Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth
by Stuart Ritchie · 20 Jul 2020
been aimed at older pieces of psychology research, with similarly worrying results. Perhaps the most famous psychology study of all time is the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, where psychologist Philip Zimbardo split a group of young men into mock ‘guards’ and ‘prisoners’, and had them stay for a week in a simulated prison in the
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situation over human behaviour.21 Put a good person into a bad situation, the story goes, and things might get very bad, very fast. The Stanford Prison Experiment is taught to essentially every undergraduate psychology student on the planet and on its basis Zimbardo became among the most well-known and respected modern
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always been controversial, only recently have we begun to see just how poor a study the Stanford Prison Experiment was.23 In 2019, the researcher and film director Thibault Le Texier published a paper entitled ‘Debunking the Stanford Prison Experiment’, where he produced never-before-seen transcripts of tapes of Zimbardo intervening directly in the experiment
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of what happens when ordinary humans are assigned specific social roles. Despite the enormous attention it’s received over the years, the ‘results’ of the Stanford Prison Experiment, such as they are, are scientifically meaningless.25 As you might expect, the confluence of failed replications (like the priming studies) and bizarre results (like
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just a case of fluffy, flashy research like priming and power posing being debunked: a great deal of far more ‘serious’ psychological research (like the Stanford Prison Experiment, and much else besides) was also thrown into doubt. And neither was it a matter of digging up some irrelevant antiques and performatively showing that
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Evidence for the Positive Effect of an Expansive Pose: Commentary on Cuddy, Schultz, and Fosse (2018)’, SSRN: https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3198470 20. Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: How Good People Turn Evil (London: Rider, 2007). 21. Stanley Milgram, ‘Behavioral Study of Obedience’, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 67
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/10.1177/0190272519861952 22. Philip Zimbardo, ‘Our inner heroes could stop another Abu Ghraib’, Guardian, 29 Feb. 2008; https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/feb/29/iraq.usa 23. Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975). 24. Thibault Le Texier, ‘Debunking the Stanford Prison Experiment’, American Psychologist 74
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–39; https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000401 25. The debate continues and Zimbardo has responded to the criticisms. For example, see Philip Zimbardo, ‘Philip Zimbardo’s Response to Recent Criticisms of the Stanford Prison Experiment’, 23 June 2018; https://static1.squarespace.com/static/557a07d5e4b05fe7bf112c19/t/5dee52149d16d153cba11712/1575899668862/Zimbardo2018-06-23.pdf. See also Le Texier’s reply
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Festinger and Carlsmith’s cognitive dissonance studies Kahneman’s priming studies LaCour’s gay marriage experiment politics and preprints publication bias in Shanks’ priming studies Stanford Prison Experiment Stapel’s racism studies statistical power and Wansink’s food studies publication bias publish or perish Pubpeer Pythagoras’s theorem Qatar quantum entanglement racism Bargh
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engineering and geoscience and journals and Kahneman’s priming studies marine biology and medical research and neuroscience and physics and Schön’s carbon-based transistor Stanford Prison Experiment Stapel’s racism studies Wolfe-Simon’s arsenic life study reproducibility Republican Party research grants research parasites resveratrol retraction Arnold Boldt Fujii LaCour Macchiarini Moon
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studies LaCour affair (2014–15) Morton’s skull studies Office for Research Integrity Poehlman affair (2006) pre-registration in public domain laws Reuben affair (2009) Stanford Prison Experiment Summerlin affair (1974) tenure Walker’s sleep studies Wansink affair (2016) universalism universities cash-for-publication schemes fraud and subscription fees and team science University
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-Simon, Felisa World as Will and Presentation, The (Schopenhauer) World Health Organisation (WHO) Yale University Yarkoni, Tal Yes Men Yezhov, Nikolai Z-tests Ziliak, Stephen Zimbardo, Philip Zola, Émile About the Author Stuart Ritchie is a lecturer in the Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre at King’s College London. His main
Thinking in Systems: A Primer
by Meadows. Donella and Diana Wright · 3 Dec 2008 · 243pp · 66,908 words
