I have no strong opinions either way, but one meta-point I personally find interesting is: why don't journalists send a final draft of an article to the people involved and get a final round of comments? That just seems fair. Zimbardo claims some facts in the article are simply wrong, and either 1) those errors would be corrected, or 2) Zimbardo's response to those claims could stand side-by-side, instead of this bifurcated situation of articles and response articles.
I think it would be even better if these arguments were in a wiki (or git) style instead of a series of articles.
Having worked as a journalist previously, it's funny how this is often almost impossible in practice. Most of the time subjects don't want to comment, ignore, or responses are handled by a PR person who doesn't provide adequate comment. Then, when you do publish and you get X detail wrong they blast you, or the subject themselves bemoans how they were never given the opportunity to comment. Not that journalists are above reproach but I can't tell you how many times people got annoyed about not being able to to tell their side of the story or how X or Y was misrepresented when they were given countless ops to do put forward their own case.
Attitude toward journalists these days, partly because of more professionalised PR is hugely adversarial rather than co-operative. Anyway /rant.
Giving a statement to a journalist who has already made up their mind that you’re a bad guy is probably a mistake. Especially when it comes to politics, the other side will take whatever you say out of context and present it in the light most unfavorable to you. Morally-exculpatory nuance goes out the window, or buried at the bottom of the article (the part that we know no one reads). The headline will be spun to make you sound like a monster (see CNN’s headlines about Mr. Damore: that he thought “women are biologically unfit for tech jobs”).
Most people should make all statements with the assistance of professional PR if they’re in such a situation. Just like how anyone being interrogated by the police should only speak with the advice with a lawyer, no matter how innocent they actually are.
There are many people that believe CNN is a reputable publisher. Even after the Japan fish feeding hoax, fabrications about the contents of the Damore memo, and even denying their own "I'm sure in individual cases" interview with Obama administration re: child seperation this last 24 hours.
Quick edit due to downmods: dear partisan Americans: I don't particularly care for either side of your politics. I'm not saying Fox is any better, and I think Donald Trump's a nasty and very hypocritical individual. But 1 and 3 are easily proven false on video, and 2 is clearly different from the content of the Damore memo, which you can read online. You're lying to yourself if you refuse to believe evidence about CNN fabricating any of these stories.
As @Notradamus says before, giving a quote to a journalist allows them to shape the story. There is no reason to do that: you can self publish and still reach the masses in your own words, without risking someone else cutting video, lying about you, or denying something happened even when they filmed it themselves.
The parent makes the point that one should use a reputable publisher. I'm arguing that publishers generally considered reputable aren't particularly different from those that are not (as the parent to that correctly notes, with fewer examples). What do you think isn't relevant?
Because nothing you said disproves what the parent said, it simply gave an annecdote about what bad things a publisher did, unless you would categorize those as "ill-will of a single writer".
Claiming systematic bias can also lead to that would have been fine in contrast, maybe even mentioning it has happened vaugely and bringing up your CNN example when challenged.
The down votes are likely because your post could seemingly be summarized as "but Fake News" which has people on edge. Sure that isn't what you said but your phrasing makes that an easy mistake to make as a reader.
> Because nothing you said disproves what the parent said, it simply gave an annecdote about what bad things a publisher did, unless you would categorize those as "ill-will of a single writer".
Well the general implication in the paresnt discussing fabrication as 'the ill of a single writer' and that a reputable publication should curtail them. You're right in that a 'reputable publication' may also simply deliberately craft lies as an organisation, rather than this happening as the result of the individual journalist.
> The down votes are likely because your post could seemingly be summarized as "but Fake News" which has people on edge.
Hence the edit restating that every single one of those is either well known or provable. Anyone can watch the unedited fish feeding video, read Damore's original memo, or see the CNN interview wherethe Obama admin talks about sepration happening. Something being a popular saying doesn't make it untrue. A more simple an likely explanation is that a US citizen's understanding of reality is now determined on a tribal basis rather than a factual one.
> Hence the edit restating that every single one of those is either well known or provable.
But news organizations lie. All of them do and they do it on a routine basis.
On the topic of your examples:
1. It appears that the article recognizes the normality in its last sentence, so this was corrected
2. I don't see anything in the Damore article (http://money.cnn.com/2017/08/15/technology/culture/james-dam...) that seemed to disagree with his memo unless I am missing a subtly.
3. This seems to be a failure to acknowledge and not a fabrication best I can tell (too difficult to find what disputes the original comment)
These seems to be examples where CNN has corrected the stories quietly instead of issuing a retraction best I can tell which while I agree is annoying at least is ensuring the latest version of the article is as accurate as possible (including in "accuracy" intended tone here). How to best handle such corrections is hard.
It's largely about who gets to control the narrative. If you give a quote to a journalist, they control the narrative - they can choose how to piece it together with other quotes, and where to put it in the article, and how to spin it, and with what emotional tone. If you say "no comment" to the journalist and then post your own version of the narrative on your blog later, you control the narrative from start to finish.
