Wow, I completely agree. And you were clear before. I was just a little surprised by this commentary given my participation in the thread you started, To those who don’t think criminals are different than you and I
Perhaps I missed the point of that thread. What did I miss?
Is that a direct cite? If so, from where? BTW, did you read the interview that I posted the link to? Because this is his explanation, (which is similar to the Milgard experiment result)
Um. No. He meant that according to the full psych evaluations they did of the kids before the experiment, there were no warning signs; no signs of latent problems.
I think you’re extrapolating far too far. He has never said that ‘all people in prisons will eventually become power-mad fiends’ but rather that if the wrong situations are allowed to develop, people will mistreat other people.
Do you dispute the dynamics of cults? Do you disbelieve everything that’s known about Stockholm Syndrome, Battered Wife Syndrome, and other cases where people are treated very badly and change radically?
That’s what he means by ‘environment’. He doesn’t mean ‘prison’; he means ‘situation in which people are enabled to exercise power over others without restraint’.
So? What you’re saying is that he’s right in saying that people take on roles in such situations.
When ‘the situation’ includes strong peer pressure, then that can be the equivalent of a cattle prod. Read the part where the guards would punish other prisoners if one prisoner acted out.
I’d like to see your answers to the questions posed by John DiFool
John DiFool’s hypothetical doesn’t apply in this case. No one was threatening death in the Stanford experiment and there was no reason to think that dire consequences would ensue if one did not follow. In the Stanford experiment, there was only peer pressure.
In John DiFool’s hypothetical, the only reason that murder becomes the option is because the other alternatives are worse. That’s a simple cost/benefit analysis.
Comparing the two is not applicable. Peer pressure influence vs. losing your life are not comparable.
Well, you’re welcome to fly in the face of established studies, not to mention real-world examples, if you really like to. However your wishing it was not so won’t make it not so.
At this point, the question should be ‘how does this happen and how can it be prevented’ or it will just keep happening.
I didn’t really have a point in that thread. I was just relaying the experience of encountering somebody whose mental landscape was completely alien to my own. A lot of people read way too much into that.
That was you? All is becoming clear.
…it does sell a lot of books.
“It” will keep on happening, because people suck. It’s inherent in the species.
Of course a major genetic reprogramming effort could lie in the future, and/or we’ll find a way to get soma into the water supply.
If a dead Pope can cure Parkinson’s disease, anything is possible. 
Yes, I read your link. Did you read mine? Because that’s the source of my quote.
Here are some of the ways he described them: “a collection of the ‘best and brightest’ of young college men in collective opposition to the might of a dominant system”; “all 24 participants were physically and mentally healthy, with no history of crime or violence, so as to be sure that initially they were all ‘good apples’.”; “good personalities”; “We gave them a battery of psychological tests, interviews, because we wanted to start our prison filled only with good apples, if you will. That is, normal healthy young men, college students. Little more intelligent than the average public. But ordinary, healthy young men.”; “Remember, this is 1971. All of these kids are anti-war activists, civil rights activists, everybody’s got hair down to here, you could call them hippies. So these are kids who are against authority, whether they are prisoners or guards.”
Except that Zimbardo has specifically and repeatedly over a period of three decades said “prison”. He believes that the prison environment caused all of the behavior he saw and that once the people were removed from that environment it all disappeared.
These are all quotes from Philip Zimbardo:
“The situational forces in that “bad barrel” had overwhelmed the goodness of most of those infected by their viral power. It is hard to imagine how a seeming game of “cops and robbers” played by college kids, with a few academics (our research team) watching, could have descended into what became a hellhole for many in that basement. How could a mock prison, an experimental simulation, become “a prison run by psychologists, not by the state,” in the words of one suffering prisoner? How is it possible for “good personalities” to be so dominated by a “bad situation”? You had to be there to believe that human character could be so swiftly transformed in a matter of days not only the traits of the students, but of me, a well-seasoned adult. Most of the visitors to our prison also fell under the spell.”
“And what I able to say was, all of you did some bad things, and all of you saw each other doing some bad things. But it’s not diagnostic of any pathology in you because we picked people who are the most normal and healthy on all psychological measures. It’s really diagnostic of the power of the situation. So that even though kids had these emotional breakdowns if you will, there was no lasting effects.”
