Was the Stanford Prison Experiment a Sham? (nypost.com) 136
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 "Blum's expose -- based on previously unpublished recordings of Zimbardo, a Stanford psychology professor, and interviews with the participants -- offers evidence that the 'guards' were coached to be cruel,"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."
Science: Is it replicable? (Score:5, Informative)
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!
Re:Science: Is it replicable? (Score:5, Informative)
Any study that actually removed the barriers between the guards and the inmates would be inherently immoral. No study that is done "properly" would be allowed. by any respectable institution.
Re:Science: Is it replicable? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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.
Replying to myself here.
As I thought about this some more, I realized that I left out the experiments by the US government at Tuskegee (infecting servicemen with Syphilis, as I recall), and the CIA experiments with LSD.
Come to think of it, there are enough examples out there of people in authority of some sort brutalizing other human beings for "good reasons" that it does not really seem to matter whether the Stanford Prison Experiment was a sham or not. No matter how you slice it, there are plen
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Medical studies do not, as a rule, have a control group consisting of people who are not treated at all. That, in most cases would be morally impossible.
It would also not be that useful.
When a new treatment is developed, the question to answer is not "is it better than no treatment" but "is it better than the current treatment". For this reason, the control group consists off people being treated with the current best treatment and their outcomes are compared with people getting the new treatment.
As for an
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This is actually one of the easier ones. The MMR vaccine is a combined vaccine for measles, mumps, and rubella. The only reason that it is used is because it is more convenient than getting each vaccine separately. Antivaccers are against it because they believe that it is a contributing cause of autism. Many peer reviewed studies deny this claim, but I can understand the motivation of parents.
I must say I understand because a family friend had a child that seemed perfectly normal when they were young and e
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Actually, it IS possible to remove the barriers. You need to plant ringers in both the guard and prisoner group. Then you can have your 'ringer' guard assault the 'ringer' prisoner. That will appear to break the barriers and get you into territory that is not allowed.
Not sure how you keep a lid on the situation from there, but you certainly can make it as real as you want - even down to having only ONE real test subject among 20 guards/prisoners.
Would be a pretty sick study, and could cause some emotiona
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Re:Science: Is it replicable? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Science: Is it replicable? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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
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Has the study been replicated? Have the conclusions been replicated?
An alarming percentage of studies in psychology can not be replicated:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#In_psychology
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Has the study been replicated? Have the conclusions been replicated?
Sort of. WW2 Germany was a good example of how normal regular people changed their behaviour to an inhumane level based on not much more than political inference. Donald Trump (yeah yeah I know) is actually having a similar effect where suddenly it's ok to dehumanise other people as long as they belong to a different social or ethnic group. I can't recall any other Western leader post WW2 promoting such despicable behaviour.
So yeah, I'll probably get modded troll for this, but the pattern of regular people
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Dude, that didn't start with Trump, nor are those on that side of the fence the greatest utilizers of that technique.
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Dude, that didn't start with Trump...
Didn't say it did. But he's taking in that direction a lot stronger than any previous western leader since WW2. We need to be vigilant as anyone who knows history knows this direction never ends well.
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Has the study been replicated? Have the conclusions been replicated?
I'm replying because this was addressed quite well even in an introductory psychology course I took (I took others, but this particular example was brought up in the introductory course), and I'm surprised nobody made this same reply yet. ebrandsberg hinted at it, but did not go into detail.
The Stanford Prison Experiment is usually brought up partially because the subject and conclusion were interesting. But moreso because the methodology of the experiment is considered to have been highly unethical. It
Re:Science: Is it replicable? (Score:4, Informative)
Sadly, in psychology, it goes further than poorly designed studies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Honestly a bad time to reveal this (Score:2, Insightful)
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 ther
Re:Honestly a bad time to reveal this (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Honestly a bad time to reveal this (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [wikipedia.org].
