{"id":4033,"date":"2018-06-11T02:40:42","date_gmt":"2018-06-11T02:40:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/?p=4033"},"modified":"2018-06-11T02:40:42","modified_gmt":"2018-06-11T02:40:42","slug":"the-lie-of-the-stanford-prison-experiment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/2018\/06\/11\/the-lie-of-the-stanford-prison-experiment\/","title":{"rendered":"The Lie of the Stanford Prison Experiment"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"1_Tr9jvx5Q7hu0hiH4G5eYvA\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Replication crisis, episode #7812.<\/p>\n

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D<\/span>espite the Stanford prison experiment\u2019s canonical status in intro psych classes around the country today, methodological criticism of it was swift and widespread in the years after it was conducted. Deviating from scientific protocol, Zimbardo and his students had published their first article about the experiment not in an academic journal of psychology but in\u00a0The New York Times Magazine,\u00a0<\/em>sidestepping the usual peer review. Famed psychologist Erich Fromm, unaware that guards had been explicitly instructed to be \u201ctough,\u201d nonetheless opined that in light of the obvious pressures to abuse, what was most surprising about the experiment was how few guards did. \u201cThe authors believe it proves that the situation alone can within a few days transform normal people into abject, submissive individuals or into ruthless sadists,\u201d Fromm wrote. \u201cIt seems to me that the experiment proves, if anything, rather the contrary.\u201d Some scholars have argued that it wasn\u2019t an experiment at all. Leon Festinger, the psychologist who pioneered the concept of cognitive dissonance, dismissed it as a \u201chappening.\u201d<\/p>\n

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A steady trickle of critiques have continued to emerge over the years, expanding the attack on the experiment to more technical issues around its methodology, such as demand characteristics, ecological validity, and selection bias. In 2005, Carlo Prescott, the San Quentin parolee who consulted on the experiment\u2019s design, published an\u00a0Op-Ed<\/a>\u00a0in\u00a0The Stanford Daily<\/em>\u00a0entitled \u201cThe Lie of the Stanford Prison Experiment,\u201d revealing that many of the guards\u2019 techniques for tormenting prisoners had been taken from his own experience at San Quentin rather than having been invented by the participants.<\/p>\n

In another blow to the experiment\u2019s scientific credibility, Haslam and Reicher\u2019s attempted replication, in which guards received no coaching and prisoners were free to quit at any time, failed to reproduce Zimbardo\u2019s findings. Far from breaking down under escalating abuse, prisoners banded together and won extra privileges from guards, who became increasingly passive and cowed.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Replication crisis, episode #7812. Despite the Stanford prison experiment\u2019s canonical status in intro psych classes around the country today, methodological criticism of it was swift and widespread in the years after it was conducted. Deviating from scientific protocol, Zimbardo and his students had published their first article about the experiment not in an academic journal […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4033","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3pfIY-133","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4033","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4033"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4033\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4035,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4033\/revisions\/4035"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4033"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4033"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4033"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}