The Stanford Prison Experiment, one of the most famous and compelling psychological studies of all time, told us a tantalizingly simple story about human nature.
The study took paid participants and assigned them to be “inmates” or “guards” in a mock prison at Stanford University. Soon after the experiment began, the “guards” began mistreating the “prisoners,” implying evil is brought out by circumstance. The authors, in their conclusions, suggested innocent people, thrown into a situation where they have power over others, will begin to abuse that power. And people who are put into a situation where they are powerless will be driven to submission, even madness.
The Stanford Prison Experiment has been included in many, many introductory psychology textbooks and is often cited uncritically. It’s the subject of movies, documentaries, books, television shows, and congressional testimony.
But its findings were wrong. Very wrong. And not just due to its questionable ethics or lack of concrete data — but because of deceit.
“We just learned” is a bit of a stretch. Here is a Medium post from 2020, which cites previous interviews and Jon Ronson’s 2015 book “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed,” that explains the problems with the infamous experiment: https://medium.com/invisible-illness/have-we-gotten-the-stanford-prison-experiment-all-wrong-fad09471e79c
Edit: Ah, title is straight from the Vox title, and that article is from 2018
Before your edit I was about to say that maybe the journalists just saw the video fact checking all Somerson videos where they learned that the research was a fraud.
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Yup. My psychology/sociology classes 5+ years ago were teaching that this experiment was super flawed
Yo mods, we really could use a tag for articles that are old. In this case, half a decade!
down vote is all I got. down and scroll. liberal ad/script blocking. Firefox has this reading mode. If that doesn’t work I usually skip the whole site. can’t sit here all day and delete trash. let op know your displeasure and hope they try harder in the future. obvious spam gets trashed on site. you can read any account’s post history by visiting their profile.
Have we not known this for decades?
By Brian Resnick@[email protected] Jun 13, 2018, 2:30pm EDT
At least more than half a decade.
They didn’t even know what a control group was; “fraud” may be giving it too much credit
The experiment was little more than a political demonstration and I can confirm that was “old news” to my professors in the late '00s
I always thought Philip Zimbardo and his dyed goatee looked like they were right out of a Reno magic show. I guess Zimbardo was more of an illusionist than most people actually realized.
We just learned? The article is from 2018. OP are you dumb?
You’re Wrong About did a solid deep dive into this one. ( On buzzsprout )
I get that this is yesterday’s news, but I did not hear of this development in 2018 when the article came out. So for me this is a “Today I learned” (even if it’s old news for everyone else).
I learned about the Stanford Prison Experiment from the crappy German movie “The Experiment” they made in 2001 and then listened to some interviews by Zimbardo around 2006 or so.
In fact, though the linked Vox article provides several examples of experiments that cannot be well reproduced, it is interesting that the Wikipedia article says Zimbardo is still very much convinced his experiment is sound (at least he still was in 2018).
Edit: fixed grammar
Everything you learned about the Milgram experiment is bullshit too.
paying the bills
not