“Of course, once you take them out of that situation, and once you take them out of their costumes, just like soldiers, you take them out of their uniform and put them back in their street clothes, they bounce back to the healthy, base rate that they had earlier. So there were not, surprisingly, any lasting negative effects, which of course makes me feel good.”
“When we have total freedom, we choose situations that we know we can control. But when we’re in situations where other people are in charge, in the military, in prisons, in some schools, in some families, we are – we can be transformed.”
"And what we wanted to do was create essential psychology of imprisonment, and that’s all about power. Every prison is about power. Guards have to assume more and more power and domination, and prisoners have to have their power stripped away. And so that is the ultimate evil of prison. It’s all about power, dominance, and mastery. And that was the same thing we found in Abu Ghraib prison.
But also – so the way that power evolves is, the prisoners have to be ultimately dehumanized. You have to think of them as not your kind, not your kin, as – ultimately you end up thinking of them as animals. And the guards have to be impersonal, distant. Whatever humanity they have when they are home, when they are with their families, that has to be suspended, put on a hook. Because, what they have to do is treat other people in ways that they don’t treat anyone else, those are the people being prisoners."
“It’s not the bad apples, it’s the bad barrels that corrupt good people.”
“The question there was what happens when you put good people in an evil place? We put good, ordinary college students in a very realistic, prison-like setting in the basement of the psychology department at Stanford. We dehumanized the prisoners, gave them numbers, and took away their identity. We also deindividuated the guards, calling them Mr. Correctional Officer, putting them in khaki uniforms, and giving them silver reflecting sunglasses like in the movie Cool Hand Luke. Essentially, we translated the anonymity of Lord of the Flies into a setting where we could observe exactly what happened from moment to moment.”
“In contrast, if you grow up poor, you tend to emphasize external situational factors when trying to understand unusual behavior. When you look around and you see that your father’s not working, and you have friends who are selling drugs or their sisters in prostitution, you don’t want to say it’s because there’s something inside them that makes them do it, because then there’s a sense in which it’s in your line. Psychologists and social scientists who focus on situations often come from relatively poor, immigrant backgrounds. That’s where I came from.”
“Coming from New York, I know that if you go by a delicatessen, and you put a sweet cucumber in the vinegar barrel, the cucumber might say, “No, I want to retain my sweetness.” But it’s hopeless. The barrel will turn the sweet cucumber into a pickle. You can’t be a sweet cucumber in a vinegar barrel. My sense is that we have the evil barrel of war, into which we’ve put this evil barrel of this prison—it turns out actually all of the military prisons have had similar kinds of abuses—and what you get is the corruption of otherwise good people.”
"The bottom line is that nobody really cares what happens in prison. Nobody wants to know. Prisons are the default value of every society. We just want to dump convicts there, and let them come back and be good people. We only care about rapists and child molesters, so we want to keep track of them when they get out. For everybody else we don’t want to know. We assume they go to prison, we’d like to believe they get rehabilitated, and when they come back they work in society. But from everything I know, most prisons are places that abuse prisoners, making them worse. They make them hate, make them want to get back at the injustice they’ve experienced.
All prisons are cloaked in a veil of secrecy. No one knows what happens in a prison. And when I say no one outside the prison knows, I mean mayors don’t know, governors don’t know, presidents don’t know, and Congressional subcommittees don’t know. Prisons are huge places, and if you just walk in you wouldn’t know what to see. They could direct you to one part of the prison where everything is clean and rosy and nice, and the prisoners are eating steak for your visit. Prisons have to lift the veil of secrecy. The media and lawyers have to have access to prisons."
The conclusion is unavoidable. Professor Zimbardo believes that the prison environment will inevitably and immediately corrupt anyone who enters it. The only cure is to leave the prison environment whereupon you will immediately become normal again.
Which I know to be nonsense. Philip Zimbardo spend tix days in a make-believe prison in 1971. I have spent over twenty-four years in a variety of real prisons. I know that the conditions he experienced in those six days bear no reality to the conditions in real prisons. I’m not saying that abuses cannot occur in a prison but they they are no more typical of a prison than they are of a college or a factory or a department store.
I don’t know the answer to that question. I’ve never been in a situation where I had to make a choice between killing somebody else or dying myself. I hope I never am. But I don’t see where this has any relevancy to what we’re discussing here.
Yes, Quiddity, I’m sure it’s clear to you. You know that people like you and Philip Zimbardo would never do anything immoral. Unless the room you were in made you do it. Bad room. Evil room. Step out of the room and be good again. Look, Nemo’s still inside the room - he must be evil.