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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That jailers can be cruel is no revelation. What was ostensibly being tested was to find whether or not jailers are self-selecting, i.e. if sadists intentionally apply for jobs as prison guards, because they want a position of power that lets them mistreat others; or, if becoming a jailer inherently causes one to become abusive.
This case is different from the Milgram experiment in that in this case, actors were being told to act, then their acting was put forth as headline evidence. The jailers knew they we
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>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.
I'm not sure it really shows that either. As others in the thread point out, the fact that everyone involved knew it was fake makes the whole thing more of a role-playing exercise. It's unclear whether how/whether observed behavior under those conditions relates to 'actual behavior.'
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Doctorate: (n) An academic degree, confers that the receiver is qualified to doctor data.
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The part about people willing to do questionable and immoral things to please an authority figure, things that they normally would never even consider doing on their own, is real and has been replicated in many different experiments (many of which are banned today for being unethical).
So this experiment is discredited in its support of the hypothesis it was trying to prove. But the way the experiment was manipulated mak
No it does not. (Score:1)
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 an
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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 proo
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What make you think it would get through their skulls? It didn't get through Hillary's skull, she's not _that_ much stupider.
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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.
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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.
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Times haven't changed at all. People's ability to tell the truth without facing left-wing social repercussions has.
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"People's ability to say racist shit without facing left-wing social repercussions has."
Fixed to say what you really meant.
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I really love the new seasonal definition of racism! It's so hip!
Acknowledgement that racism was common in 1971 (Score:2)
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
Yes - It was a Sham (Score:5, Informative)
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... [psychologytoday.com]
Then so was the holocaust! (Score:2, Insightful)
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
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Oh, I RTFA (Score:2)
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 ac
Re:Then so was the holocaust! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Um...let me try different words. The reason nobody has the "guts" to recreate this experiment, or use it as a foundation are as follows:
https://www.psychologytoday.co... [psychologytoday.com]
1. The study was fake.
2. The control group was fake.
3. The students were paid actors.
4. They were COACHED on expected behavior during the study.
5. The paid actors then:
-Psychologically abused the inmates as they were coached and encouraged to do.
-Rebelled / Rioted as the news told them prisoners do.
After 6 days, the "game" wasn't fun for the prisoners anymore, they were tired of the psychological abuse, and Zimbardo ended the study, claiming to have proven something.
All he proved is that 18-22 year old psychology students getting paid $15 a day in 1970 will do what they're told to do. At least for 6 days.
Re:Then so was the holocaust! (Score:4, Insightful)
After 6 days, the "game" wasn't fun for the prisoners anymore, they were tired of the psychological abuse, and Zimbardo ended the study, claiming to have proven something.
All he proved is that 18-22 year old psychology students getting paid $15 a day in 1970 will do what they're told to do. At least for 6 days.
Seems to me that you are being deliberately obtuse about busdriver's point. The exact minutia of what levers you can use to get normal "good" people to do horrific things are still debated (which is good). But the basic point that most lay folks derive from the story of the experiment is that "good" people (ie people like them) can be manipulated into doing pretty nasty things. The reason people thought it was so important to make this point was obviously the events in Germany and Japan during WWII.
You are nitpicking about the exact nature of the levers when the lesson that most people will take from this is that "good" people can't be manipulated into doing acts against their current values. That is inherently dangerous, especially right now. Not to mention that even the reproduction you linked to doesn't really invalidate Zimbardo, it says that he was (very very) sloppy about controlling for which levers he was pulling.
"I am startled by the ease with which I could turn off my sensitivity and concern for others for ‘a good cause." seems to say that the basic thing that Zimbardo was trying to prove was true. That is that good people can be manipulated into doing things against their values. Another experiment that shows this basic point is the Milgram experiment [wikipedia.org]. The only differences is what the exact levels you need to pull to get the desired bad behavior. That Zimbardo's work does little to tell us exactly what those levers are doesn't invalidate the basic point that most people take from the story.
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I think you're deriving the wrong conclusion because your assumptions are wrong.
The Miligram experiment makes my point. 65% of the participants preformed the nasty deed. 35% refused. The prevailing theory is that those 65% caved in to authority and were only evil because they were 'influenced' to be.