Basic journalist practice is that you can read the piece and suggest corrections, especially if you set it as a condition before being interviewed. You can have your own recording equipment, and someone else taking notes. You can require that you have an option to give your own response in the same page as the story (ask certain number of words). Write everything agreed down, have a record + witness.
In TV all bets are off. I fully understand why people come in the front of TV cameras and spout only canned responses that say noting. Even the most innocent you say can be edited in a way that changes the narrative completely. Joe Nobody should never volunteer to be in the front of cameras if they are the source of bad news. It's completely adversarial setting and editing can change everything.
I've take to journalists before on technical topics. Whenever I she'd to see the article before publication so I could correct mistakes they always refused and always stated they never share stories with sources. So I think you're wrong about that.
Not that it's necessarily the case here, but people might not want to correct errors before someone publishes their piece- if the errors stay in, you can write a rebuttal that focuses on those errors and ignores other points which are harder to rebuke.
If you're interested in winning an argument in public debate, then giving your opposition the chance to see your first rebuttal before they've publish their first attack is a huge, huge handicap.
Of course, it's not usually something so blatant. My point is that your intention is to surmise as correctly as possible. Usually PRs pick up on fastidious detail to discredit whole story. Mostly these are genuine mistakes that are inconsequential to overall narrative and that could've easily been clarified.
> “Now, okay,” Zimbardo corrected himself on the phone with me. He then acknowledged that the informed consent forms which subjects signed had included an explicit safe phrase: “I quit the experiment.” Only that precise phrase would trigger their release.
> “None of them said that,” Zimbardo said. “They said, ‘I want out. I want a doctor. I want my mother,’ etc., etc. Essentially I was saying, ‘You have to say, “I quit the experiment.”’”
> But the informed consent forms that Zimbardo’s subjects signed, which are available online from Zimbardo’s own website, contain no mention of the phrase “I quit the experiment.”
If the transcript of that phone discussion is thruthful and accurate, then Zimbardo lied with regards to that issue.
I believe this is a huge issue. The original article makes the accusation that this was probably criminal action ("false imprisonment"). Yet it is not listed in the "Contentious Issues" section of the rebuttal. I didn't read the entire piece, but searching for certain keywords didn't turn up anything new, either.
(Edit: just to be clear, claiming to be contractually entitled to hold people against their will unless they use an "explicit safe phrase" is nonsense to begin with, which is why I was hoping the rebuttal would address that argument.)
> claiming to be contractually entitled to hold people against their will unless they use an "explicit safe phrase" is nonsense to begin with, which is why I was hoping the rebuttal would address that argument
I agree, but at the same time safe-words exist for a reason. To allow people "playing the game" to tell what is a real out of character comment, and what is just part of the role. I honestly have no idea what the law says with respect to that. I think it's a tough area to play around in, and things can get real murky real quick.
(I'm talking quite generally wrt the concept around consent with safe words etc)
That's a good point... Zimbardo could claim that anything but the agreed-upon safe words were to be understood as part of the act they were hired for. Then, I imagine that it would be very hard to show beyond reasonable doubt intent to actually falsely imprison someone.
However, the original article claimed that the consent form had no such agreement -- Zimbardo merely claimed so in a phone interview.
Furthermore, given that Zimbardo's rebuttal is 18 pages long, you'd think that he'd at least briefly comment on the accusation of potentially criminal behavior.
You appear not to understand the concept of a safe word.
The entire point of a safe word is that it is SHORT and MEMORABLE, not long and generic. "I quit the experiment" is a highly generic phrase, easily forgotten. Calling that phrase a "safe word" is absolutely absurd.
Also, even if I accepted your argument that "I quit the experiment" Is somehow a "safe word"-- it still wouldn't be technically correct to say, because it's not a word, it's a phrase / sequence of words. Have you ever heard of a "Safe phrase?" Me neither. That's because making a "safe word" a phrase completely defeats the concept of a safe word. It needs to be short enough to be said and understood in as little time as possible. Making a "safe word" a phrase instead of a short and easily-communicable SINGLE WORD is so deceptive and intellectually dishonest that it's clearly a willful and intentional misunderstanding of the safe-word concept. It's trickery, pure and simple.
Good safe word: "Banana."
Bad safe word: "Stop."
Terrible to the point of being unusable safe word: "I quit the experiment."
Zimbardo's lack of addressing this issue in his so-called "rebuttal": pathetic.
In general, I think journalists do always at least try to get both sides, and responses to any criticism, and would keep going back and forth. (If they don't, it's a basic ethical failure.)
And especially for technical articles, it's fairly common to send maybe a bullet list of all the points you're using from what they told you.
The reason sending drafts around is considered bad journalistic practice comes from political and commercial interests. People will object to minutiae in your article not because it's wrong, but because it's inconvenient for them, including blocking publication etc. (Again, less relevant for science, but the most important pieces of journalism can be a battle to get published.)
(A further point is that there do exist wiki-style summaries, more full and precise discussions, etc. But it's the pop media-style articles that have so much more reach, partly because of the often-erring attempts to simplify and make readable.)
