Talk:Stanford prison experiment

	This Psychology related article has not received a brainstar for quality. Please consider expanding the article appropriately. See RationalWiki:Article rating for more information.

Problems

I don't know too much about the experiments so I don't feel intellectually comfortable research them and summarising them, but does anyone else feel that our description doesn't really describe the experiments themselves? Having read about them before and knowing the common name, I can infer that some participants were prisoners and others were guards, but apart from that, the article seems a bit lax. άλφα^Ταλκ 22:56, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

Agree. There's no account of the methodology; any flaws it may have had; or any depth to the conclusions drawn. Unfortunately, I'm unqualified to expand the article. Scherben (talk) 21:39, 19 February 2014 (UTC)

Short version? It's a handful of american college students (9 in each group) and Zimbardo was the guy who ran the prison. It is methodologically unsound to the extreme; this article is therefore thoroughly factually inaccurate; eg, claims that the experiment "showed the power of authority" are nonspecific and misleading.

Additional post in an earlier WIGO:Blogs: The Lifespan of a Lie. We should go into detail about the shame that is this experiment. Disappointing in its current state. --It's-a me, LeftyGreenMario! 20:12, 16 August 2018 (UTC)

Bullshit

http://www.cracked.com/article_21193_5-ridiculous-lies-you-probably-believe-about-psychology.html

Zimby was just a narcissistic misanthrope who desperately wanted people to accept his unfounded theory. Don't be gullible. 31.77.138.215 (talk) 09:30, 4 May 2015 (UTC)

Room for Expansion

I saw that an article by Philip Zimbardo was trending on the Clogosphere and looked to see what the wiki had on him. I've read his book 'The Lucifer Effect', some papers and heard a talk or two. So I'm biases and an interest, the Stanford Prison Experiment was unsound. Bullshit isn't inaccurate, but it's more like an apocrypha that just caught on and overshadows all his other work. It comes up in Conspiracy Blogs on how the Government is brainwashing people, while it's not as fraudulent as Milligram's experiment turned out to be. I am wanting it to be longer and more detailed.

There's some inaccuracies;

• One person did leave the experiment by malingering, and those in the guard roles didn't permit some to leave.
• The Uncertainty/Certainty Weaseling; Here we have "Though not designed very well" and later "The results of this experiment showed the power" it reads as giving undue weight to the conclusion of the experiment. The article as I see it should run a balance against making him look like the Psych Rockstar Conspiracy Theorists want him to be, and a run-of-the-mill Kook that ended up with legit qualifications and good PR.

And Points to Expand;

• How the subjects adopted their roles so quickly
• The abuse of ethics
• Zimbardo also claimed to have taken a role of Prison Warden
• Reluctance to terminate the experiment early
• Media/Pop Response and maybe the opinion of other social psychologists (peer review en all)
• Later Work

Largely going by memory but my reasoning for each point; In Lucifer Effect he talked about Abu Ghraib and the lack of instructions the Prison Guards were given allowed an informal 'code of conduct' form that give their silent approval to abuse. In the original experiment, Zimbardo took a 'hands-off' approach early in and avoided giving instructions on what the guards were to do; no clear rules, they let their imagination sink in on what their guard role is supposed to be like. I can't remember the Prisoner's being briefed on Fair Treatment (let alone their human rights) and rioted and made barricades out of mattresses. The abuse of ethics I feel should be covered as apart from being unsound, it's the other half of the critique against it. Pro-Human-Testing views or wanting to defend Jozef Mengele's work for it's 'value' pervades the NRx's legion of Armchair Scientists. The experiment is popular, but I think it's for the wrong reason or is used to argue for worse bullshit. His later work is him trying to reformulate how to go about the experiment but without the abuse of ethics that ensued, such as the Hero Initiative and how to avoid that whole 'banality of evil' of being an asshole because you think that's your job. He also did work on Italians with the Perception of Time, completely irrelevant but I want to point out he still does other work. 109.148.18.5 (talk) 22:17, 30 May 2015 (UTC)

Total rewrite needed

The experiment was deeply flawed and no conclusion should ever have been drawn from it. Bongolian (talk) 08:04, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

Finished the rewrite. Bongolian (talk) 03:50, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

Thank you very much for addressing that dire need of a rewrite. --It's-a me, LeftyGreenMario! 04:08, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

You're welcome, @LeftyGreenMario! I think I only knew about the study from an old college textbook before I saw the docudrama recently. That got me interested, because even the Zimbardo-supported docudrama showed that there were methodological and ethical problems. I mostly took citations from the WP page, but the text is mine obviously. Bongolian (talk) 04:12, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

Sure. Have you seen my older comment here linking to an article about this? --It's-a me, LeftyGreenMario! 05:44, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

I just gave it a read. It's a good story. Do you want to integrate it into the page? Zimbardo countered those criticisms on his web page.[1] I find it harder to deal with some of the qualitative critiques, for which Zimbardo often offers counter-claims. I think that the strongest criticisms rely on failure to create an experiment, failure to reproduce it, and assertions about the study that are not supported by what transpired. I'd welcome any editing that you can contribute. Bongolian (talk) 07:05, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

He isn't even counter-claiming them, if you squint your eyes. For each claim, he's attacking one more or less incidental element rather than the actual core criticism:

• some humiliations were suggested to the guards by your accomplice? Well, let's just say one out of many different sources for it was false (and also fail to mention the colossal lengths the Stanford Daily went to try to validate their reporting)
• there was a blackboard with torture-related words during guard training? Let's just repeat that we requested them to be "firm" and nothing else
• the worst shit was only done by a single guard, but more or less every one thought they had to act a role? Let's only argue that "simulated doggy style sodomy" is something that would never cross the mind of a young fratboy
• prisoners didn't know how to act in the first place because it wasn't even clear if getting paid required to put up with the bullshit or telling "the system" to fuck off? Uuh.. something the emotional breakdown of one guy something
• it would have been incredibly difficult for the entire setup to be convincing and immersive because prisoners could pretty much always hear the offices around them? Hey look, the BBC study!

IN FACT now that I focus better on it, his very response betrays him:

SPE was designed as a mock prison simulating .. the main features ..[of] the American prison system at that time —

This is a total disown of 50 years of pretending this was actually about human nature. No fucking shit that even in Norway guards don't give you the keys to your cell, but if the "US prison" expectation directly implies that you have to be a bloody monster, then you cannot brag that is a magical and unexpected result of your experiment. Let alone when he plays semantic slalom, by pretending that unqueried nudges to "get active" (after everything going according to the plan, but sadism) is the same thing of.. I don't know? Real wardens having to put up with an ongoing riot (or soldiers having to defend their trench) and one of them deciding it's really time for a smoke break? --Mirh (talk) 21:49, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

Lede picture

I'd like to add this (https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2013-06-30) to the top of the article, but I don't know what the policy is with regards to permissions and copyrights. Friedman (talk) 00:29, 9 December 2021 (UTC)

Since the image is copyrighted, you should request permission for use on our website before it gets added. Zach Weinersmith's email seems to be weeklyweinersmith@gmail.com. Bongolian (talk) 00:34, 9 December 2021 (UTC)

Thanks, will do. Friedman (talk) 01:30, 9 December 2021 (UTC)