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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: 4, Interesting) by driverless on Tuesday August 21 2018, @05:15AM (6 children)
I'm not shocked. There's always been a strong push to reinterpret history to edit out disturbing findings, particularly when it shows the darker aspects of human nature. One of the most notorious examples was the "clean Werhmacht" whitewashing, with the US complicit in the whitewash (they needed a rearmed West Germany as an ally against the Eastern Bloc). This is the same thing. Sure, "the experimenters intervened to shape the study more than they acknowledged" as the story says, but from listening to some of the tapes objectively, not with a goal of rewriting history, they didn't "fake" the experiment. They did uncover a dark side of human nature, and no attempt to rose-tint it fifty years after the fact through nitpicking details of old, out-of-context recordings is going to change that.
(Score: 2) by Lester on Tuesday August 21 2018, @10:05AM (5 children)
That is the corner stone of science. You have an hypothesis, you design an experiment to prove or refute it, the you make the experiment, and according with the experiment, you have a conclusion.
That is the theory, but many times the reality is not that clear. Many times experiments may prove, but can't refute. If the result is positive, you prove the hypothesis, but if the result is negative it doesn't refute the hypothesis, it just keeps it unproven. "Unproven" doesn't mean "refuted". (And the other way around: "not refuted" doesn't mean "proven", as pseudoscience thinks). "Unproven" is not "refuted", but when many experiments on a hypothesis result "unproven", the feelings slip to "refuted". So most researcher tend to not work hypothesis that have been unproven many times. So there is a temptation to manipulate the experiment to "help" to prove the hypothesis to avoid been disregard as "unproven" and then assimilated "refuted"
Standford experiment didn't prove anything, because it was manipulated and other experiments didn't have the same results. So it is unproven. Until someone proves the opposite, I will *believe* that the dark side of human mind is there. "Observations" along the history make me think the hypothesis of a dark side of human is a fact. But, until someone proves it, I am open to new ideas. (by the way, I've never bought the rosy picture of human nature, it is even more unproven, and "observations" say the opposite). You can't do such experiments on real human without moral concerns, so we have only one experiment and we don't want to be disregarded as fake, but from the science point it is. Period. Let's move forward.
Your fear is that "unproven" becomes "refuted". Yes, that is a risk, but it is more dangerous manipulated science. Even if it has been unproven in thousand experiments, there is still room for a new experiment that proves it or refutes it for ever. Accepting wrong results may stop research for years. It has happened before. (note: eggs are not bad for cholesterol, bad science told they were and, after years of been refuted, even nutritionist believe eggs are a problem for cholesterol levels).
(Score: 2) by driverless on Tuesday August 21 2018, @11:50AM (3 children)
So do I, my comment may not have been clear on what I was agreeing/disagreeing with.
Incidentally, for an extreme example of trying to rose-tint human nature, read the Seville Statement on Violence [ppu.org.uk], which is an attempt to define scientific results to be whatever the authors of the statement wish them to be:
It is scientifically incorrect to say that if we hadn't been breast-fed more as infants we'd now all be sitting under a tree together singing kumbaya.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 21 2018, @04:38PM (2 children)
You're looking for a word to describe the Seville Statement, but your STEM background hasn't given it to you. Let a medievalist help: the word you want is "dogma." The Seville Statement is dogma, taught belief that an authority requires its subjects to believe; believing otherwise is heresy. Replace the words "scientifically incorrect" with "heresy," and the statement makes just as much sense.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by driverless on Wednesday August 22 2018, @02:26AM (1 child)
Actually I do have a non-STEM background, so I'm aware of some of the thinking behind this. If you accept that people can be born bad, rather than voluntarily choosing to be bad, then this has profound implications on both philosophical and criminal justice grounds, because now a defence lawyer can claim that their serial-killer client wasn't responsible for their actions, their genes caused it. This was part of the debate at the time. At least some of the motivation behind the Seville Statement was to make this philosophical problem go away. AFAIK this was before there'd been much work done on things like the nature vs. nurture aspect of psychopathy, which would have immediately shot down several of their "it is scientifically inaccurate" claims, #3 and #4 definitely.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Lester on Wednesday August 22 2018, @09:21AM
There several reasons for state punishment:
None of this points is affected by whether someone committed a crime because of his DNA or because of environment.
Depending upon the trend of the society, legal systems may stress more or less different points. In a extreme rosy wishful thinking society, criminals are not evil, just commit errors, so deterrence doesn't work with them because they are not aware of doing anything bad. Victims are good-hearted, pardon and never want vengeance. Nobody is dangerous, it is just a temporal state. Everybody can be reeducated and reintegrated.
The Seville statement was written in an epoch of very rosy thinking. That rosy picture was politically correct. Those days there ware psychologist, politicians, biologist that didn't buy such rosy picture, but obviously those weren't invited.
There is an interesting book The Blank Slate [wikipedia.org] by Steven Pinker, written in 2002, that challenges the theory of that we are good and only environment makes are bad, it says we are aggressive by evolution and why we shouldn't be afraid of that, we should be more afraid of the consequences of denying such reality.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 21 2018, @01:57PM
Um.
You're conflating existential proof ("we have seen it thus it exists") which has no disproof ("we haven't seen it, but we also haven't seen the earth's core, which exists") with relationship status ("stats indicate the correlation of these, assuming other factors corrected or equal, is within this band"). A study can conclude there's probably no significant correlation between variables.
You make a tangent epistemological argument about knowability. Doesn't matter. Nothing is knowable, we have false beliefs like with cholesterol and eggs, that doesn't mean a study couldn't conclude that eating eggs doesn't significantly increase bad cholesterol levels.