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The Stanford Prison Experiment was massively influential. We just learned it was a fraud. (www.vox.com)

submitted 10 months ago by kpw@kbin.social to c/science@lemmy.world

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The Stanford Prison Experiment, one of the most famous and compelling psychological studies of all time, told us a tantalizingly simple story about human nature.

The study took paid participants and assigned them to be “inmates” or “guards” in a mock prison at Stanford University. Soon after the experiment began, the “guards” began mistreating the “prisoners,” implying evil is brought out by circumstance. The authors, in their conclusions, suggested innocent people, thrown into a situation where they have power over others, will begin to abuse that power. And people who are put into a situation where they are powerless will be driven to submission, even madness.

The Stanford Prison Experiment has been included in many, many introductory psychology textbooks and is often cited uncritically. It’s the subject of movies, documentaries, books, television shows, and congressional testimony.

But its findings were wrong. Very wrong. And not just due to its questionable ethics or lack of concrete data — but because of deceit.

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[-] ClanOfTheOcho@lemmy.world 118 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

"We just learned" is a bit of a stretch. Here is a Medium post from 2020, which cites previous interviews and Jon Ronson's 2015 book "So You've Been Publicly Shamed," that explains the problems with the infamous experiment: https://medium.com/invisible-illness/have-we-gotten-the-stanford-prison-experiment-all-wrong-fad09471e79c

Edit: Ah, title is straight from the Vox title, and that article is from 2018

[-] driving_crooner@lemmy.eco.br 9 points 10 months ago

Before your edit I was about to say that maybe the journalists just saw the video fact checking all Somerson videos where they learned that the research was a fraud.

[-] fireweed@lemmy.world 52 points 10 months ago

Yo mods, we really could use a tag for articles that are old. In this case, half a decade!

[-] laverabe@lemmy.world 3 points 10 months ago

there is no such tool to tag a post as such, the mod tools are still very limited. It's either remove or approve, and it's hard to draw where that line should go sometimes.

[-] fireweed@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago

Bummer. Is it possible to require titles of submissions that are more than X months old include the source date? Especially since Lemmy allows for title editing it wouldn't even require post resubmission to comply.

[-] laverabe@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago

I think since Lemmy is still very low on content, so any restrictions should be light. Right now Lemmy is in the wild west phase, and it'll probably be like that for awhile until there is more content.

A long list of rules and requirements worked great on a subreddit with a million people, but right now I think less rules is better for the time being, at least until there are multiple posts a day.

[-] fireweed@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago

Fair enough. In the meanwhile, thanks for modding and helping keep the sub alive!

[-] m3t00@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

down vote is all I got. down and scroll. liberal ad/script blocking. Firefox has this reading mode. If that doesn't work I usually skip the whole site. can't sit here all day and delete trash. let op know your displeasure and hope they try harder in the future. obvious spam gets trashed on site. you can read any account's post history by visiting their profile.

[-] JWBananas@startrek.website 30 points 10 months ago

Have we not known this for decades?

[-] SturgiesYrFase@lemmy.ml 6 points 10 months ago

By Brian Resnick@B_resnickbrian@vox.com Jun 13, 2018, 2:30pm EDT

At least more than half a decade.

[-] JackLSauce@lemmy.world 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

They didn't even know what a control group was; "fraud" may be giving it too much credit

The experiment was little more than a political demonstration and I can confirm that was "old news" to my professors in the late '00s

[-] Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world 22 points 10 months ago

I always thought Philip Zimbardo and his dyed goatee looked like they were right out of a Reno magic show. I guess Zimbardo was more of an illusionist than most people actually realized.

[-] Destraight@lemm.ee 11 points 10 months ago

We just learned? The article is from 2018. OP are you dumb?

[-] uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 10 months ago

You're Wrong About did a solid deep dive into this one. ( On buzzsprout )

[-] ConstipatedWatson@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I get that this is yesterday's news, but I did not hear of this development in 2018 when the article came out. So for me this is a "Today I learned" (even if it's old news for everyone else).

I learned about the Stanford Prison Experiment from the crappy German movie "The Experiment" they made in 2001 and then listened to some interviews by Zimbardo around 2006 or so.

In fact, though the linked Vox article provides several examples of experiments that cannot be well reproduced, it is interesting that the Wikipedia article says Zimbardo is still very much convinced his experiment is sound (at least he still was in 2018).

Edit: fixed grammar