This sounds like a good feature of the future of science, but doesn't really fit into the current publishing model. They aren't vetting the papers published there more than on a very basic level. If you want to respond to a paper, you should write another paper titled "Comments on..."
If we make this the policy, what do we do when the subject of a piece does not provide that final round of comments? Do the subjects of articles get to prevent publication by withholding comment? Or can the articles go ahead without those comments?
Because what you're describing is generally what is done, what has been done for decades. This is why you often see a sentence near the end of an article stating that the subject declined to comment or did not respond when reached for comment.
The assumption seems to be that people are interested in truthful reporting. In fact, most subjects do not want truthful reporting. They want favorable reporting, which is often not the same thing.
There seems to be very clear evidence that Zimbardo lied, at least, and possibly acted extremely unethically, possibly even illegally. Why would he be interested in providing comments on a story stating so? What would be his motivation? By withholding his rebuttal until after original publication, he can base his response on which parts of the story are gaining traction, if any. In this case, he's doing just that, and ignoring several elements for which he has no good answer.
It would be very nice if life were documented in a series of objective wiki pages, but so long as humans are involved, that will never be practical.
The criticism that the participants were just doing as they were told has always seemed to me as rather missing the point. What better demonstration is there of the human capacity for cruelty than a bunch of Stanford undergrads torturing other students because a professor told them to?
I don’t think that’s an accurate characterization of the criticism. The Milgram study, and its numerous replications, have pretty conclusively shown that most folks will do something they know is wrong if a perceived authority instructs them to. That’s not really in dispute.
The allegation is that Zimbardo orchestrated his project in order to produce a more dramatic narrative of spontaneous cruelty that wasn’t scientifically justified. It would be (it is alleged) as if Milgram had passed participants a note under the table that said, “FYI the subject is an actor— just go along with it, we’re trying to prove a point.”
Whether or not the Milgram results are valid, that certainly wouldn’t be a good demonstration of them.
Most of the people in the Milgram experiment said they knew it was fake which isn't the same thing as actually knowing. On one hand of course they knew it wasn't a real prison, they were told it wasn't a real prison and it clearly wasn't. Did they believe they weren't hurting "the prisoners"? That is far less clear and plenty of people have used the excuse that they didn't think they were actually hurting the other person.
I'm not weighing in one way or the other on the Milgram experiments, but we should not take reported experiences at face value in psychology experiments especially when there is a strong incentive for the subject to engage in self-deception.
So did a lot of Nazis who enabled the Holocaust. Isn’t that the point?
That’s maybe too flippant. “This is fake” is a way someone can rationalize doing something that they know is wrong. It’s important that they came up with that idea themselves, in response to a seemly inappropriate demand from an authority.
Notice:
The most common explanation was that they believed the person they’d given the electric shocks to (the “learner”) hadn’t really been harmed. Seventy-two per cent of obedient participants made this kind of claim at least once, such as “If it was that serious you woulda stopped me” and “I just figured that somebody had let him out“.
It doesn’t seem that there was anything evident in the room to make participants believe that it was anything besides what it appeared to be. They’re not saying “the screams were obviously acted.” Not “I could see that the box wasn’t connected to anything.” Definitely not “the experimenter told me it was staged.”
What led them to that belief was the social and cultural context. They believed the experiment was fake primarily because they believed that the authority figure would not make or let them actually harm someone. They transferred responsibility for their own actions to the authority figure; “I knew it was fake” is merely the mechanism.
At least, that’s a coherent theory we could put together based on the evidence. If Milgram had sneakily passed participants a note under the table, it would be a foregone conclusion that participants would believe it was fake, the evidence collected would therefore be meaningless, and the experiment generally worthless. That’s why this allegation is so damning to Zimbardo’s project.
The particular Nazi the Milgram Experiments are most associated with traditionally is Adolf Eichmann. Milgram's experiments were inspired by the trial of Adolf Eichmann, which began earlier that year (1961.) During that trial Adolf Eichmann infamously pleaded that he was merely following orders. He did not say the holocaust never happened, and he did not say he was unaware of it. He said that he was following orders.
The popular narrative of the Milgram experiments is that there exists such a psychological phenomenon in humans. That most humans follow orders, even orders they find deeply distressing. That's why the Milgram experiments shocked so many people; they were being told that if placed in the same position as Eichmann, they probably would have followed those same orders.
But we now know Eichmann's defense was bullshit, and a reexamination of the Milgram experiment results backs that up. People comply with orders when they agree with the motivation behind those orders; in the case of Eichmann the motivation behind the orders that he found agreeable was the wholesale slaughter of jews. In the case of the Milgram experiments, the motivation the teachers found agreeable was the advancement of science. An Amish man doubtlessly would have refused to comply in Milgram's experiments; and somebody opposed to the ideology of the Nazis would have refused to comply with the orders Eichmann received.
Even if they didn't see through the experiments; they still believed they were helping to advance the state of science.