. As the upper class, they feather their own nests; as the lower class, they become apathetic or rebellious. So would you. In the famous Stanford prison experiment by psychologist Philip Zimbardo, players even took on, in an amazingly short time, the attitudes and behaviors of prison guards and prisoners.12 Seeing how individual decisions are
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outcomes in the face of imperfect information. H. Simon, Models of Man, (New York: Wiley, 1957). 12. Philip G. Zimbardo, “On the Ethics of Intervention in Human Psychological Research: With Special Reference to the Stanford Prison Experiment,” Cognition 2, no. 2 (1973): 243–56) 13. This story was told to me during a conference in
Humankind: A Hopeful History
by Rutger Bregman · 1 Jun 2020 · 578pp · 131,346 words
basis for hundreds of studies on apathy in the modern age (Chapter 9). And then there were the experiments by psychology professors Muzafer Sherif and Philip Zimbardo (Chapter 7), who demonstrated that good little boys can turn into camp tyrants at the drop of a hat. What fascinates me is that all
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next will send shockwaves around the world. In a matter of days, the Stanford Prison Experiment spins out of control – and in the process reveals some grim truths about human nature. The basement of Stanford University, August 1971. Source: Philip G. Zimbardo. It started with a group of ordinary, healthy young men. Several of them
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is all fucked up inside! I can’t stand another night! I just can’t take it anymore!’1 The study’s lead investigator, psychologist Philip Zimbardo, also got swept up in the drama. He played a prison superintendent determined to run a tight ship at any cost. Not until six days
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schools and happy families and good neighborhoods and powerfully affect their behavior,’ Gladwell tells us, ‘merely by changing the immediate details of their situation.’3 Philip Zimbardo would later swear up and down that nobody could have suspected his experiment would get so out of hand. Afterwards, he had to conclude that
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. Both had twenty-four white, male subjects, and both were designed to prove that nice people can spontaneously turn evil.12 But the Stanford Prison Experiment went a step further. Philip Zimbardo’s study wasn’t just dubious. It was a hoax. My own doubts surfaced on reading Zimbardo’s book The Lucifer Effect, published
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exhibit if they’re able to guess at the aim of a study, thus turning a scientific experiment into a staged production. And in the Stanford Prison Experiment, as one research psychologist put it, ‘the demands were everywhere’.15 What, then, did the guards themselves believe was expected of them? That they could
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have something to work with. After all, what could they possibly learn from guys sitting around like it was a country club?’16 That the Stanford Prison Experiment hasn’t been scrapped from the textbooks after confessions like this is bad enough. But it gets worse. In June 2013, French sociologist Thibault Le
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,’ Jaffe subsequently explained, ‘based on my previous experience as master sadist.’17 For forty years, in hundreds of interviews and articles, Philip Zimbardo steadfastly maintained that the guards in the Stanford Prison Experiment received no directives. That they’d thought it all up themselves: the rules, the punishments and the humiliations they inflicted on the
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up to me, I wouldn’t do anything. I would just let it cool off.’20 What’s fascinating is that most guards in the Stanford Prison Experiment remained hesitant to apply ‘tough’ tactics at all, even under mounting pressure. Two-thirds refused to take part in the sadistic games. One-third treated
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[…] I just can’t take it anymore!’21). His breakdown would feature in all the documentaries and become the most famous recording from the whole Stanford Prison Experiment. A journalist looked him up in the summer of 2017.22 Korpi told him the breakdown had been faked – play-acted from start to finish
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’t take it anymore!’24). Those cries would become infamous the world over. In the decades since the experiment, millions of people have fallen for Philip Zimbardo’s staged farce. ‘The worst thing,’ one of the prisoners said in 2011, is that ‘Zimbardo has been rewarded with a great deal of attention
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most noted psychologist of his time, making it all the way to president of the American Psychological Association.26 In a 1990s documentary about the Stanford Prison Experiment, student guard Dave Eshelman wondered what might have happened if the researchers hadn’t pushed the guards. ‘We’ll never know,’ he sighed.27 It
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? But now for prime time? For Alexander Haslam and Stephen Reicher, both doctors of psychology, it was a dream offer. The big problem with the Stanford Prison Experiment had always been that it was so unethical that no one dared to replicate it, and so Zimbardo had for decades enjoyed the last word
