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Everyone's heard the stories of how it was "fake." How many of you have actually read Dr. Zimbardo's own response to the debunking? https://www.prisonexp.org/r

Everyone's heard the stories of how it was "fake." How many of you have actually read Dr. Zimbardo's own response to the debunking? https://www.prisonexp.org/response https://www.prisonexp.org/response

echan00 3y ago
Thank you
EA-3167 3y ago
I always wonder how people square "It's a fraud" with "It's a fraud that fits the reality of power and abuse incredibly well." I get the sense that some people really just don't like to talk or think about the banality of evil.
- scotty79 3y ago
  It's a fraud because if guards were pressured or knew the experimenters expectation then it's just yet another Milgram's experiment that is apparently enough to explain banality of evil as a result of few bad apples in various places of power with complacent masses willing to do amoral things when ordered. Nothing that should make Zimbardo world famous.
romusha 3y ago
No one because they want it to be false cuz of neo-romanticism
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
sirspacey 3y ago
Thank you for sharing, fascinating to understand the study’s intended purpose.
- pas 3y ago
  was is preregistered (published before) or this is just his explanation after-the-fact?
adastra22 3y ago
I have read it. He basically doesn’t address any of the criticism, he just reframes to claim that the experiment was actually testing something different than what we’ve all understood it to be. Maybe that is true. In which case he would be a terrible scientist rather than a fraudulent one. Even so, that still makes the legacy of the SPE false, and one has to wonder why he never corrected the record in the nearly 50 years between the experiment and its failure to replicate.
- pdonis 3y ago
  > the experiment was actually testing something different than what we’ve all understood it to be Even if this is true, whose fault is it? Is it Zimbardo's? Or is it all the academics and media hacks who ran with their own mistaken understanding of what the experiment was actually testing, without bothering to check their understanding against what Zimbardo actually published? (Not to mention all the supporting information that he went to great trouble to make publicly available, as he describes in his response.) > one has to wonder why he never corrected the record Trying to correct mistaken or intentionally false claims in the media is a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. Very few scientists have the time or the wherewithal to do this. Zimbardo published several peer-reviewed papers, as he describes in his response; that's the "record". Anyone who takes media descriptions of any scientific research as accurate is kidding themselves. > its failure to replicate Zimbardo's response specifically addresses this point (both in discussing the claimed failure to replicate by a British research team, and in describing other research which has replicated the main findings), so I don't think you can just help yourself to this claim.
  - tshirthoodie 3y ago
    >Trying to correct mistaken or intentionally false claims in the media is a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. Wrong. Merely trying is in-fact incredibly easy to do, but there is no record of Zimbardo taking a single step in that direction. You don't have a case.
    - pdonis 3y ago
nickff 3y ago
His response is informative, and should be read against what I believe to be a stronger case than the OP (and linked from it): https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/2019-letexier.pdf https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/2019-letexier.pdf Some of the more damning parts: >"Of the students tested, 81% accurately figured out the experimenter’s hypothesis (that guards would be aggressive and that prisoners would revolt or comply), and 90% predicted that the guards would be “oppressive, hostile, aggressive, humiliating” (p. 158), thereby supporting the argument that demand characteristics were likely operating in the SPE and that the participants in the SPE would have probably guessed how Zimbardo and his coexperimenters wanted them to behave." >"Reason 4: The experimenters intervened directly in the experiment, either to give precise instructions, to recall the purposes of the experiment, or to set a general direction. " >"When he began to get interested in prisons, only 3 months before the beginning of the experiment, Zimbardo already had strong views on the subject. As he would confide later, “my sympathies were heavily with prisoners. I was anti-prisons, anti-corrections, etc.” (Zimbardo, 2009, p. 34)."
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  >> 81% accurately figured out the experimenter’s hypothesis so what? Did they get a grade on their participation? I'd bet not. So why would they care what the hypothesis was? >> The experimenters intervened directly in the experiment, either to give precise instructions, to recall the purposes of the experiment, or to set a general direction. PZ says they said, "We noticed this morning that you weren't really, you know, lending a hand, and I was wondering if there's anything's wrong… We really want to get you active and involved because the guards have to know that every guard is going to be what we call a “tough guard”… what I mean by tough is [that] you have to be firm, and you have to be in the action… It’s really important… for the workings of the experiment [because] whether or not we can make this thing seem like a prison—which is the aim of the thing—depends largely on the guards’ behavior." Sorry, but I don't see how this invalidates anything. If some of the guards were just phoning it in and not taking it seriously, they did need a talking-to.