My theory is that the number of 'evil' people, 65%, reflects the number of people in the real world who will not do the right thing. They aren't 'good people like you or me' they are the proof that humanity cons
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I think you're deriving the wrong conclusion because your assumptions are wrong.
The Miligram experiment makes my point. 65% of the participants preformed the nasty deed. 35% refused. The prevailing theory is that those 65% caved in to authority and were only evil because they were 'influenced' to be.
My theory is that the number of 'evil' people, 65%, reflects the number of people in the real world who will not do the right thing. They aren't 'good people like you or me' they are the proof that humanity consists overwhelmingly of more or less horrible people.
So in any country where evil people come into positions of leadership can count on 65% of the populous supporting them because they more or less agree with the actions of the leadership and 35% make up the resistance and a good portion of the victims.
Not a popular conclusion, but one I think history supports pretty well.
No, the Miligram experiment would seem to say that 65% of people can be made to do the "nasty deed" using the lever of authority. I would bet that the other 35% would respond to some other lever(s) (but there is no evidence of this either way in these 2 experiments). And this is really the crux of what I'm discussing, that YES YOU TOO can be manipulated into doing things against your value (me too). This is the lesson I have always taken from these experiments and I imagine that most people who don't know a
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"All he proved is that 18-22 year old psychology students getting paid $15 a day in 1970 will do what they're told to do. At least for 6 days"
The multiple strip search phone call scams proved that it's not hard to find people who'll do very questionable things when told by an authority figure *EVEN ONE THEY DON'T KNOW AND CAN'T SEE"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
"On November 30, 2000, a female McDonald's manager in Leitchfield, Kentucky, undressed herself in the presence of a customer. The caller had conv
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6. Zimbardo assumed the role of "warden", thereby putting himself into the study of which he was supposed to be an outside observer.
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It's an interesting thought experiment, like Maslow's hierarchy of needs, even if it's bullshit. One can consider "what would I do if I were a guard and my superiors looked the other way?"
there are probably better experiments that show what people are in the dark, though.
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Re:This does not invalidate the results (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re: This does not invalidate the results (Score:2)
Social experiments with scientific rigor? (Score:3)
Re:Social experiments with scientific rigor? (Score:4, Insightful)
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".
Social experiments are difficult to perform with scientific rigor because they are rarely conducted by scientists, let alone scientists using the scientific method.
Take the landmark Zimbardo study here. This study came about because of the ongoing prison riots - He coached the guards on how to behave and mistreat the prisoners before the experiment started, "reinforcing" the expected behavior. The "prisoners" behaved as they thought they were expected to behave, based on what they saw on the news: Prison riots.
Imagine if Zimbardo had coached the guards differently: We're testing to see if prison guards can treat prisoners gently and humanely.
That study would have ended reinforcing his message. All of these were 18-22 year old kids, doing as they were told, behaving in accordance with the expectations laid out for them in this fake science.
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That's why you use spherical people, in a vacuum [wikipedia.org]. If they are spherical before or only after the vacuum exposure, is left as an exercise to the reader.
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Wrong specimens (Score:1)
so there really are good and bad people after all (Score:2)
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 m
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Old News (Score:2)
soft science (Score:2)
psychology has fads and trends, it's a "soft science"...and all of it could be a sham
Of course it was (Score:2)
There was no Control, in the experimental sense.
Abu Grahib? (Score:1)
Wasn't Abu Grahib a real-life demonstration of the "Lucifer Effect"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Interesting but will not matter. (Score:1)
I still have to go to bi-yearly sex assault from a SJW whose group volunteered or won the lowest bid. You still get the fake story from the New York Times about Kitty Genovese and this event.
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nothing new, what's the story? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Not just this one. (Score:2)
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).
Could make it real. (Score:1)
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.
Re: Psychology is a Sham! (Score:2, Funny)
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?
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Is that a threat ? Is that what Slashdot is now ?