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broadcast, the British press was rife with speculation. To what depths would people sink? ‘Is this reality TV gone mad?’ wondered the Guardian.28 Even Philip Zimbardo expressed disgust. ‘Obviously they are doing the study in the hopes that high drama will be created as in my original study.’29 When the
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, we can say that it was a failure. The BBC Prison Study has since faded into obscurity, while people still talk about the Stanford Prison Experiment. And what does Philip Zimbardo have to say about all this? When a journalist asked him in 2018 if the new revelations about just how much was manipulated would
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longevity.’31 8 Stanley Milgram and the Shock Machine 1 There’s one psychological experiment even more famous than the Stanford Prison Experiment, and one psychologist who’d become more widely known than Philip Zimbardo. When I started to work on this book, I knew I couldn’t ignore him. Stanley Milgram. Milgram was a
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list. William Golding and his dark imagination. Richard Dawkins and his selfish genes. Jared Diamond and his demoralising tale of Easter Island. And, of course, Philip Zimbardo, the world’s best-known living psychologist. But topping my list was Stanley Milgram. I know of no other study as cynical, as depressing and
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death of the so-called learner.’18 3 In the first version of this chapter, I left it at that. My conclusion was that, like Philip Zimbardo’s sadistic play-acting, Milgram’s research had been a farce. But in the months after meeting Gina Perry I was plagued by a nagging
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to draw it out. And most importantly, evil has to be disguised as doing good. Ironically, good intentions also played a major role in the Stanford Prison Experiment, from Chapter 7. Student guard Dave Eshelman, who wondered if he would have taken things as far if he hadn’t been explicitly instructed to
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Guards who behave this way.” But in order to say that we have to have Guards who behave that way.’27 Ultimately, David Jaffe and Philip Zimbardo wanted their work to galvanise a complete overhaul of the prison system. ‘Hopefully what will come out of this study is some very serious recommendations
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– it was the same era that Lord of the Flies became a bestseller, Adolf Eichmann stood trial, Stanley Milgram send shockwaves around the world and Philip Zimbardo launched his career. But when I began reading up on research into the circumstances surrounding Kitty’s death, I found myself on the trail of
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2013 in my native Dutch, whose title translates as The History of Progress. Rereading it was an uncomfortable experience. In that book I dished up Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison ‘research’ without an ounce of criticism, as proof that good people can spontaneously turn into monsters. Clearly something about this observation had
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-clad. Stanley Milgram demonstrated it using his shock machine. The media shouted it from the rooftops following Kitty Genovese’s death. And William Golding and Philip Zimbardo rode the theory to worldwide fame. Evil was thought to simmer just beneath the surface in every human being, just as Thomas Hobbes had argued
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the future. In hindsight, it’s shocking how fast the tide turned – and what caused it. It started with Philip Zimbardo, who in February 1973 published the first academic article on his Stanford Prison Experiment. Without having ever set foot in a real prison, the psychologist asserted that prisons are inherently brutal, no matter how
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wrote, ‘the rehabilitative efforts that have been reported so far have had no appreciable effect on recidivism.’12 The progressive social scientist hoped – much like Philip Zimbardo – that everyone would realise prisons were pointless places and should all be shut down. But that’s not what happened. At first the media couldn
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a matter of hours, ordinary passers-by had demolished the car. The researcher’s name? Philip Zimbardo! Zimbardo’s car experiment, never published in any scientific journal, was the inspiration for the broken windows theory. And just like his Stanford Prison Experiment, this theory has since been thoroughly debunked. We know, for instance, that the ‘innovative
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In the Basement of Stanford University 1Quoted in Ben Blum, ‘The Lifespan of a Lie’, Medium.com (7 June 2018). 2Craig Haney, Curtis Banks and Philip Zimbardo, ‘A Study of Prisoners and Guards in a Simulated Prison’, Naval Research Review (1973). 3Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point. How Little Things Can Make A
