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by helloplanets·2y ago·view on hn ↗
Stanford prison experiment has very much been debunked, it does not reflect at all what would naturally happen in such a situation.

> These new criticisms include the biased and incomplete collection of data, the extent to which the SPE drew on a prison experiment devised and conducted by students in one of Zimbardo's classes 3 months earlier, the fact that the guards received precise instructions regarding the treatment of the prisoners, the fact that the guards were not told they were subjects, and the fact that participants were almost never completely immersed by the situation. [0]

> Zimbardo and his assistants ordered the guards to become cruel, and, moreover, that guards and prisoners alike knew what Zimbardo was trying to prove and were eager to help. [1]

> In other words, the sadism of the guards and the submissiveness of the prisoners in the experiment didn’t reveal the hidden darkness of the human soul, so much as the willingness of college students to please a professor. [1]

[0]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31380664/ [1]: https://www.wired.com/story/beware-the-epiphany-industrial-c...

1 comments
That's why I am so often disgusted with the psychology research ethics. So many experiments are impossible to reproduce (vide recent reproducibility crisis), some (like the Stanford Prison Experiment) are debunked, but it is already too late — the damage is already done. As soon as a controversial research thesis reaches the public opinion (Zimbardo made sure his thesis would become popular), it becomes part of the "folk wisdom" and is repeated as a holy truth and a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Fwiw I don't think an IRB would ever sign off on Zimbardo in 2023. Extremely poorly designed study; it's a travesty that we still see his mug while he narrates videos in Psych 101.