23 అక్టోబర్, 2026

"You might have wondered, as I did, whether it’s even possible to authentically recreate such a famous experiment."

"'Stanford Prison Experiment' has become a cultural shorthand for sinister power dynamics. As a participant, wouldn’t you know how things turned out last time? Wouldn’t you try, equipped with the knowledge that cameras were capturing your every move for millions of viewers, to make things not turn out that way?"

I'm reading "This landmark experiment was horrifying. Why is Netflix performing it again? The Stanford Prison Experiment has been rebirthed for your viewing, uh, pleasure" (WaPo)(gift link).
వీరిచే పోస్ట్ చేయబడింది Ann Althouse వద్ద 11:17 AM
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32 కామెంట్‌లు:

RCOCEAN II చెప్పారు...

If it was legitimate science, it can be replicated. Science, social or not, that cannot be replicated is not science.

23-10-26 11:19 AM
Brian McKim and/or Traci Skene చెప్పారు...

They wanna "recredit," as it's been discredited.

23-10-26 11:23 AM
Aggie చెప్పారు...

Replicated or not? For your viewing pleasure.

It'll be a little hard to find someone that won't be instantly familiar with the story. Where will they find their test subjects?

Netflix, huh? Isn't that the one with some interesting board members?

23-10-26 11:23 AM
Joe Bar చెప్పారు...

Wasn't this "experiment" exposed as a fake? The whole thing was scripted, IIRC.

23-10-26 11:25 AM
chuck చెప్పారు...

It's politics, and likely was the first time around as well.

23-10-26 11:32 AM
s'opihjerdt చెప్పారు...

How long does it take for "reality" tv to go from "fear factor" to "the running man"?

23-10-26 11:35 AM
Paddy O చెప్పారు...

Didn't some questions come up about how actually valid that original experiment was? In that the people involved were staged or something?

Even if it was valid, I don't think the issue of replicability is a problem. The trouble with any behavioral sciences is that humanity is extremely complex in unpredictable ways depending on a lot of factors. So there can be trends and tendencies but rarely exact conditions unless the experiment is performed with clones of the original time and place and people.

I never discount the ability for humanity to quickly devolve into barbarism, but there's immense difference between how college students in 1971 were raised and how college students are raised now, making for very different reactions to authority and power in culture (what was a huge emotional break away in cultural resistance for a 20 year old in 1971 would be a normal Saturday nowadays).

But people are people, so maybe they would react the same. Just too many variables to say any divergence somehow discounts the original.

And now in thinking the earlier study was invalidated I think I was remembering the Milgram shock experiment. But maybe not.

23-10-26 11:35 AM
Paddy O చెప్పారు...

Now reading the other comments which affirm my earlier doubt about it. I wish there was a tool or website out there that would help me learn about the wider context of things like this...

23-10-26 11:36 AM
rhhardin చెప్పారు...

The important social science experimental advice is don't use cats. They screw up the data.

23-10-26 11:38 AM
Lazarus చెప్పారు...

I would wonder whether it's necessary, since a movie about it was already made in 2015. This new version is just slopburger forced down our throats by Hollywood, abetted by big media. But it's slop all the way down, since the original "experiment" has been discredited as "flawed, unscientific, and manipulated."

I don't know if the earlier Milgram experiment was also discredited, but Peter Sarsgaard was entertaining in the movie "Experimenter," also 2015.

23-10-26 11:49 AM
Smilin' Jack చెప్పారు...

Today as a proposed experiment it would never get past any institution’s Human Subjects Committee. Fortunately, Netflix doesn’t have one of those.

23-10-26 11:53 AM
RideSpaceMountain చెప్పారు...

Sam Hyde is already practically doing this with Fish Tank. Kids think it's entertaining. Looks like torture to me.

23-10-26 12:01 PM
Marcus Bressler చెప్పారు...

That was exposed as quite a bit less than ... scientific. Fake news.

23-10-26 12:13 PM
Ignorance is Bliss చెప్పారు...

Wouldn’t you try, equipped with the knowledge that cameras were capturing your every move for millions of viewers, to make things not turn out that way?

I'm pretty sure I would be playing it up for the cameras just for the fun of it.

23-10-26 12:15 PM
Big Mike చెప్పారు...

It’s called the Hawthorne Effect. I assert that the original Stanford Prison Experiment may well have also been an example of the Hawthorne Effect, if one or more of the observers subtlety conveyed approval of the sadism.

23-10-26 12:31 PM
Mary Beth చెప్పారు...

Didn't the professor running that experiment also take part in it and influence the students acting as guards? If so, then I expect the new reality show trying to replicate it will do as reality shows seem to do and also have a thumb on the scale. Actually, I expect that regardless of what happened the first time.

23-10-26 12:44 PM
Josephbleau చెప్పారు...