Milgram's Experiments are often casually tossed around as proving that people blindly follow orders, but they actually showed the opposite. Teachers complied when they believed they shared a common cause with the experimenter (advancing science.) When this common cause was taken away, compliance rates plummeted. Removed from the prestige of Yale, compliance rates dropped; when the experimenter was not appealing to the necessity of science, compliance rates dropped.
What this demonstrates contrary to popular wisdom is that Adolf Eichmann's "I was just following orders" excuse was a load of shit. When the Milgram experiment results were first made public the narrative sold to people is that any common person would have become a Nazi had they been on the receiving end of those orders, just like Eichmann pleaded. The public was sold a bogus narrative about the experiments and this bogus narrative was subsequently reinforced by claims of the experiments being replicated (they were, but like in the original the experiments weren't demonstrating what they were claimed to demonstrate; that people blindly follow orders.)
Adolf Eichmann was not merely following orders, he was a true believer. This of course was revealed in quotes that came to light later:
>"Hätten wir 10,3 Millionen Juden getötet, dann wäre ich befriedigt und würde sagen, gut, wir haben einen Feind vernichtet. … Ich war kein normaler Befehlsempfänger, dann wäre ich ein Trottel gewesen, sondern ich habe mitgedacht, ich war ein Idealist gewesen."[If we would have killed 10.3 million Jews, then I would be satisfied and would say, good, we annihilated an enemy. … I wasn't only issued orders, in this case I'd have been a moron, but I rather anticipated, I was an idealist.]
> Removed from the prestige of Yale, compliance rates dropped; when the experimenter was not appealing to the necessity of science, compliance rates dropped.
This doesn't debunk anything. The thesis was that people would unquestioningly obey "an authority figure". What your observation shows is that people don't attach the same authority to scientists with less eminent affiliations which makes perfect sense.
I'm not saying that Milgram's experiment isn't flaweed, it most certainly is [0] but your analysis is weak.
> "This doesn't debunk anything. The thesis was that people would unquestioningly obey "an authority figure".
It debunks precisely that. The phenomena of obeying authoritiy figures is not ideologically neutral as the popular narrative suggests. Rather people make a decision about whether or not to comply with the authority figure based on whether or not their personal ideology aligns with the goals and motivations of that authority figure. In other words, it's not unquestioning obedience. People question the circumstance, question the motivation of the authority figure, and then make a decision about whether or not they will comply.
To put a finer point on it, people who follow orders from Nazis do so because they are themselves Nazis. People who follow orders from scientists do so because they believe in science. Demonstrating that x% of the general population near [university] during [year] follow the orders of scientists does not demonstrate that x% of that same population would follow orders from Nazis. This is contrary to the popular Milgram narrative that was sold to the public.
> people who follow orders from Nazis do so because they are themselves Nazis. People who follow orders from scientists do so because they believe in science
I don't want to spend too much time on this, but your position is itself informed by ideology.
I don't believe you fully grasp what went on in WW2 and are happy to promulgate a hurdurr bad guys narrative, which is fine to be honest but is antithetical to the tradition of "unconditional positive regard" upon which modern psychology is built, and so I believe any "good faith" analysis of this study is impossible for you.
> The Milgram study, and its numerous replications, have pretty conclusively shown that most folks will do something they know is wrong if a perceived authority instructs them
to. That’s not really in dispute.
The Milgram study needs to be contextualised in that participants will follow the orders as part of a scientific experiment, when prompted by the experimenter. You can see this in the order of prompts they were given when showing hesitation:
1. Please continue.
2. The experiment requires that you continue.
3. It is absolutely essential that you continue.
4. You have no other choice, you must go on.
It would be interesting to see a similar experiment outside of a "this is for science" setting, although I'm not sure what that would look like and how unethical it would be.
If that "ordinary men following orders and under expectation can be total bastards" then it's just Milgram's experiment all over again which result is itself obvious for any historian.
And if you are trying to prove that "ordinary men in position of power in jail setting spontaneously become total bastards" then the experiment is crap for that purpose if guards were encouraged to behave that way.
I don't think anybody doubts human capacity for cruelty.
The thing that Zimbardo built celebrity status on crap experiment and he still is a scientist and people give weight to his opinions on other psychology related subjects rubs some people the wrong way, I guess.
If that "ordinary men following orders and under expectation can be total bastards" then it's just Milgram's experiment all over again which result is itself obvious for any historian.
But as I pointed out in the other thread ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17289154 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17289386 ), Milgram has his own detractors. His conclusions were far from obvious to many, and are still controversial today. And it's true that his work was not above criticism. It seems you can't touch this subject on HN without getting personal, though. Unjustifiably-flagged comments and scores clamped to the -4 minimum are the order of the day.
I'm not a psychologist and have only a casual interest in the subject, so my experience in the last thread was like stumbling into a bar fight that I didn't know was going on. I suspect this thread will evolve along similar lines, but it's hard to be sure without conducting a formal study that will probably come under heavy dispute. /s
And if you are trying to prove that "ordinary men in position of power in jail setting spontaneously become total bastards" then the experiment is crap for that purpose if guards were encouraged to behave that way.
