>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.
I think the reason why the experiment, if true, is so fascinating is because it's about normal people put into an abnormal situation rather than inherently bad people being given power.
What I take away from the experiment is that given the right situation and pressures, most people would do things they thought they would never otherwise do. More importantly, I think it's probably a mistake to think that you're the exception and are morally incorruptible.
> along with the Milgram experiment that people should lookup
Don't bother, the experiment was so unethical it cannot be replicated properly. Furthermore, the way it was presented to the public was deceptive; only some of the results were widely reported and some of those suppressed results draw into question the popular narrative of the experiments outcomes.
For instance, it is popularly claimed in undergrad psych classes that the Milgram experiments showed people comply with authority. But what is meant by authority is left unqualified. In the popularly described versions of the experiments, the authority ('the experimenter') presented themselves as a scientist and used appeals to the value of science to persuade the test subjects ('the teachers'.) What they never deigned to teach me in my undergrad psych class is the compliance rates fell when the presentation of the authority was changed, and also fell when the experiments were performed away from the context of Yale University in New Haven. This suggests that people don't blindly comply with authority; personal value systems play a role in determining how likely somebody is to comply with a particular sort of authority. This seems wholly unsensational to me; somebody who values science is more likely to comply with a scientist. Somebody who likes cops is more likely to comply with cops. And nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann enthusiastically complied with nazi authorities because Eichmann was a nazi (contrary to his claim of merely following any authority blindly.)
Much of what I've read about this, including Zimbardo's rebuttal linked above, makes it sound much more like Milgram's studies on willingness to do cruel things if you're told to. While I don't doubt that putting people in positions of power can often bring out their bad sides, that doesn't mean that this experiment was a great way of showing that, not least because it is intrinsically difficult to replicate.
It's difficult to achieve some kind of objectivity. Of course no one wants to believe that they are innately bad or easily coerced into doing terrible things to other human beings, so it seems like it would be very natural to expect them to lash out at the methods of the experiment.
I am sorry to be a downer, and I agree that it is nice to pretend that people are essentially good. Ignoring the Milgram results, however, leads us to forget why we have to maintain societies with complex crime deterrent schemes, and why we should not trust anonymous individuals who cannot be located for punishment.
"[H]alf ... were female, and their rate of obedience was virtually identical to that of the male participants." "Where participants had to physically hold the "learner's" arm onto a shock plate, ... 30 percent of participants completed the experiment."
>> 81% accurately figured out the experimenter’s hypothesis
so what? Did they get a grade on their participation? I'd bet not. So why would they care what the hypothesis was?
>> The experimenters intervened directly in the experiment, either to give precise instructions, to recall the purposes of the experiment, or to set a general direction.
PZ says they said, "We noticed this morning that you weren't really, you know, lending a hand, and I was wondering if there's anything's wrong… We really want to get you active and involved because the guards have to know that every guard is going to be what we call a “tough guard”… what I mean by tough is [that] you have to be firm, and you have to be in the action… It’s really important… for the workings of the experiment [because] whether or not we can make this thing seem like a prison—which is the aim of the thing—depends largely on the guards’ behavior."
Sorry, but I don't see how this invalidates anything. If some of the guards were just phoning it in and not taking it seriously, they did need a talking-to.
I find the experiment skewed. Or more precisely, that it is not meant to investigate human behaviour or psychology. It is rather precisely designed to support a chosen result to support a given world view. The fact that it has been ran for 50 years is a strong indication of this.
IOW, the experimenter wanted to be able to arrive at the conclusion that difference in performance was unrelated to workers and designed the experiment so it would give this result. In short, this demonstrate few things outside of a very artificially setup situation, where the workers have no say and the job is predestined to fail.
Anyone who worked anywhere knows very well that there are actually vast difference between two workers.
> … offers convincing evidence that the guards in the experiment were coached to be cruel.
This was the point of the experiment. That simply coaching people in banal ways to be cruel caused them to be cruel.
Yes the study participants were just doing what they thought the scientists wanted to see… exactly as many humans do in many human organizations.
Perhaps the guards believed deep down there was no real danger to the prisoners. Exactly as many people assume about civil society and the social safety net.
How many people would do things that are quite evil or disastrous to another human’s life if instructed to do so by a company’s performance management system, at risk of losing their job?
Remember the context in the early 70s was the relatively recent discovery of the Nazi’s unimaginably cruel treatment of people, and the unknown question of what could cause humans to behave that way.
It turns out, just some authoritative instructions.
First, I don't buy the post's statistics. 65% of the subjects administered every shock in the experiment. But
when we believe that someone knows more than us about a
subject, they can get us to do what they want most of the
time (or 65% of the time if you can believe the experiment)
mis-parses the probabilities.
Second, I think the "(65% of) people obey to authority despite what should be their better judgment" overfits the results of the experiment. Perhaps people simply listen to scientists during experiments?
>the scientific value of the [Standford Prison] experiment was lost //
I strongly disagree. It has informed psychological experiment strongly since, yes partly by being an example of how not to conduct experiments but not wholly. It has also strongly informed understanding of human nature and the conditions in which minimal pressure can modify moral action.
Under test was how "assignment of a label" would affect the development of "norms, rules and expectations". The results showed how such assignment could affect a persons character dramatically even to the point of drawing in Zimbardo to the point that he had to be corrected by his partner to stop the experiment.
I don't think people are drawn to it because it's giving an excuse for bad behavior. The Stanford experiment resonates with a lot of people because it mirrors civilization as a whole (hierarchical class based system)
The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.
> Besides, the so called 'leaders' in this experiment were pretty selfish. Making all kinds of gross noises while eating their cookie. Did they care what somebody else thought of them?
That bit made me suspect the study - that the "leader" ate the cookie is believable, that they did so in a semi-vindictive manner is not believable.
> the conclusions are about humans becoming sadistic just because they put on a uniform
The experiment was not about how clothing affects behavior but was about presenting a group with power and encouraging them to use it. The uniforms were important in establishing group identity, but not the sole or even primary focus of the experiment.
I would strongly expect that for the experiment to have any validity at all, the people in the group primed with feelings of power would be selected randomly. I don't see the connection with a propensity for being selected randomly, and a lack of skill with spacial reasoning.
Well, define 'flawed'. It is flawed if you attempt to interpret it as being representative of how people in the general population would behave in a setting without an active experimenter interfering, sure.
It does still reveal the influence that one person can have on a group of people and how much can be changed about behavior. It would be unwise to throw away discussions of the experiment because people can't properly place the data in context or evaluate the strengths/weaknesses of the experimental design and implementation (which is what Psychology courses should be teaching you to do in the first place.)
The Milgram Experiment[1] shows that most people do go along with what an authority figure tells them. It’s one of the more depressing experiments in social psychology.
Interesting experiment which suffers from the problem that all psychology experiments have: based upon observations of college students. I've been around the block a few times and I definitely don't now perceive respectful people as weak.
Actually, it doesn't really. The experiment says far more about the importance of perceptions of authority than it does about "good" or "bad" people.
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