4 ms·

The Stanford Prison Experiment has been discredited and debunked for almost a decade now. It's interesting to me how little attention the discrediting got and h

by Tanoc 3y ago

The Stanford Prison Experiment has been discredited and debunked for almost a decade now. It's interesting to me how little attention the discrediting got and how many people still point to it as a real unguided trial because of that.

whythre 3y ago
I think part of Stanford’s hardiness is due to the fact that it ‘feels true.’ We have all had our chains yanked by petty tyrants… even if the science was rotten. You are right about it not being properly discredited, though- I remember it being featured and commonly cited in textbooks; something that big and ‘influential’ is going to take a long time to die.
- red-iron-pine 3y ago
  sure it feels true... but are we sure that's not just a US or Western thing? is that just a low-level, client-facing role thing? plus it's role-playing a prison, where legit, actually-murdered-a-bunch-of-people are locked up in real life, and they play real games -- and guards play them back. Tell people to roleplay a group of people who are violently anti-social, and another group to role play the people who have to keep them in line (also violently) and the participants fall back on what they think the roles do and how they act. just like with Freud, there may be some slivers of truth, but there is too much untestable, non-transferable bunk that comes with it; you can't call that science.
- CamperBob2 3y ago
  The reason it "feels true" is that it's one of several experiments designed not to determine if something is possible, but how something that happened (the Holocaust) actually happened. People forget that when they criticize Zimbardo and Milgram. Their methods were problematic, but nothing they found was surprising. It's hard to replicate their work, but that's only because you can't get similar experiments approved by ethics committees these days.
CamperBob2 3y ago
No, the SPE has not been "discredited." To do that, you will have to run an experiment that demonstrates that people will NOT do what you tell them if the request is unethical. The SPE was itself unethical to run, and was a terribly designed experiment, but that doesn't mean that its conclusions were invalid. They were very valid. If someone refuses to commit an atrocity for you under color of authority, all you have to do is ask the next person. You won't have to go very far down the line.

by Tanoc 3y ago

whythre 3y ago

I think part of Stanford’s hardiness is due to the fact that it ‘feels true.’ We have all had our chains yanked by petty tyrants… even if the science was rotten. You are right about it not being properly discredited, though- I remember it being featured and commonly cited in textbooks; something that big and ‘influential’ is going to take a long time to die.

red-iron-pine 3y ago
sure it feels true... but are we sure that's not just a US or Western thing? is that just a low-level, client-facing role thing? plus it's role-playing a prison, where legit, actually-murdered-a-bunch-of-people are locked up in real life, and they play real games -- and guards play them back. Tell people to roleplay a group of people who are violently anti-social, and another group to role play the people who have to keep them in line (also violently) and the participants fall back on what they think the roles do and how they act. just like with Freud, there may be some slivers of truth, but there is too much untestable, non-transferable bunk that comes with it; you can't call that science.
CamperBob2 3y ago
The reason it "feels true" is that it's one of several experiments designed not to determine if something is possible, but how something that happened (the Holocaust) actually happened. People forget that when they criticize Zimbardo and Milgram. Their methods were problematic, but nothing they found was surprising. It's hard to replicate their work, but that's only because you can't get similar experiments approved by ethics committees these days.

CamperBob2 3y ago

No, the SPE has not been "discredited." To do that, you will have to run an experiment that demonstrates that people will NOT do what you tell them if the request is unethical. The SPE was itself unethical to run, and was a terribly designed experiment, but that doesn't mean that its conclusions were invalid. They were very valid. If someone refuses to commit an atrocity for you under color of authority, all you have to do is ask the next person. You won't have to go very far down the line.