As everdev points out, that's the whole idea behind prison guard training! If you insist on studying these scenarios in a sterile, painstakingly-ethical academic environment, you will always be left scratching your head when an Abu Ghraib or a My Lai or a Guantanamo happens, wondering why reality stubbornly refuses to conform to your approved methodology.
If you want to run experiments on soldiers, then run them on soldiers.
If you're trying to prove a more general point, you do have to be much more careful. After all, if you do train your subjects to be soldiers or to blindly follow orders this does not prove the general point anymore.
If you additionally filter your experimental group (as typicalsoldier training does) then the point is even less general.
So you're missing the point. Now, a study on how effective military training is at instilling blind obedience is still very useful and important.
> that's the whole idea behind prison guard training! If you insist on studying these scenarios in a sterile, painstakingly-ethical
Thing is though, when the behaviour emerges you can't see if it's to do with the training, or the mere adoption of the prison guard role.
When you "condition" your participants to behave in a particular way then that can become a confounding factor and then when it comes time to appraise the results you can be left scratching your head.
Precisely what you want to understand when an Abu Ghraib scenario occurs is whether it could be the training or innate characteristic emerging from the role.
Of course you could do a between-groups study where some were conditioned and some weren't but what would that prove? That the conditioning had the expected effect?
> And if you are trying to prove that "ordinary men in position of power in jail setting spontaneously become total bastards" then the experiment is crap for that purpose if guards were encouraged to behave that way.
I think they were told to act in a dominant manner because actual prison guards are trained on how to be dominant.
Actually, "React as you imagine pigs reacting." according to this self-published source. According to another source from a decade ago by the very same author and published by Random House, a somewhat longer instruction:
> The guards have to know that every guard has to be what we call a "tough guard" [...] we need you to act a certain way. For the time being, we need you to play the role of "tough guard". We need you to react as you imagine the pigs would. We're trying to set up the stereotype guard – your individual style has been a little too soft.
Not "real prison guards", but "pigs", which latter carried in the 1970s a whole bunch of connotations that the former does not. As does "stereotype guard".
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.
What I find interesting are the people who are absolutely fanatical about disputing Zimbardo's conclusions. It's as if it's very important to them personally to be able to classify potential perpetrators of atrocities into two simplistic categories, People Who Do Stuff Like That and People Who, Somehow, Magically, Don't. Any experiments that might reveal human nature as the ultimate culprit are considered politically incorrect and unacceptable to perform.
Yes, the Stanford Prison Experiment was a dumpster fire. But so was the Nazi regime. When you want to study dumpster fires, you could do worse than to start a small-scale dumpster fire of your own and see how things progress.
Well said. I think it's instinctual to want to believe there is some intrinsic, insurmountable difference between us and them (people who do morally repugnant things). At the heart of it, it's tribalism.
This quote from Solzhenitsyn springs to mind. I have always kept it close to heart:
>If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
> Well said. I think it's instinctual to want to believe there is some intrinsic, insurmountable difference between us and them (people who do morally repugnant things). At the heart of it, it's tribalism.
Or maybe they’re just tired of crap science that just won’t die.
When you want to make your point, just use “Lord of the Flies” instead. It makes compelling, similar points about the human condition. But it just does it as a novel, not as a fake experiment.
> It's as if it's very important to them personally to be able to classify perpetrators of atrocities into two simplistic categories, People Who Do Stuff Like That and People Who, Somehow, Magically, Don't.
You don't see why that is something a person might want to believe, if at all possible? Humans have done some pretty terrible things; I think that being able to say "Yeah, but I wouldn't do that" is almost as important (regardless of truthiness) as believing in free will.
I mean, sure, maybe everyone would have done those horrible things, and maybe we don't have free will... But it's clear that you will make better decisions if you act as if you have free will... if you act as if you have some power to stop or at least not contribute to the horrible things that happen in the world.
So... yeah, I'm personally quite sympathetic to people who feel it's really important to believe that not all of us would become nazis.
You don't see why that is something a person might want to believe, if at all possible?
The people I respect want to know the truth, even if it's upsetting or disillusioning. I think Zimbardo and Milgram were similarly motivated, even if their methods were questionable.
We are, after all, talking about a scientific experiment here. Starting with a conclusion and looking for evidence to justify it is what the researchers are being criticized for, so we need to avoid making the same mistake in support of our own comforting biases.
>The people I respect want to know the truth, even if it's upsetting or disillusioning.
Even if it makes you dramatically less effective?
As far as I can tell, the best evidence is that we probably don't have free will in a way we would find meaningful.
However I can tell you that you will have a much better life if you act as if you have free will, in spite of that evidence.
Even if I'm wrong on that point of fact, and I could be; this isn't really my field, my point stands. Would you prefer to believe in something, even if the 'upsetting or disillusioning' side of that belief is that truly believing it would cripple you as a human?
It's an interesting question, all right. In some ways it's similar to the question of whether we'd be off as a species if the resources we spend on religious institutions and practices were directed toward rational ends.
