Re: The Stanford Prison Experiment

Working in the theater in college in the late 1960s, we did a production of “The Brig” with student actors and a freshly minted Yale Drama grad as director. Sometimes the magic works, and in that case the results were pretty horrific and left some lasting emotional scars on the entire production crew. It was a great piece of theater.

Ref: The Brig, 1963 The Living Theater, NYC (written by a former Marine brig prisoner who served 30 days)

Every time I think about the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp I shudder because of that play. Prison is a sharp blade that cuts both ways hurting the guards as well as the guarded. Anyone who thinks that the results of the Stanford Prison Experiment were bullshit doesn’t know what they’re talking about. . . imo

But in all seriousness, the RSA visualizations truly are great. I’ve always considered the creation of art more interesting than the final product. I’m even more amazed at how tightly the animation ties in with the language.

As to the content of the speech, there was a lot of intriguing concepts but it seemed to cover such a wide field that I have a hard time deciding on the point of the whole thing. Is it all just background leading up to the claim that technology is making us less patient? Or is it less judgmental, suggesting that a variety of time-perspectives are valid, and the US’s is simply shifting?

The amount of information I gathered from that ten minutes HAD to have been significantly higher than just listening to the audio, and even more so than if it was presented in a school setting.

I am personally torn. I see it two ways; 1) we are crippling ourselves with the need for constant stimulation and 2) we are able to do so much more because of it.

Vague generalities, applying causation to correlation or speculation, ignoring quantitative data for qualitative data, mis-applying study information to prove a theory while ignoring entire bodies of peer reviewed data, and on and on.

Even after I tossed out the obviously classist and racist notions of Zimbardo, which clearly color his own interpretation of his self-selected and largely qualitative suppositions, I thought he did a good job of showing why you don’t let failed professors make public policy.

I fully believe the SPE showed how terrible people can be to one another. Here is why I think Zimbardo’s execution of it was, ahem, in your words, “bullshit.”

1. During the SPE, he styled himself the “prison warden” and actively encouraged the guards to de-humanize the prisoners. His interpretation is that the “roles” made the prisoners abuse the guards – but he does not address that he was essentially ordering the guards to mistreat the prisoners. All this shows is that people can follow orders to do terrible things — not new knowledge, and not informative about roles alone. Milgram had already demonstrated this in a lab setting very clearly.

2. He never released his SPE data – no one can see if his story of events is actually true.

3. He never published his SPE findings in a peer-reviewed journal – again, no one can validate his findings.

4. If you want to see an alternative explanation of the processes behind abuses at the SPE, watch the BBC’s mini-series The Experiment.

Full disclosure: I worked in post-production on the BBC’s The Experiment and work with one of the psychologists who designed it.

He prefaces the Stanford Prison Experiment with the claims it’s all above board and purely scientific.

Humbug.

He’s a pervert, I’m sure he had a hard-on during the entire experiment.

Not to mention, that despite claiming to have done proper background checks on the participants of that experiment, the lead prison guard had apparently suffered at the hands of a real prison guard in a real prison for 15 years.

Yeah… way to get unbiased results!

It was basically a bedroom roleplay writ large, with naive participants.

This is very Mcluhanesque stuff; its a perfect expression of the shift from the linear, fragmented awareness fostered by the Gutenberg media to the immersive simultaneity of the electric media. It took the computer age to show what he meant. Perhaps you have just to find new ways to thread a string of little dopamine hits through whatever your presenting, using cool graphics and humour and the occasional terrifying statistic, to get your point across. The pace of things forces us to get our points across quicker.

It sounds like a terrifying thing for teachers to face, especially ones without proper funding. This research could help to make an argument against the coming wave of brutal cuts to education budgets across the globe (that are only just getting started).

Tho yes, the cartoons are great.

He claims: “You can’t have family values if you don’t eat together.” Seriously, are there really people in this forum who agree with such a lame assertion? Or is everyone too distracted by the animation to listen?

This is 10 minutes of “let me tell you the problem with kids these days…”

1971? An experiment like this? Sure…it probably was. Human subjects boards looked for things like physical abuse back then and overlooked a lot of mental abuse. 40 years ago, the world was a different place when it came to psychology.

“claiming to have done proper background checks on the participants of that experiment”

I can’t believe he didn’t have Interpol run all the applicants, or look up their status on facebook to see if their history included abuse in jail.

One of the problems with a lot of research of this kind — even today — is that we as researchers have to use the subjects we can find. More often than not, they are undergrad students taking a psych class that need extra credit. This is an extremely biased crowd towards two populations…the future psychologists that don’t need the better grade but want to suck up to the professor for letters of rec, or the students that took psych as their science of choice thinking it would be a piece of cake and realized by midterm they need every piece of extra credit they can get to barely pass.

Either side, it biases the results. Considering the vast majority of studies out there are based around these populations, you get piss poor results, and back to the point…you aren’t going to be digging too deep into someone background. Might want to, but the resources are just not there to do it. Even today, to do a halfassed background check is $75…and this barely covers anything. We generally get about $30 a head…so unless someplace like Eli Lilly is paying (i.e., even grantwise, you aren’t going to get much…someone pretty much has to hire you to complete your research so they can own a chunk of it)…

But of course it is easy to snicker and point to prove how much more you know than the professors. Especially 40 years later.

Gee, and how does he explain the productivity of these other countries: Japan (Shinto/Buddhist), China (Taoist/Buddhist/Catholic), India (Hindu/Muslim)?

Also, as an athiest, I was a little personally annoyed that [at 1:26] he actually professes that to be “Future Oriented” you have to believe that “life begins after the death of the mortal body.” Is this type of “future orientation” a socially productive concept? (Suicide bombers are fairly future-oriented, but I guess they take it too far?)

the North Italy/South Italy generalization: shudder.

Saying child playing video games = “unschoolable” child: shudder.

LOL @ 8:03 when he finds it disturbing kids dont wear wristwatches. (Checking the time using your cellphone is somehow nefarious?) I think he just cant stand innovation by children. He might as well just have also said “And, the music they play nowadays, its too loud!”

LOL @ 8:30, if you wait a long time for your computer to boot up, and get angry, the problem is YOU and not your PC? (Gee, that certainly would be Microsoft’s argument.) But isn’t a PC that takes a long time to reboot like those “Southern Italians” in that the PC is not being “Future Oriented” enough– or am i getting his gobbledegook wrong?

If you do not like ‘generalizations’ read “Fleeing from absence” book with like dozens of interpretations and for those with a short attention span every chapter like a half a page with a lot of illustrations.

It’s a very interesting fact that Sicilian dialect does not have the future tense. But it’s not absolutely correct. From Wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sicilian_language)

“The Simple Future tense in Sicilian is no longer in use. However the Sicilian language employs several possible methods of expressing the future tense:
1) by simply using the present indicative, usually preceded by an adverb of time:
Stasira vaiu ô tiatru — This evening I [will] go to the theatre.
Dumani ti scrivu — Tomorrow I [will] write to you.”