The Stanford Prison Experiment - (((Italian)))-American lead experiment showing that humanity is basically just Kiwifarms mixed with 4chan and 9/11

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DaBigBopper

DaBigBopper

We had better make damn sure of our evidence
kiwifarms.net
Joined
Oct 12, 2021
Honestly, I kinda want to discuss it because at it's heart it shows how fucking insane the University system has been for a while. The entire study was a psychologist, Philip George Zimbardo, horribly designing an experiment to satisfy his bias and run his own personal fetish buffet. Stanford News Service described it as such:

Zimbardo's primary reason for conducting the experiment was to focus on the power of roles, rules, symbols, group identity and situational validation of behavior that generally would repulse ordinary individuals. "I had been conducting research for some years on deindividuation, vandalism, shower rape, and dehumanization that illustrated the ease with which ordinary people could be led to engage in anti-social acts by putting them in situations where they felt anonymous, or they could perceive of others in ways that made them less than human, as enemies or objects," Zimbardo told the Toronto symposium in the summer of 1996.
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The experiment stopped after a few days because it quickly became guards power tripping because they thought it's what the researchers wanted to see or were basically informed by the others they were supposed to make inmates bite the pillow. Zimbardo, also, put himself at the center of the experiment as a liaison between prisoners and guards, which failed. The experiment ended on the sixth day when his girlfriend and research assistant saw the conditions and wanted to know why the fuck it devolved into leather daddies and gimps.

Zimbardo has flip flopped over the years if the experiment was valid or not based upon social climate, I'm not gonna link directly because it's fucking absurd how much he goes back and forth. A lot of the interviews were by the his then-girlfriend now wife. Something important I should add is that Zimbardo and Stanley Milgram were supposedly associates in highschool.

I feel like a lot of psych experiments are just University lolcows running their own experiments to satisfy their own biases. Feel free to bring up other experiments if you want and cause huge flame wars if you bring up how Kinsey was highly unethical.
 
If you want a demon to explain the current political climate, Pavlov has a lot to answer for.


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murph said:
If you want a demon to explain the current political climate, Pavlov has a lot to answer for.


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I'd blame social Darwinism making rich people think that being rich means that they are more fit because no one understands that Darwinism just means the fittest person in the room has the most kids live to adulthood to spread their genes.
It doesn't always mean that the best and smartest do succeed. After all, Ethan Ralph has kids and Null doesn't.

Conditioning itself is a huge fucking problem because we assume a lot of shit based upon animal models. Unlike biology, animal models in psych aren't always criticized in the field as much. I'm not much of an experimentalist, my training is making theoretical models while working with a experimentalist. However, of the conventions I have had to go to the psychology presentations are fucking absurd and it's all in the direction of diversity now.
 
Zimbardo is pretty interesting guy. I once heard a story that he likes to go to restaurants and order dessert first, then a main meal, just to fuck with people and see how they react.

(((Behavioural psychology))) as a whole has taken some pretty big hits ever since the Replication Crisis a decade or so ago. IMO it's pretty easy to see which of their conclusions are valid and which are complete nonsense, though.
 
Kerwin White said:
Zimbardo is pretty interesting guy. I once heard a story that he likes to go to restaurants and order dessert first, then a main meal, just to fuck with people and see how they react.

(((Behavioural psychology))) as a whole has taken some pretty big hits ever since the Replication Crisis a decade or so ago. IMO it's pretty easy to see which of their conclusions are valid and which are complete nonsense, though.
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I'd say it took pretty big hits when it was founded considering the first big name was just trying to explain away why he wanted to kill his dad and fuck his mom. People go into psychology merely to find answers for their own hang ups then project them onto other people so everyone with that hang up feels less crazy. What a racket.
 
Psychology is about as real as the WWE. Only realistic when you discuss it in the context of psychology. Otherwise it's just meaningless. IDK why this is in the fitness board.
Only time psychology is really useful is with personality disorders. Disordered individuals do follow a pattern and it's good to know the pattern.
 