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, The Lost Boys. Inside Muzafer Sherif’s Robbers Cave Experiment (London, 2018), p. 39. 9Ibid. p. 138. 10Ibid. p. 139. 11Ibid. p. 146. 12In the Stanford Prison Experiment twelve students were assigned the role of prisoner (nine plus three stand-ins), and twelve that of guard (nine plus three stand-ins). 13Quoted in
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-b02-f21, pp. 1–2. 21Quoted in Blum, ‘The Lifespan of a Lie’. 22Blum, ‘The Lifespan of a Lie’. 23Ibid. 24Ibid. 25Quoted in Alastair Leithead, ‘Stanford prison experiment continues to shock’, BBC (17 August 2011). 26For many years, psychologists used Zimbardo’s ‘experiment’ to spark students’ enthusiasm for the field. Thibault Le Texier
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spoke to a number of lecturers who said they liked discussing the Stanford Prison Experiment because it at least got students to look up from their phones. In response to my question whether it should still be taught in classrooms
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Stanford Experiment is a pretty good overview of all the errors you can make in scientific research.’ 27Quoted in: Kim Duke and Nick Mirsky, ‘The Stanford Prison Experiment,’ BBC Two (11 May 2002). Dave Eshelman’s full quote in this documentary is: ‘It would have been interesting to see what would have happened
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, here, here, here Spanish Civil War, here, here Speer, Albert, here Spencer, Herbert, here Spinoza, Baruch, here Stalin, Josef, here, here, here, here, here, here Stanford Prison Experiment, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Stangneth, Bettina, here Starr, Belle, here states, origins of, here STDs, here Stein, Gertrude, here Sudbury
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Wrangham, Richard, here, here xenophobia, here, here, here, here, here Yahil, Leni, here Yanomami people, here, here Ypres, Battles of, here Zehmisch, Lieutenant Kurt, here Zimbardo, Philip, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Zobrist, Jean-François, here, here A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR Rutger Bregman
So You've Been Publicly Shamed
by Jon Ronson · 9 Mar 2015 · 229pp · 67,869 words
more than any other has kept his idea alive. It’s the one created in a basement at Stanford University in 1971 by the psychologist Philip Zimbardo. * Zimbardo was a working-class New York City boy, the son of Sicilian immigrants. After graduating from Brooklyn College in 1954 he taught psychology at Yale
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visit the Explorations Cafe and Vista Lounge whenever I liked), at no point, even on the worst nights, did I turn into someone from the Stanford Prison Experiment. What had really gone on in that basement? * Nowadays John Mark works as a medical coder for the health insurance company Kaiser Permanente. But for
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the experiment in the Stanford alumni magazine, which was how I discovered him. ‘What happens when you tell people you were a guard in the Stanford Prison Experiment?’ I asked him over the telephone. ‘Everyone assumes I was brutal,’ he replied. He sighed. ‘I hear it all the time. You turn on the
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TV and they’ll be talking about anything to do with brutality and they’ll drop in, “as was shown in the Stanford Prison Experiment …” They were studying it in my daughter’s high school. It really upsets me.’ ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘It’s not true,’ he said. ‘My days
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just told me a remarkable thing - something that might change the way the psychology of evil was taught. He might have just debunked the famous Stanford Prison Experiment. And so I sent a transcript of the interview to the crowd psychologists Steve Reicher and Alex Haslam. They’re professors of Social Psychology - Reicher
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that, you get a long way towards understanding human sociality. That is why, instead of being an aberration, crowds are so important and so fascinating.’ * Philip Zimbardo’s assistant emailed. ‘Unfortunately he is declining all further interview obligations until mid fall due to a full schedule.’ It was February. I asked her
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numbers. In general, what all this should create in them is a sense of powerlessness. We have total power in the situation. They have none.’ - Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect, Random House 2008 For Gustave Le Bon a crowd was just a great ideology-free explosion of madness - a single blob of
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to provide an explanation for a variety of antinormative collective behavior, such as violent crowds, lynch mobs, etc … Deindividuation. Here were Gustave Le Bon and Philip Zimbardo springing into life once again, this time within Adria’s blog. … I stood up slowly, turned around and took three, clear photos. There is something