  - mlyle 3y ago
    > so what? Did they get a grade on their participation? I'd bet not. So why would they care what the hypothesis was? - If you were a subject in an experiment, wouldn't you be curious about the experiment design and the hypothesis being tested? - If you had a good guess as to the tested hypothesis, could that influence your behavior?
rgrieselhuber 3y ago
I’ve seen enough in the last 22 years to know how people behave when given arbitrary power over others.
- charles_f 3y ago
  Yeah, anecdotal evidence, and the resulting structure of capitalism as a whole, seem to point to that
saghm 3y ago
Reading his response, it seems pretty sketchy the way he defends some of the stuff. I'm not sure "fraud" is the term I'd use as much as "cruel" and "unethical" human experimentation: > One of three guards on a shift that day left the area during a prisoner count and wasn't even requiring prisoners to follow orders issued by the other guards, so David Jaffee, acting as the SPE Warden, took this guard aside and asked him to become more active, involved, and "tough" in order to make the experimental setting seem more like a prison. Here are his exact words: > "We noticed this morning that you weren't really, you know, lending a hand, and I was wondering if there's anything's wrong… We really want to get you active and involved because the guards have to know that every guard is going to be what we call a “tough guard”… what I mean by tough is [that] you have to be firm, and you have to be in the action… It’s really important… for the workings of the experiment [because] whether or not we can make this thing seem like a prison—which is the aim of the thing—depends largely on the guards’ behavior." Okay, so if you tell people the experiment requires they be strict rather than lenient, and correct them when they don't follow this, then they act strict. Sure, this is a more accurate representation of prison, but I thought the point was to argue that this was some sort of inevitable dynamic, not just "technically possible"? > Asking a person role-playing a guard in a prison simulation to be "firm" and "in the action" is mild compared to the pressure exerted by actual wardens and superior officers in real-life prison and military settings, where guards failing to participate fully can face disciplinary hearings, demotion, or dismissal. Although the research team asked all guards to be actively involved and firmly in control of the prisoners, it never instructed guards to employ brutality, and it explicitly banned the use of physical force. This sounds like more evidence that the intensity of behavior is proportional to the amount of pressure. Pressuring people harder makes them respond more strongly; I still don't see how this is somehow a validation of his thesis. > With each passing night, he became more creatively evil in ways that went beyond being a tough guard. Indeed, he later said that he began to think of himself as a “puppeteer” who made prisoners do whatever he chose. In an extreme perversion of his experimentally assigned role, he devised an unthinkable way to humiliate all prisoners on the fifth night of the study...Fortunately, I had earlier decided to terminate the experiment the next morning. That's kind of a ridiculous defense on his part. His timing somehow coincided exactly with particularly brutal abuse of some of the experimentees ostensibly in his care, but of course he couldn't have been actively monitoring it or else he'd be culpable for not intervening...so he somehow managed to have the idea to pull the plug exactly at the time that saved him the most face but also at the subdued level of urgency for the entire incident to play out? Either he was grossly negligent in taking care of the experimentees, or he was complicit by choosing not to intervene; there's no middle ground here that makes any sense, despite him clearly wanting to pretend there is. > Blum portrays the case of Doug Korpi, alias Prisoner 8612, as an instance of me being duped into believing that a prisoner was having an emotional breakdown when in fact the prisoner was simply faking a breakdown in order to leave the study early...For reasons I cannot fathom, Korpi’s story has changed several times over the past 47 years: from genuinely losing control of his emotions, to getting out of the study so that he could lead an insurrection and liberate the other prisoners, to faking a breakdown just to get out early and study for an upcoming Graduate Record Exam, to other reflections and memory distortions. I don't find it hard to believe that someone's memory of something might shift over nearly half a century and them not intentionally lying. If it was actually an emotionally harrowing experience, it would almost be more surprising if their understanding of how they felt evolved over time, and if it wasn't, it's still pretty mundane for people to remember things incorrectly after decades. Given that any one of their explanations would individually make sense (I would certainly not be surprised if I had a mental breakdown in a situation like this, and if I didn't but had to get to an exam and genuinely didn't think that I would be allowed to get to an exam I needed to take without lying, I wouldn't hesitate to lie to get out because that sounds like _real_ imprisonment, not an experiment), either their memories just being faulty like most people's are or them actually having an emotional breakdown seem far more like than, I don't know, predicting that this would be a famous experiment and deciding to try to make a name for themselves in it?

