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Recently 994 items including 49 videos and 54 sound recordings were deposited in Zimbardo's online archive at Stanford University. This newly revealed evidence challenges everything that has been taught about the Stanford Prison Experiment.
https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/time-change-story
From the article:
We all know the story of the Stanford Prison Experiment. It has been a staple of introductory psychology textbooks and lectures for nearly fifty years (see Griggs, 2014).
[...] But now, a half century later, dramatic new evidence has emerged that challenges Zimbardo's account. Our textbooks and our lectures will have to be rewritten. The story of what happened in the SPE and why such brutality occurred will have to be retold.
[...] The startling new evidence tells a tale of the experimenters treating the Guards effectively as research assistants. It reveals how disturbed the Prisoners were when Zimbardo told them they could not leave the study. It raises profound intellectual, moral and even legal questions about what went on in that Stanford basement in the summer of 1971.
[...] You can listen to this interview – start after 8.38 minutes. The tape shows the leadership of the experimenters was at the core of the SPE. More specifically, it provides evidence of identity leadership. That is, Zimbardo and his colleagues sought to ensure conformity amongst the Guards by making brutality appear necessary for the achievement of worthy ingroup goals, namely science that would make the case for prison reform. "What we want to do", Zimbardo's Warden told the Guard, "is be able to go to the world with what we've done and say "Now look, this is what happens when you have Guards who behave this way ... But in order to say that we have to have Guards who behave that way."
[...] How has Zimbardo responded this time? By reasserting that 'none of these criticisms present any substantial evidence that alters the SPE's conclusion'. And at the same time that he berates his critics (without engaging with their arguments), he reworks his story to now say that, yes, Guards were told to be tough, but not how to be tough. For Zimbardo, then, this is all just fake news. Except that it plainly isn't.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Mykl on Tuesday August 21 2018, @03:44AM (2 children)
I just read the article, and also listened to the audio link (starting at 8:38, the relevant section goes for about 20 mins).
It's just as bad as the article claims - a guard basically told Zimbardo that he didn't agree with how the guards were being told to act, so Zimbardo convinces him that the experiment is actually about something completely different - measuring what it's like in an environment that has brutal guards. Zimbardo convinces him that they can't measure if the guards aren't brutal, so this guard is supposedly jeopardising the experiment by refusing to play along. You can tell that he remains uncomfortable about the proposition however, and resists all the way through.
For Zimbardo to then claim that the experiment shows people will naturally become brutal in that scenario is an outright lie - they were specifically told to do that, and had to be convinced of it through the experiment too!
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 21 2018, @10:05AM (1 child)
Don't forget Zimbardo himself is a part of the experiment and represent a person in authority desiring to stay there. A prison warden would pressure his guards to act as such to prevent them from colluding with the prisoners and usurping their authority. Both business management schools and the military officer courses teach similar divide and conquer strategies starting with "keep distance" or "don't fraternize" and ending with "this and that should be kept separate".
The classic example is when management tells development they had to allocate the new offices to marketing and tell marketing they the bonuses would be slightly smaller this quarter since development went over-budget, they're deliberately keeping folks from getting too comfortable so they won't realize they can just leave the company and start their own business doing the same but keep the money for themselves. A business not doing this can't grow and compete so eventually all business are selected to do the same. Similarly all armies become "disciplined" following the same pattern.
And don't forget our entire society is built around more advance means to achieve the same: We replaced food and resource distribution with currency to create an incentive for crime and justification for policing. As developers, we call it planned obsoleteness as use leaky hardware and software so someone will hire us to fix it later on.
TL;DR Companies, leaders and societies that aren't willing to do what it takes to justify their existence end up losing that one that do. And in a society where only 0.1% of the population are required to produce food and other necessities, we're basically all prison wardens in one way or another so when we reach that position of power we'll rarely do differently.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Tuesday August 21 2018, @08:45PM
This. And the people are conditioned from birth to be proud of their prison and to admire, respect and obey their prison wardens. Above all else, the moral code that is taught centers on the work ethic. Toiling for the good of the system, with the goal of profit, becomes one of the strongest moral obligations and the mental phenomena of guilt and conscience are carefully nurtured and shaped to drive each person towards that end. Beyond that, the only other ethic that matters is the law.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?