I'm unquestionably less 'effective' as a member of society because I'm not religious, and I might even be happier if I took advantage of the free social capital that comes with participation in communal irrationality. But at some point, it would threaten my sense of self-actualization. I don't want to die feeling like a successful, happy fraud. Do you? For the same reason, I don't want to pretend that Zimbardo's results can be ignored because of the unscientific manner in which they were obtained.
Sigh, here come the ad hominems. I do not have a "pro-Zimbardo bias," whatever that is. I wouldn't know Zimbardo if he came to the door selling encyclopedias.
I have read Solzhenitsyn, Mayer, Ma Bo, and any number of other authors who have recounted similar 'experiments' that also took place outside the comforting oversight of a peer-reviewed ethics committee, though. At some point, patterns emerge and conclusions are drawn.
If there had been a control group, it would have consisted of prisoners held by guards who didn't behave anything like prison guards are trained to behave.
So whether that would be useful is a matter of opinion, I guess. In the real world, you don't always have the luxury of controlled experiments. Ask astronomers, climatologists, paleontologists, or any number of other practitioners about that.
Except that, you are the one who makes simplistic categories. You want it to be about human nature and don't want it to be about ideologies and opinions.
"It is human nature to escalate abuse within week in position of power" and "we can make people escalate abuse quickly if we indoctrinate them right" are very different conclusions with very different implications.
If you are really interested in Nazi regime, you would do better if you would study history, what happened when Nazi were still small, what real Nazi were saying, ideas and fears that shaped German opinions, journals of contemporary people, what opposition did and how they lost, that sort of thing.
You will find better understanding of historical German actions in there then in single study on few American students.
If you are really interested in Nazi regime, you would do better if you would study history, what happened when Nazi were still small, what real Nazi were saying, ideas and fears that shaped German opinions, journals of contemporary people, what opposition did and how they lost, that sort of thing.
I have. The conclusion I've reached is that we're incredibly fortunate that few of those circumstances exist in the US today. If they did, the outcome would be the same, because -- get ready for this, it's a radical statement -- we're no different than the Germans.
The Nazis were not aliens or monsters or demons. They were us. Just a matter of the right (wrong) circumstances combined with the right (wrong) leadership, that's all.
That's basically what the infamous psychological experiments of Milgram and Zimbardo showed, when all of the academic hair-splitting and infighting is said and done. Their observations were, and are, a big problem for anyone who's invested in the "Some people are just evil monsters" model.
Oh yeah, we are very different then Germans. We have different values and political system. We have overall much lower levels of violence. We could become like Germans, but overall, we are not nearly there. Hitler did not became leader randomly and his ideas and opinions were not formed randomly. His competitors for power were different then him.
Among other things, the social darwinism and race believes of Nazi were formed by bad contemporary science (and misuse of it). They believed themselves to be rational and the right kind of man. Guess someone needed to hair split those ideas more loudly long before.
The academic hair splitting matters. The truth matters and the truth here is that this particular experiment did not shown what Zimbardo claimed to show.
In practical politial consequences of time, this experiment was used as argument that you can't possibly make prison less abusive. It did not shown that at all, it shown only that it is possible to make it abusive if you want to. Difference matters, because if you stop trying, well then conditions won't improve.
> fanatical about disputing Zimbardo's conclusions
What you're misrepresenting as "fanaticism" is simply a strong but justified emotional reaction to what the debunking of Zimbardo implies.
An emotional reaction triggered by the revelation of a revealed hostile bias against normal people just like themselves by formerly trusted scientists, formerly trusted journalists, and other formerly trusted opinion leaders.
Ah yes, the Stanford Prison Experiment, which makes serious psychologists sigh and roll there eyes. Putting aside ethical considerations, it was so confounded as to be completely useless.
It's taken seriously enough to be taught in every university survey course on psychology and sociology, and that wouldn't still be happening if the "serious" people in those disciplines wanted to stop.
I was taught it.... in a way to say "this is not how to research things and if you heard about this you should probabbly rethink anything you think about it".
Whilst that may indeed be what you were taught, Jared M. Bartels paints a rather different picture of what introductory textbooks have been found to say on this subject.
You're right actually. I recall the textbooks did present the study in a different light to what we were taught in class. Interestingly the discussion in these textbooks never went into much detail, usually just providing a brief overview of it and noting that it was "important".
As a more mature reader I might read between the lines there and wonder.
Yeah, the reason I was taught it was in an experiment design class, because it caused psychological harm to the subjects (not the prisoners) without their consent. Thus being an exemplary case of an ethical failure.
Zimbardo has lost all credibility, the fact that this begins with anything but a point-by-point refutation of the Medium article just highlights that fact.
The Medium article was highly illuminating and included so many different sources that Zimbardo's response here just reads as a desperate attempt to regain credibility that's LONG gone.
> He had befriended both Carlo and me in an attempt to get me to agree to give him screen rights to a Hollywood movie about the SPE. When instead, I chose to go with Maverick Films producer, Brent Emery, Lazarou began writing negative critiques of both me and the SPE.
Why does anyone need Zimbardo's permission to write a screenplay involving the SPE?