No Batty Boys in Jamaica said:
Psychology is about as real as the WWE. Only realistic when you discuss it in the context of psychology. Otherwise it's just meaningless. IDK why this is in the fitness board.
Only time psychology is really useful is with personality disorders. Disordered individuals do follow a pattern and it's good to know the pattern.
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It's the Health and Fitness board. Mens sana in corpore sano and all that you know? I don't know if this topic really fits this board, but it's technically Health. I don't really want to @ Null about this. I'll ping @AnOminous and @Secret Asshole because they seem to be the most active mods/ former mods who'd probably have a good say about this.
 
Both experiments would be considered so wildly unethical now that they would never be allowed. In fact, those two experiments in particular (among even worse ones with absolutely zero scientific merit) are a big part of why human research permissions are so difficult to get now.

If you allowed an experiment like this and someone was psychologically harmed (many involved in Zimbaro and Milgram claimed lasting negative effects), they could sue your pants off as well as the institution that okayed such quack tier shit.

However, I still think they proved their central point, if not the specific hobby horses the two scientists were riding: a person in a position of authority or apparent authority can get a ridiculous degree of compliance to absolutely absurd commands, and the degree of compliance varies by the perception of authority. Why they can get a bunch of barely adults to participate in their personal weird fetishes as if they were the Whizzard in that cartoon from 1d4chan. . .except with the power to decide your grades.

(I think the fundamental critique of these experiments and why they are arguably not valid and are currently not replicable under ethical rules, is that the mere coercive aspect of a teacher/student relationship meant that with or without the psychological justification, that alone could have altered behavior, thus providing an alternative explanation for the students' behavior that is not the explanation offered by the researchers.

I'd say that doesn't really ultimately matter because the internal mental reasoning why people do something in the presence of apparent authority is less important than that they actually do so.)

There are a number of people who appear to be immune to this kind of control but the number is disappointingly small.

And of the portion who don't, a good number don't not because they're mavericks or some kind of noble individualist, but because they're just sociopaths who can't even obey good rules.

As for where the thread should be, I dunno, deep thunks?
 
Hate to burst bubbles, but two very oft cited psychological studies, 'The Miller Experiment on Obedience' and 'The Stanford Prison Experiment' have both been completely disproven, with The Stanford Prison Experiment being revealed as completely fraudulent.

The Miller Experiment, famous for justification of the banality of evil of Nazisim, had someone turn up the electricity to someone getting a shock on the other side. Miller found most people would keep turning the voltage no matter what, even when the screaming stopped. Scary right? Well, no.

You see, there's a big thing in psychology where your experiment needs to hide the objective from the participants, or at least the game. The truth is, most people figured out the game that no one was really getting shocked and they wanted to see what would happen. Another thing was excluded that most people flatly refused to hurt someone else and didn't participate. These data points were excluded from the study and presented a radically different conclusion that the entire premise of the experiment was flawed and the results were actually nothing like they were claimed to be.

The Stanford Prison experiment suffers from what I like to call 'Nice Story Syndrome'. The whole thing is a really nice story. Its engaging, dramatic and reveals something about human nature. Its such a good one. The problem is, with good story syndrome, we tend not to be critical and don't look too close because we like the story.

However, here's the thing: The guards were coached to be cruel. The prisoners knew the guards couldn't actually hurt them or do anything to them. They were just college kids fucking around and having fun. Most of the participants used it to brush up their acting or improv skills. One student who was a guard played at being sadistic for improv, acting the role, not really being sadistic himself.

Zambardo also broke the cardinal rule: He was part of the experiment himself, which means he exposed the whole thing to an incredible amount of bias. The whole 'experiment' was functionally an improv class.

The whole thing is a complete fraud and says nothing about human nature except college kids had a blast fucking around and acting out a little play and were all friends.

The Stanford Prison experiment is an example of absolute fraud perpetuating itself as research and the Miller experiment is an example of data manipulation getting the outcome you want. They are both wrong and have since been stopped being taught in any modern psychological curriculum.
 
