The Stanford Prison Experiment was a hoax : people are not that pliable

An excellent long read on the Stanford Prison Experiment. Some of this I was aware of previously, much else is new.

The very short version is that Zimbardo is an arse.

The slightly less short version is that Zimbardo is a victim of his own flawed narrative, depicting himself as a victim of circumstance. Actually, the prison experiment, when the full facts are described, reveals basically the opposite of the popular conclusion. People don't naturally become psychopaths through such rudimentary conditioning. Not only were there heavy selection effects at work in the choice of prisoners and guards, and not only were Zimbardo and others actively encouraging the behaviour they were seeking, but much of the resulting "behaviour" was simply fake. Rather than everyone falling victim to the situation and becoming brutal sadists, Zimbardo's own innately arsehole nature seems to be the overwhelmingly dominant force here. Not only did he force the conclusions that he wanted the experiment to show, but he goes on to actively promote those conclusions for decades afterwards.

The appeal of the experiment is that it lets people off the hook for committing atrocities. While there's no doubt that the situation does play a role, it's nothing like what Zimbardo claimed. This is somewhat good news for decent people (caveat : https://plus.google.com/u/0/+RhysTaylorRhysy/posts/DUBMNo9PFZj) but bad news for arseholes.

“You have a vertigo when you look into it,” Le Texier explained. “It’s like, ‘Oh my god, I could be a Nazi myself. I thought I was a good guy, and now I discover that I could be this monster.’ And in the meantime, it’s quite reassuring, because if I become a monster, it’s not because deep inside me I am the devil, it’s because of the situation. I think that’s why the experiment was so famous in Germany and Eastern Europe. You don’t feel guilty. ‘Oh, okay, it was the situation. We are all good guys. No problem. It’s just the situation made us do it.’ So it’s shocking, but at the same time it’s reassuring. I think these two messages of the experiment made it famous.”

It also has a bunch of consequences for prison reform :

“When I heard of the study,” recalls Frances Cullen, one of the preeminent criminologists of the last half century, “I just thought, ‘Well of course that’s true.’ I was uncritical. Everybody was uncritical.” In Cullen’s field, the Stanford prison experiment provided handy evidence that the prison system was fundamentally broken. “It confirmed what people already believed, which was that prisons were inherently inhumane,” he said."

“What the Stanford Prison Experiment did,” Cullen says, “was to say: prisons are not reformable. The crux of many prison reforms, especially among academic criminologists, became that prisons were inherently inhumane, so our agenda had to be minimizing the use of prisons, emphasizing alternatives to prison, emphasizing community corrections.”

Most criminologists today agree that prisons are not, in fact, as hopeless as Zimbardo and Martinson made them out to be. Some prison programs do reliably help inmates better their lives. Though international comparisons are difficult to make, Norway’s maximum-security Halden prison, where convicted murderers wear casual clothing, receive extensive job-skill training, share meals with unarmed guards, and wander at will during daylight hours through a scenic landscape of pine trees and blueberry bushes, offers a hopeful sign. Norwegians prisoners seldom get in fights and reoffend at lower rates than anywhere else in the world. To begin to ameliorate the evils of mass incarceration, Cullen argues, will require researching what makes some forms of prison management better than others, rather than, as the Stanford prison experiment did, dismissing them all as inherently abusive.

https://medium.com/s/trustissues/the-lifespan-of-a-lie-d869212b1f62