Zimbardo is a disgrace. There are legitimate results in the field of psychology, but the Stanford Prison Experiment is not one of them. All it ever proved was that Zimbardo's ethics was highly compromised.
In the final paragraph, he claims to be "promoting what is best in human nature. That in [sic] my current life mission." In reality the only thing he's ever been good at promoting is himself. And I know this is trivial and stupid, but he couldn't even avoid a typo in the last line of his rebuttal? Come on.
Consensuality is such a fragile thing, when benefits and/or potential for exerting pressure are involved. Well, at least we don't need evidence that it wasn't consensual. /s
If anything, this whole debacle has revealed to me how pathetic the whole "science" of psychology is in its current state.
I mean, the emblem of its field can't even acknowledge any flaw in his experiment. I'm not saying it was bogus, but it's pretty obviously biased and flawed in many ways. Even if executed with perfect methodology, which it clearly wasn't, that sample size and the bias in participants literally provides no value.
At least if they had the humility to acknowledge how primitive the whole thing was, and that there's much more to learn. But it seems they're just like, here it is folks, undeniable unarguable proof, we're done, let's close shop.
I mean, has the field of psychology given us anything of value? I'm asking genuinely. I'm now under the impression it did not. In fact, it seems it has mostly been used as a tool to justify atrocities under the guise of science instead of religion, more often then it actually enabled us to understand ourselves better and thus organise our society more optimally, or correct and alter negative behaviours.
The reproducibility problems of psychology general - of which this is only a small fragment - is showing a few things:
1) Psychology is harder than almost anyone thought.
2) We are only now starting to have enough data to know just how hard psychology really is.
3) There is too much of an onus to publish, "Publish or perish" in science in general.
4) Negative results are very valuable for the public and all other researchers, but generally negative for the researchers career. Even scientists need food.
5) People will use whatever that can pass for facts to further their own agenda, whatever that may be. Left, right, and center. Incidentally, psychology as a science has now taught us that both through its successes in that area, and through how people outside of psychology believed the authorities of psychology to be implicitly right whenever it fit their point of view.
Psychology is a science, no need for the quotes, it's just happens to be incredibly hard to turn the experimental results into reliable facts in that particular field, so shortcomings of both people and systems become magnified. The high difficulty is probably also why some authorities might have gotten an unusually large role in the social networks underlying any area of research, and the public eye. People want answers, even if there isn't really enough data, and even when researchers says: We really don't know.
Science is always only our best guess, in some areas it pretty darn good, but in others not so much, yet.
> If anything, this whole debacle has revealed to me how pathetic the whole "science" of psychology is in its current state.
What? How an academic being defensive of his study, conducted in 1971, an invalidation of "current" psychology? That's 40 years ago.
> I mean, has the field of psychology given us anything of value? I'm asking genuinely.
What an extreme leap, and an odd generalization for me to have to argue against. How about Milgram, Asch, Cognitive Dissonance? Studies of memory, vision, neurons can inform the development of AI. Things like IQ tests have helped detect and prove that leaded gasoline was damaging the intellect of a generation. Psychology is THE field to give clarity to question such as what gender dysphoria is about (research shows it is usually correlated with a brain that is more structurally similar to the gender one identifies as [1]).
So I'm not sure where a wholesale indictment of a field could really come from.
That wiki link, did you read the section on psychology in it? It pretty much reinforces my opionion. Seems like most of the real understanding of it is coming from biological factors.
Now it seems that those initial psychological theories were all argued with similarly low sample and methodologically wonky studies. Just paraphrasing the wikipedia link. In effect, that probably hurt more then it helped and that's why we're starting to see things like Denmark declassifying it as no longer a mental disorder.
Edit: I know I'm making a big blanket statement. As someone who does not read about all the latest psychological breakthrough, I'm saying in honesty that with my limited knowledge, the impression I get from psychological research is that its not very thorough. So I'm open to hearing that in the last 40 years this has changed, an example would be great, so that I can start maybe changing my opinion.
1. I provided 6 separate examples of the use of psychology (3 experiments, 3 real-world use-cases). You responded to one.
2. Something being biological is not contrary to it being psychological.
Your response is disingenuous. You certainly are well-aware that your blanket statement was a rash, emotional inaccuracy. Rather than concede that point, you're choosing to try to nit-pick at one sixth of the refutation.
The problem, from where I sit, is that certain types of experiments have a built error detection or safety rails and psychology doesn't have this. For instance if a physics experiment has a result which appears to violate conservation of momentum or has information being sent faster than the speed of life, then it is likely that there is a flaw in the experiment. Unfortunately many of the social sciences don't have these easily detected error conditions. Thus, it becomes much harder to determine is an experiment is flawed or not. Making this situation even worse social sciences are very hard to control for and replicate because you can't just order "one standard human" for the experiment. Two experiments may not replicate each other due to no fault of the experiment. What we need is a model of human psychology that provides clear boundary conditions.
But there are methods to deal with more or less all of these problems, that is why social scientists learn research design/methodology separately so much. In my opinion being able to replicate results should still be required to accept a theory. My problem with this case is that things that I consider basics for the scientific method (replication or even a control group) are obviously missing.