echan00 3y ago

Thank you

EA-3167 3y ago

I always wonder how people square "It's a fraud" with "It's a fraud that fits the reality of power and abuse incredibly well." I get the sense that some people really just don't like to talk or think about the banality of evil.

scotty79 3y ago
It's a fraud because if guards were pressured or knew the experimenters expectation then it's just yet another Milgram's experiment that is apparently enough to explain banality of evil as a result of few bad apples in various places of power with complacent masses willing to do amoral things when ordered. Nothing that should make Zimbardo world famous.

romusha 3y ago

No one because they want it to be false cuz of neo-romanticism

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

sirspacey 3y ago

Thank you for sharing, fascinating to understand the study’s intended purpose.

pas 3y ago
was is preregistered (published before) or this is just his explanation after-the-fact?

adastra22 3y ago

I have read it. He basically doesn’t address any of the criticism, he just reframes to claim that the experiment was actually testing something different than what we’ve all understood it to be. Maybe that is true. In which case he would be a terrible scientist rather than a fraudulent one. Even so, that still makes the legacy of the SPE false, and one has to wonder why he never corrected the record in the nearly 50 years between the experiment and its failure to replicate.

pdonis 3y ago
> the experiment was actually testing something different than what we’ve all understood it to be Even if this is true, whose fault is it? Is it Zimbardo's? Or is it all the academics and media hacks who ran with their own mistaken understanding of what the experiment was actually testing, without bothering to check their understanding against what Zimbardo actually published? (Not to mention all the supporting information that he went to great trouble to make publicly available, as he describes in his response.) > one has to wonder why he never corrected the record Trying to correct mistaken or intentionally false claims in the media is a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. Very few scientists have the time or the wherewithal to do this. Zimbardo published several peer-reviewed papers, as he describes in his response; that's the "record". Anyone who takes media descriptions of any scientific research as accurate is kidding themselves. > its failure to replicate Zimbardo's response specifically addresses this point (both in discussing the claimed failure to replicate by a British research team, and in describing other research which has replicated the main findings), so I don't think you can just help yourself to this claim.
- tshirthoodie 3y ago
  >Trying to correct mistaken or intentionally false claims in the media is a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. Wrong. Merely trying is in-fact incredibly easy to do, but there is no record of Zimbardo taking a single step in that direction. You don't have a case.
  - pdonis 3y ago

nickff 3y ago

His response is informative, and should be read against what I believe to be a stronger case than the OP (and linked from it): https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/2019-letexier.pdf https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/2019-letexier.pdf Some of the more damning parts: >"Of the students tested, 81% accurately figured out the experimenter’s hypothesis (that guards would be aggressive and that prisoners would revolt or comply), and 90% predicted that the guards would be “oppressive, hostile, aggressive, humiliating” (p. 158), thereby supporting the argument that demand characteristics were likely operating in the SPE and that the participants in the SPE would have probably guessed how Zimbardo and his coexperimenters wanted them to behave." >"Reason 4: The experimenters intervened directly in the experiment, either to give precise instructions, to recall the purposes of the experiment, or to set a general direction. " >"When he began to get interested in prisons, only 3 months before the beginning of the experiment, Zimbardo already had strong views on the subject. As he would confide later, “my sympathies were heavily with prisoners. I was anti-prisons, anti-corrections, etc.” (Zimbardo, 2009, p. 34)."

AlbertCory 3y ago
>> 81% accurately figured out the experimenter’s hypothesis so what? Did they get a grade on their participation? I'd bet not. So why would they care what the hypothesis was? >> The experimenters intervened directly in the experiment, either to give precise instructions, to recall the purposes of the experiment, or to set a general direction. PZ says they said, "We noticed this morning that you weren't really, you know, lending a hand, and I was wondering if there's anything's wrong… We really want to get you active and involved because the guards have to know that every guard is going to be what we call a “tough guard”… what I mean by tough is [that] you have to be firm, and you have to be in the action… It’s really important… for the workings of the experiment [because] whether or not we can make this thing seem like a prison—which is the aim of the thing—depends largely on the guards’ behavior." Sorry, but I don't see how this invalidates anything. If some of the guards were just phoning it in and not taking it seriously, they did need a talking-to.
- mlyle 3y ago
  > so what? Did they get a grade on their participation? I'd bet not. So why would they care what the hypothesis was? - If you were a subject in an experiment, wouldn't you be curious about the experiment design and the hypothesis being tested? - If you had a good guess as to the tested hypothesis, could that influence your behavior?

