I had always been a little curious about the "Stanford Prison Experiment," a supposed exercise in which two groups of people were assigned to be either guards or inmates. The experiment was conducted at Stanford University in 1971 and claimed to show that just that minor exercise of power brought out innate cruelty in the group acting as guards.
My curiosity came from wondering how ordinary folks degraded so quickly. Certainly there are people in authority who abuse their power. Professions in which one is a part of a group that has power over another group that is essentially powerless can tend to draw people who like to exercise that power or abuse it. But not everyone's a closet sadist, and the idea that just a few hours of being on the top side of a massive power imbalance would prompt abuse never really sounded true to me.
Turns out that the experiment, like a lot of famous psychological experiments that are supposed to show how rotten people can be, was fabricated. It had always been given a bit of a side-eye based on questionable ethics and such, but writer Ben Blum dug deeper into the records of the experiment, following the trail of French documentary moviemaker Thibault Le Texier who had researched and prepared his own exposé.
Blum's interviews show that one of the supposed breakdowns that stopped the experiment early was faked. The cruelest guard deliberately went over the top and crafted a character based on guards from Cool Hand Luke, even faking a southern accent he didn't really have.
Writing for Vox, Billy Resnick notes several other famous psychological experiments have problems being reproduced and seem to feature coaching from the experimenters which probably skewed the results. Although many of these experiments are decades old, information eroding their credibility is only lately being confirmed. Some required many years of work and research to be debunked.
Which effort, it seems, according to both stories, pales in comparison with getting the fraudulent or suspect findings out of the classroom. The Stanford Prison Experiment seems to have been clearly refuted, and it only took forty-seven years. It may take another forty-seven to get it out of basic psychological textbooks.
2 comments:
Wow. I started reading the book by Zimbardo on the experiment a year or more ago and had to quit because it creeped me out/depressed me too much.
So: some faith in humanity restored to realize that it was made up. (Then again, I suspect anyone who's gone through a public school system in the US in the past 40 or so years is aware of the cruelty that groups of people can seemingly-spontaneously get up to)
That one -- and the one where people kept "shocking" people because they were ordered to -- never seemed quite right. The scenarios they were said to have created are certainly possible and for some people even likely, but I always felt like there was a curtain I was being told not to look behind.
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