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who did the actual annihilating? We got nothing. * From the beginning I’d been trying to understand why - once you discount Gustave Le Bon and Philip Zimbardo’s theories of viruses and contagion and evil - online shaming is so pitiless. And now I think I have the answer. I found it in
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Tom Nugent, published in People magazine on 16 April 1990. I loved piecing together the history of group madness from Gustave Le Bon through to Philip Zimbardo. Five people were incredibly generous with their time and expertise - Adam Curtis, Bob Nye, Steve Reicher, Alex Haslam and, especially, Clifford Stott. Clifford kindly talked
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of California Press in 2000, and from The Third Reich: Politics and Propaganda, written by David Welch and published by Routledge 2002. My research into Philip Zimbardo took me to ‘Rethinking the Psychology of Tyranny: The BBC Prison Study’, written by Steve Reicher and Alex Haslam and published in the British Journal
Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
by Robert M. Sapolsky · 1 May 2017 · 1,261pp · 294,715 words
, and controversial studies in the history of psychology, namely the conformity experiments of Solomon Asch, the shock/obedience studies of Stanley Milgram, and the Stanford Prison Experiment of Philip Zimbardo. The grandparent of the trio was Asch, working in the early 1950s at Swarthmore College.62 The format of his studies was simple. A volunteer
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distress—but would obey. In the original study, horrifically, 65 percent of them administered the maximum shock of 450 volts. — And then there’s the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE), carried out by Zimbardo in 1971.64 Twenty-four young male volunteers, mostly college students, were randomly split into a group of twelve “prisoners
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acid RWA right-wing authoritarianism SDO social-dominance orientation SES socioeconomic status SHRP stress hyporesponsive period SNPs single-nucleotide polymorphisms SNS sympathetic nervous system SPE Stanford Prison Experiment SSRI selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor STG superior temporal gyrus TF transcription factor TH tryptophan hydroxylase ToM Theory of Mind TPJ temporoparietal juncture TRC truth and
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the Shock Machine: The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psych Experiments (New York: New Press, 2013). 71. T. Carnahan and S. McFarland, “Revisiting the Stanford Prison Experiment: Could Participant Self-Selection Have Led to the Cruelty?” PSPB 33 (2007): 603; S. H. Lovibond et al., “Effects of Three Experimental Prison Environments on
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BBC Prison Study 467–68 Hofling hospital experiment, 464n Milgram’s shock experiment, 461–62, 464–66, 468, 469, 470, 471, 473, 474 Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE), 461, 463–68, 475 object permanence, 176 Ochsner, Kevin, 529 O’Connor, Sandra Day, 590, 592 olfaction, see smell olfactory bulb, 24 On Killing
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, 468, 555 judicial decisions on, 448, 449, 566, 583, 643 Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD), 92, 116, 345–46, 372, 393, 557, 633, 634 prison experiments: BBC, 467–68 Stanford, 461, 463–68 progesterone, 117–19, 124, 158, 211, 708 prostate gland, 329 proteins, 709, 711–17 amino acids in, 712 DNA as blueprint
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spandrels, 381–82, 382 Spanish Civil War, 662 spatial maps, 151 Spence, Melanie, 211 Sprenger, Jakob, 606–7 Stalin, Joseph, 369, 487–88, 535, 618 Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE), 461, 463–68 Star Wars, 472, 472 Steele, Claude, 89 Steinberg, Laurence, 164, 166, 592 stress, 115, 423 acute, 125–27, 143 aggression and
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., 332 Yanomamö, 311–14, 316, 319 Yanomamo: The Fierce People (Chagnon), 312 Young, Larry, 110, 526 zero-sum games, 394–95 Zhong, Chen-Bo, 564 Zimbardo, Philip, 461, 463–68, 475 Zulus, 310, 310 Robert M. Sapolsky is the author of several works of nonfiction, including A Primate’s Memoir, The Trouble
Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World
by Malcolm Harris · 14 Feb 2023 · 864pp · 272,918 words
a belt strung with bullets.46 And yet Stanford’s most disastrous government experiment didn’t even involve the CIA. The money for social psychologist Philip Zimbardo’s infamous six-day research project in the summer of 1971 came from Stanford’s dear old friends at the Office of Naval Research.47
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possession, it makes sense not to feel too bad about being a host, but Zimbardo created the situation, or at least part of it. The Stanford Prison Experiment is supposed to be a lesson about a species (humans) rather than a place, but generalizing from the behavior of young men in Palo Alto