rgrieselhuber 3y ago

I’ve seen enough in the last 22 years to know how people behave when given arbitrary power over others.

charles_f 3y ago
Yeah, anecdotal evidence, and the resulting structure of capitalism as a whole, seem to point to that

saghm 3y ago

Reading his response, it seems pretty sketchy the way he defends some of the stuff. I'm not sure "fraud" is the term I'd use as much as "cruel" and "unethical" human experimentation: > One of three guards on a shift that day left the area during a prisoner count and wasn't even requiring prisoners to follow orders issued by the other guards, so David Jaffee, acting as the SPE Warden, took this guard aside and asked him to become more active, involved, and "tough" in order to make the experimental setting seem more like a prison. Here are his exact words: > "We noticed this morning that you weren't really, you know, lending a hand, and I was wondering if there's anything's wrong… We really want to get you active and involved because the guards have to know that every guard is going to be what we call a “tough guard”… what I mean by tough is [that] you have to be firm, and you have to be in the action… It’s really important… for the workings of the experiment [because] whether or not we can make this thing seem like a prison—which is the aim of the thing—depends largely on the guards’ behavior." Okay, so if you tell people the experiment requires they be strict rather than lenient, and correct them when they don't follow this, then they act strict. Sure, this is a more accurate representation of prison, but I thought the point was to argue that this was some sort of inevitable dynamic, not just "technically possible"? > Asking a person role-playing a guard in a prison simulation to be "firm" and "in the action" is mild compared to the pressure exerted by actual wardens and superior officers in real-life prison and military settings, where guards failing to participate fully can face disciplinary hearings, demotion, or dismissal. Although the research team asked all guards to be actively involved and firmly in control of the prisoners, it never instructed guards to employ brutality, and it explicitly banned the use of physical force. This sounds like more evidence that the intensity of behavior is proportional to the amount of pressure. Pressuring people harder makes them respond more strongly; I still don't see how this is somehow a validation of his thesis. > With each passing night, he became more creatively evil in ways that went beyond being a tough guard. Indeed, he later said that he began to think of himself as a “puppeteer” who made prisoners do whatever he chose. In an extreme perversion of his experimentally assigned role, he devised an unthinkable way to humiliate all prisoners on the fifth night of the study...Fortunately, I had earlier decided to terminate the experiment the next morning. That's kind of a ridiculous defense on his part. His timing somehow coincided exactly with particularly brutal abuse of some of the experimentees ostensibly in his care, but of course he couldn't have been actively monitoring it or else he'd be culpable for not intervening...so he somehow managed to have the idea to pull the plug exactly at the time that saved him the most face but also at the subdued level of urgency for the entire incident to play out? Either he was grossly negligent in taking care of the experimentees, or he was complicit by choosing not to intervene; there's no middle ground here that makes any sense, despite him clearly wanting to pretend there is. > Blum portrays the case of Doug Korpi, alias Prisoner 8612, as an instance of me being duped into believing that a prisoner was having an emotional breakdown when in fact the prisoner was simply faking a breakdown in order to leave the study early...For reasons I cannot fathom, Korpi’s story has changed several times over the past 47 years: from genuinely losing control of his emotions, to getting out of the study so that he could lead an insurrection and liberate the other prisoners, to faking a breakdown just to get out early and study for an upcoming Graduate Record Exam, to other reflections and memory distortions. I don't find it hard to believe that someone's memory of something might shift over nearly half a century and them not intentionally lying. If it was actually an emotionally harrowing experience, it would almost be more surprising if their understanding of how they felt evolved over time, and if it wasn't, it's still pretty mundane for people to remember things incorrectly after decades. Given that any one of their explanations would individually make sense (I would certainly not be surprised if I had a mental breakdown in a situation like this, and if I didn't but had to get to an exam and genuinely didn't think that I would be allowed to get to an exam I needed to take without lying, I wouldn't hesitate to lie to get out because that sounds like _real_ imprisonment, not an experiment), either their memories just being faulty like most people's are or them actually having an emotional breakdown seem far more like than, I don't know, predicting that this would be a famous experiment and deciding to try to make a name for themselves in it?