tough guard," Jaffe told one such guard [skip to 8:35].
"[H]opefully what will come out of this study is some very serious recommendations for reform... so that we can get on the media and into the press with it, and say 'Now look at what this is really about....
[T]ry and react as you picture the pigs reacting."
Now there's just evidence that Zimbardo was doing MORE faking than it was previously known.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens