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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: 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.