“Am Psychol
. 2019 Oct;74(7):823-839. doi: 10.1037/amp0000401. Epub 2019 Aug 5.
Debunking the Stanford Prison Experiment

Thibault Le Texier 1
Affiliations expand
PMID: 31380664 DOI: 10.1037/amp0000401
Abstract

The Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) is one of psychology's most famous studies. It has been criticized on many grounds, and yet a majority of textbook authors have ignored these criticisms in their discussions of the SPE, thereby misleading both students and the general public about the study's questionable scientific validity. Data collected from a thorough investigation of the SPE archives and interviews with 15 of the participants in the experiment further question the study's scientific merit. These data are not only supportive of previous criticisms of the SPE, such as the presence of demand characteristics, but provide new criticisms of the SPE based on heretofore unknown information. These new criticisms include the biased and incomplete collection of data, the extent to which the SPE drew on a prison experiment devised and conducted by students in one of Zimbardo's classes 3 months earlier, the fact that the guards received precise instructions regarding the treatment of the prisoners, the fact that the guards were not told they were subjects, and the fact that participants were almost never completely immersed by the situation. Possible explanations of the inaccurate textbook portrayal and general misperception of the SPE's scientific validity over the past 5 decades, in spite of its flaws and shortcomings, are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

PubMed Disclaimer”

This experiment was a hopeless unethical political statement. It has long been criticized as scientifically fraudulent but the conclusion was so politically attractive and valuable to a certain political viewpoint that it arises from the dead over and over.

Just another example of the corrupt nature of the “science “ of Sociology. Zimbardo was on a mission to find what he wanted to find.

23-10-26 1:10 PM
Josephbleau చెప్పారు...

And to have an entertainment network go through the motions of “replicating” an experiment while filming it for future broadcast, are they using paid actors? Why not just save the time and publish a paper based on the script they wrote for the actors to perform, they already have the data before the “replication” is performed! This is a disgusting perversion of what they are supposedly “researching.” It’s worse than Al Capones vault.

23-10-26 1:23 PM
rhhardin చెప్పారు...

In the old days psychology did real experiments:

Watson, repeating similar experiments [to Pavlov], noted the transference aspect of such conditioning. Having found that the violent striking of an iron bar produced fear in an infant, he noted that he could give a fear character to some hitherto neutral object, such as a rabbit, by placing it before the child each time the iron bar was struck; he next demonstrated that t his conditioned fear of the rabbit was transferred with varying degrees of intensity to other things having similar properties (such as fur coats or cotton blankets).

Kenneth Burke _Permanence and Change_ p.11-12

23-10-26 1:24 PM
Rabel చెప్పారు...

"'Stanford Prison Experiment' has become a cultural shorthand for sinister power dynamics."

"When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

23-10-26 1:50 PM
n.n చెప్పారు...

J6 prosecution... persecution.

23-10-26 1:54 PM
FullMoon చెప్పారు...

Something similar worked pretty good on the UniBomber.

23-10-26 3:10 PM
Scott M చెప్పారు...

No such things as "reality tv" except maybe sports :)

23-10-26 3:25 PM
boatbuilder చెప్పారు...

OK it's Wikipedia. But I had never heard of this apparently famous experiment, so I looked it up.

It sounds like a bunch of theater students were given the opportunity to display their chops, with the director providing encouragement and acting as warden.

What a crock!

23-10-26 5:23 PM
hanuman_prodigious_leaper చెప్పారు...

Was prison metaphoric stand-in for society or classroom?

23-10-26 6:36 PM
hanuman_prodigious_leaper చెప్పారు...

Isn't unstaged experiment an oxymoron?

23-10-26 6:44 PM
Indefinitely Extended Excursion™️ చెప్పారు...

The Stanford (Zimbardo) prison experiment is among social psychology’s most overblown studies: methodologically flawed, prematurely terminated, yet elevated into a grand theory of human nature. A case study in mistaking an intuitively appealing narrative for scientific evidence.

23-10-26 7:23 PM
Interested Bystander చెప్పారు...

It wouldn’t be legit unless you could find some subjects who had never heard of the original study. I was thinking, given the man on the street interviews Jesse Waters’ Gianni does you could go around to some of the Ivy League schools and find some. Those kids seem to know literally nothing. Most of them couldn’t name the vice president - At least the ones Gianni finds to interview.

23-10-26 8:27 PM
WWPaulKlee చెప్పారు...

All this is reminiscent of the Susannah Cahalan book The Great Pretender. The Rosenhan experiment (what's with the extra "H"s?) aka Being Sane in Insane Spaces, which she parsed out to be another academic fraud-like event. The intellectual underpinning of so much of the basis of folksy knowledge is "all folked up". People feigned mental illness and were institutionalized, coming out with varied errant diagnoses. Trying to work Howard Zinn into this, but I'll just point out his werky-werk had slavery as a topic, but not a single word of the Freedman's Bureau, run by General O. O. Howard, founder of his eponymous university. He was falsely accused of malfeasance in his office (cleared of the charge) by the Democrat Party, who then destroyed this worthy institution.

24-10-26 6:31 AM
Lazarus చెప్పారు...

What fails as science lives on as performance art. Manipulating the results makes the performance more impactful.

24-10-26 7:36 AM
Assistant Village Idiot చెప్పారు...

It's a fraud. Psychology at that time was science fiction: "Wouldn't it be cool if humans were like this? That would reinforce our prejudices." Are humans actually like that? "Don't harsh my mellow, man. This is cool to think about."

24-10-26 5:42 PM
Smilin' Jack చెప్పారు...

“But just about every accepted understanding makes that swing. The barrel of his bat was through the hitting zone -- past parallel to the front of the plate.”

I always thought it had to be past parallel to the first base line. That’s why the appeal is made to the first base umpire; he’s in the best position to judge that line since he’s standing on it. He’s not in a good position to see the angle relative to the front of home plate. In the present case it’s clearly a swing by the home plate rule; it’s only controversial if you use the baseline rule.

25-10-26 1:07 PM

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