>Those who thought that they would be participating in a prison study had significantly higher levels of aggressiveness, authoritarianism, Machiavellianism, narcissism, and social dominance, and they scored lower on measures of empathy and altruism.
So the experiment suffered from the same sort of selection bias that goes into hiring for prison guards or other authoritative punitive figures? Seems pretty realistic to me. Prison guards are not selected from the population at random.
Generally, it's cited you make a point about how anyone's moral behavior is caused by the roles society expects of them. E.g. "we would all be war criminals if we were drafted into a criminal army", or the like.
The inability of the answerer there to see the experiment as being (at least in part) about how the guards responded to the construct is just fascinating.
It's atrociously bad science. It's not worthwhile to talk about what it means. I appreciated the BBC anecdote as well as the research about the advertisement's phrasing, but trying to interpret it at all is irresponsible pop science wiring.
It is not worthwhile to talk about what it means while framing it as an experiment, but it is still worthwhile to talk about it as a historical incident. We still talk about what other human rights abuses imply about the human condition, no?
The fact something is bad science doesn't mean there's nothing to learn from it. It just means that the conclusions don't have scientific validity, but how many of the conclusions we draw every day do? How many policy decisions can be made that are supported by clear, significant and undisputed scientific results?
On the contrary, I think Britain especially is sliding into an authoritative, totalitarian nightmare. The parallels between the government workers turning the wheels of oppression against their own citizens and the way the "Guards" acted cannot be ignored.
Exactly. There was nothing valuable derived from this study, except perhaps as a lesson on how not to allocate research funds. Terrible experimental design. Bias everywhere.
For me, the most interesting part of the experiment was how it was ended. A moral person objected. That's a real lesson in leadership.
Wikipedia: "Zimbardo aborted the experiment early when Christina Maslach, a graduate student in psychology whom he was dating (and later married),[14] objected to the conditions of the prison after she was introduced to the experiment to conduct interviews. Zimbardo noted that, of more than fifty people who had observed the experiment, Maslach was the only one who questioned its morality."
> ...of more than fifty people who had observed the experiment, Maslach was the only one who questioned its morality.
Zimbardo was actually running an early-stage speed-dating experiment. The other 50+ candidates failed the real real purpose of the experiment. Later, ABC would use a similar experimental setup to wide acclaim with it's hit series The Bachelor. /s
So being the absolute pessimist here, did he suggest that she speak up? Since he was the ultimate authority? Or did it happen as stated. Absolute power corrupts absolutely and history is repeated.
Professor Zimbardo created a tyrannical environment and found "proof" that humans were innately tyrannical. Right.
As this article suggests, but doesn't quite state openly: the Stanford Prison Experiment says as much about Zimbardo's psyche as it does about human nature.
I really wonder why an article like this about a study of questionable quality, low points, and already eight hours old is still on the front page. Far more popular articles get pushed to the second page much faster.
So the experiment suffered from the same sort of selection bias that goes into hiring for prison guards or other authoritative punitive figures? Seems pretty realistic to me. Prison guards are not selected from the population at random.