Secret Asshole said:
You see, there's a big thing in psychology where your experiment needs to hide the objective from the participants, or at least the game. The truth is, most people figured out the game that no one was really getting shocked and they wanted to see what would happen. Another thing was excluded that most people flatly refused to hurt someone else and didn't participate.
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The version Bill Murray did in Ghostbusters was probably more scientifically valid.
 
AnOminous said:
The version Bill Murray did in Ghostbusters was probably more scientifically valid.
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The funny part is that's actually a real test that was done at one point.
 
BeepBoopBeepBoop said:
It's the Health and Fitness board. Mens sana in corpore sano and all that you know? I don't know if this topic really fits this board, but it's technically Health. I don't really want to @ Null about this. I'll ping @AnOminous and @Secret Asshole because they seem to be the most active mods/ former mods who'd probably have a good say about this.
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nah im not mad.
 
No Batty Boys in Jamaica said:
nah im not mad.
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I kinda just want schizo posting and effort posting about horribly designed experiments that have somehow effected the public conscience. I think there is a Kinsey thread where someone goes into detail about how Kinsey had horrible ethics and his scale was literally based upon what various prisoners. The Acali Raft experiment is another great one where some scientist wanted to prove that people alone on the ship would instantly turn into grug brains and rape women and it just turned into him trying to start shit because none of his theories were being validated.

This seemed like the best place to post it. Unless we want to start a community watch thread about the Psychology Collegiate Community.
 
Secret Asshole said:
Hate to burst bubbles, but two very oft cited psychological studies, 'The Miller Experiment on Obedience' and 'The Stanford Prison Experiment' have both been completely disproven, with The Stanford Prison Experiment being revealed as completely fraudulent.

The Miller Experiment, famous for justification of the banality of evil of Nazisim, had someone turn up the electricity to someone getting a shock on the other side. Miller found most people would keep turning the voltage no matter what, even when the screaming stopped. Scary right? Well, no.

You see, there's a big thing in psychology where your experiment needs to hide the objective from the participants, or at least the game. The truth is, most people figured out the game that no one was really getting shocked and they wanted to see what would happen. Another thing was excluded that most people flatly refused to hurt someone else and didn't participate. These data points were excluded from the study and presented a radically different conclusion that the entire premise of the experiment was flawed and the results were actually nothing like they were claimed to be.

The Stanford Prison experiment suffers from what I like to call 'Nice Story Syndrome'. The whole thing is a really nice story. Its engaging, dramatic and reveals something about human nature. Its such a good one. The problem is, with good story syndrome, we tend not to be critical and don't look too close because we like the story.

However, here's the thing: The guards were coached to be cruel. The prisoners knew the guards couldn't actually hurt them or do anything to them. They were just college kids fucking around and having fun. Most of the participants used it to brush up their acting or improv skills. One student who was a guard played at being sadistic for improv, acting the role, not really being sadistic himself.

Zambardo also broke the cardinal rule: He was part of the experiment himself, which means he exposed the whole thing to an incredible amount of bias. The whole 'experiment' was functionally an improv class.

The whole thing is a complete fraud and says nothing about human nature except college kids had a blast fucking around and acting out a little play and were all friends.

The Stanford Prison experiment is an example of absolute fraud perpetuating itself as research and the Miller experiment is an example of data manipulation getting the outcome you want. They are both wrong and have since been stopped being taught in any modern psychological curriculum.
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I appreciate the answer, but my pinging you was more about if this fits on the Health and Fitness Board. I see it as Mental Health related because it's a Psychological Study performed by a man who has his wife interview him for major publications and generally seems like a lolcow in his own right (most psychologists seem to lolcows). I just don't want to anger the Arch-Janny of the Interwebs, the Fearless Feeder known as Null with this when a more active mod probably could answer this.
@AnOminous is just active enough that I feel like bothering him was the next best option.
 
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