To the people downvoting my comment I'd be genuinely interested in hearing why people see my comment as damaging to the discussion.
>But there are methods to deal with more or less all of these problems
There are methods to deal with designing experiments poorly, but even the best experiment could have some unknown unknown issue that skews the results. Physics has an inherent advantage that experimental mistakes often lead to results which contradict theory to such an extent that the experimenter can be fairly sure the experiment is in error.
> In my opinion being able to replicate results should still be required to accept a theory.
Strongly agree, however replication often becomes harder to achieve as the complexity of the system you are measuring increases. Photons are simple in ways that humans just aren't. For example various mental disorders only appear in certain cultures, the culture of a photon isn't a problem a physics experimenter needs to worry about. With studies on humans there are so many more places for failure to occur both in the original study and in the replication. Training matters, but the task is significantly more difficult.
I am not going to describe the multitude of advances due to psychological sciences. I'd just like to point out that while the Stanford Prison Experiments got a lot of press, these experiments occurred a long time ago in a particular subfield of pschology, and has very little to do with the validity of psychological sciences as a whole.
With so many to choose from coming up with one you thought would survive scrutiny here should have been as easy as giving the blithe dismissive answer you did.
As blithely dismissive as grandparent who dismissed a whole field of science based on one scientific study (and hand waves at unnamed others)? Are you serious?
If you want a 'practical' set of findings, just take a look at all the psychological tricks learned and now applied to increase social media addiction, gambling addiction, etcetera.
As a bystander, I'm not a psychologist, the last few years have been article after article affecting the credibility of psychology.
Then, I paused and thought, what has psychology done to improve our lives? And I can't think of anything.
So I'm calling out to others to show me the flip side. Every wikipedia page I go to has a huge section in criticism that basically says no one knows, some people say this is true and works, an equal amount of others say its not and doesn't. Like the page on CBT: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_behavioral_therapy
Cognitive Bias is my first showcase of something that seems mostly proven without controversy. Can I ask what has been the next step in using our understanding of inherent cognitive biases? You mentioned they're used to increase addiction to products. That's a shame, has it helped in other areas, maybe to more positive outcomes?
Whatever problems there are, this doesn’t reflect them. As you say, he is the emblem of the field. How do you think he got there? This is someone who has made their career on one surprising result, and is probably quite used to the conference circuit and interviews now. Lots of personal reasons to fight the truth.
Ya, but the fact that his research is still thought at school, his textbooks are still used as material, and that I'm not seeing an openly acknowledging crowd of newer psychologist going: "Oh ya, we know about the methodoligical flaws in Zimbardo's research, and today's research is completly different, way more rigorous, and no one uses his data points for anything serious anymore..." makes me worried there's a pathological trend in the field.
Which is why I openly asked for people to reassure me I'm wrong to believe that the science of psychology is bogus. I've yet to see any data point or argument to reassure me by the way, I've only seen people be dismissive or point that I shouldn't generalise like that. The latter is true, but also doesn't mean my hypothesis is not correct.
Meta-analysis as we know it today is largely as it is because of psychologists using it to study therapy effects.
Referring to Zimbardo and the Stanford Prison Experiment as the "emblem of its field" is a bit strange in my opinion. It's like referring to Snapchat as the emblem of computer science.
Let’s get specific and see if you’re right. The theory of classical conditioning says if you present a neutral stimulus together with a biologically significant one, an animal will eventually show the same response to the neutral stimulus alone as it does to the biologically significant one.
Is this falsifiable? Seems like it. You’d just have to show cases where qualifying stimuli are repeated and the neutral stimulus alone provoked no reaction.
Not necessarily. In an ideal world psychology could be scientific.
In this world, however, we observe that the Behaviorists, who were uniquely concerned with holding psychology to strict scientific standards, where ganged up upon and hounded out of the field. The hounders can't be trusted.
Behaviorism isn't simply about holding psychology to a higher scientific standard and it is misguided to imply it is the only psychological paradigm to have done so. As an easy counterexample, take a look at cognitive psychology.
As it is phrased your comment is not helpful. Besides the huge generalization (how is hacker news fake news?), you barely provide any arguments for your points. Can you elaborate on how this post is 'fake news'? (I'm not going to go down a 'hacker news is fake news' rabbit hole but am interested in your criticism of this post specifically)
Anyone who is criticizing this experiment I challenge to go undercover as a prison guard or go work for ICE. In fact many journalists have done this in the past.
Dehumanization of the other mixed in with a bit of fear and poof civilization is out the window. Hello Colonel Kurtz.
I have no strong opinions either way, but one meta-point I personally find interesting is: why don't journalists send a final draft of an article to the people involved and get a final round of comments? That just seems fair. Zimbardo claims some facts in the article are simply wrong, and either 1) those errors would be corrected, or 2) Zimbardo's response to those claims could stand side-by-side, instead of this bifurcated situation of articles and response articles.
I think it would be even better if these arguments were in a wiki (or git) style instead of a series of articles.