But I know that I can work in prison and still be a moral person, regardless of what you and Philip Zimbardo think.
And your saying that there are studies and real-world examples that contradict my statements doesn’t make it so either.
I’m not saying the peer pressure doesn’t affect behavior. I’m saying that it doesn’t likely, without more, end up in murder.
All too complex to be answered by The Stanford Prison experiment in isolation.
Just as one experiment on nutrition is not sufficient to explain how to stop starvation around the world.
Perhaps you meant that they didn’t read enough into it. Because on the face of it, this:
is an apparent contradiction with this:
Well, I’ve seen documentaries on prisons and prison reform that say different, and according to this article, at the time that Zimbardo’s experiment was conducted, the situation was pretty grim.
You didn’t start working in prisons until some time after.
There have been a lot of reform efforts since but there are still quite a few groups working on prison reform so I’m guessing they’re not exactly at an ideal state yet.
Zimbardo believes that an environment similar to his “prison” will corrupt many who enter it. Whether most prisons have such an environment is a separate issue. Remember , in his “prison” the " guards" had no outside controls placed on their behavior- no oversight, no fear of being suspended or fired or going to prison themselves. All of which exist in your environment. All Zimbardo really did was show that even normal, mentally healthy people will abuse absolute power if it’s given to them. Rather seems like common sense to me, but apparently the idea was shocking to a lot of people. While I don’t think that the environment exempts an individual of responsibility for his or her own actions, I do think those who allowed that environment to exist also bear some responsibility.
Is Dr. Zimbardo an attention-seeking showboater? Was he subtly encouraging the subjects to ham it up? It’s hard to know, since as far as I can tell, the experiment didn’t have a control group and wasn’t done in a double-blind fashion. It’s hard to see this as serious science.
It’s not that hard to know, since all the participants are still alive (I believe) and are prefectly capable of saying that Zimbardo did so. They do not.
Legitimate psychology experiments do not rely on subjects accurately describing their own motivations. Legitimate psychology experiments rely on double-blind setups and control groups to test these things.
What about Milgram and the blue-eye/brown-eye experiment (which has been done many times)?
What do you think the answer is if you think Zimbardo’s conclusion is bogus?
No, some well-designed experiments are designed like you say. Others cannot be designed in the double-blind manner at all. This is one of them. Please explain how an experiment like this would work in a double-blind way and what the control group would be. Would the control group be people sitting in a room alone for a few days? Inquiring minds want to know.
BTW, your knowledge of experimental design is ignorant at best but comes from a small amount of learning… A little knowledge is the most dangerous condition.
If you want to defend yourself, redesign the experiment in your own words meeting the qualifications you state.
Simple: No direct contact between Zombardo and the subjects. 2 or 3 groups of 24 people. A grad student is given written instructions to read to each group of 24. The grad student is told generally what is being investigated but not what Zimbardo hopes or expects the experiment to show.
For example, one group of 24 might be instructed that the “guards” will be constantly obvserved and then evaluated at the end of the 2 weeks. Another group of 24 might be instructed that the guards are on their honor to behave humanely while enforcing discipline, and that based on experience, Stanford students have generally enforced discipline while not abusing any “prisoners.” Another group might be simply instructed that the guards are to enforce disipline.
That would be a legitimate experiment.
Do these experiments rely on the subjects accurately describing their own motivations?
AFAIK you’re right about the choosing of the guards, but I remember a story told to us in Air Force Basic about a German soldier, Werchmacht, who, when being told to execute civilians on the Eastern Front, put down his rifle and joined those about to die rather than pull the trigger. He was a decorated combat veteran IIRC. Obviously, I don’t know the full story and don’t have any cites or would have provided them, but this was taught to us during our Geneva Convention and Rules of Armed Combat training, telling us we had every right to refuse to follow an illegal order. I’ve also read anecdotal evidence of reliable Nazis commiting suicide after the war when the full realization of what they did came to light. But again, anecdotal.
As for the OP - I’d like to think I would do option 1 and join those killed rather than sacrifice my morals and beliefs, but I honestly don’t know. The Stanford Experiment, and some other thigns, made me think long and hard about this, and the answer is that while I would like to think I’d behave a certain way I just don’t know if that’s true and honest or just a dream.