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Office of Naval Research—the same one that helped the school build out the campus’s postwar facilities, the same one that financed the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment and who knows what else. For many decades that relationship was exceedingly cozy, leading to the aforementioned millions of dollars in annual grants, and Stanford
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of organization by poor people. The policing strategy called for total domination of the streets, and it was based on research from a familiar figure. Philip Zimbardo, working on a small government grant in the late 1960s, tried a casual experiment with some cars. A couple of years ahead of his famous
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Dreams: The CIA, LSD, and the Sixties Rebellion (New York: Grove Press, 1985), 198–99. 47. Philip G. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (New York: Random House, 2008), 236. 48. “Stanford Prison Experiment, August 15–21, 1971,” video recordings, Stanford Libraries, https://exhibits.stanford.edu/spe/browse/video-recordings. 49
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its recategorization. The recategorization isn’t wrong per se, but it is noteworthy. 41. “Crime: Diary of a Vandalized Car,” Time, February 28, 1969. 42. Philip G. Zimbardo, “The Human Choice: Individuation, Reason, and Order Versus Deindividuation, Impulse, and Chaos,” Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, 1969, 291. 43. Gilmore, Golden Gulag, 255n9. 44
The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey
by Michael Huemer · 29 Oct 2012 · 577pp · 149,554 words
In the My Lai massacre, soldiers were just following orders. One soldier who helped the villagers was reviled as a traitor. 6.7.2 The Stanford Prison Experiment Volunteers participated in a simulation of prison life. The guards became increasingly abusive toward the prisoners. 6.7.3 Lessons of the SPE Power leads
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all the time.’51 There is thus reason to suspect that many more massacres occurred that did not make the news. 6.7.2 The Stanford Prison Experiment In 1971, social psychologist Phillip Zimbardo conducted an illuminating study of the effects of imprisonment on both guards and prisoners.52 Zimbardo collected 21 volunteers
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likely to become guards or because prison inmates tend to be unusually aggressive and thus draw out aggressive responses on the part of guards. The Stanford Prison Experiment is of particular interest in that it puts hypotheses like these to the test. As it turns out, none of these things was the case
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power is intoxicating. They want to exercise their power more frequently and more fully, and they don’t want to give it up. When the Stanford Prison Experiment was ended prematurely, all the prisoners were relieved. Most of the guards, however, seemed disappointed. They were enjoying tormenting their charges. As Zimbardo reports, none
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. 51 Thompson n.d., 11. 52 Zimbardo et al. 1973; Zimbardo 2007. 53 See Zimbardo 2007, esp. 210–21, on the situational factors in the Stanford Prison Experiment. See his chapters 12–16 for evidence and arguments beyond the Stanford Prison study. 54 Acton 1972, 335 (from a letter to Mandell Creighton dated
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power is, all too often, by abusing those under one’s power while observing their helplessness to resist. This is among the lessons of the Stanford Prison Experiment, as discussed earlier (Section 6.7). Particularly if the ruler perceives some act of defiance on the part of subjects – for example, a subject criticizes
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Solidarity, 292–3 solitary confinement, 283–4 Somin, Ilya, 221n38 Soviet Union, 185, 293 space programs, 96 special interest groups, 62 standing armies, 327–8 Stanford Prison Experiment, 131–4 Stark, Cynthia, 52n29 state of nature, 198–202 statism, utopian, 196–9 status quo bias, 115, 186–7 stevia, 90 Stockholm Syndrome, 123
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, Robert Paul, 65n13 World War I, 299–300, 301–2 World War II, 297, 300–1, 302 World War III, 318–19 Yeltsin, Boris, 293 Zimbardo, Philip, 131–4
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
by Steven Pinker · 24 Sep 2012 · 1,351pp · 385,579 words
. In another classic psychology-experiment-cum-morality-play (conducted in 1971, before committees for the protection of human subjects put the kibosh on the genre), Philip Zimbardo set up a mock prison in the basement of the Stanford psychology department, divided the participants at random into “prisoners” and “guards,” and even got
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changed since then. It’s natural to wonder whether Westerners today would still obey the instructions of an authority figure to brutalize a stranger. The Stanford Prison Experiment is too bizarre to replicate exactly today, but thirty-three years after the last of the obedience studies, the social psychologist Jerry Burger figured out
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, 1997, 193–94. 266. Obedience experiments: Milgram, 1974. 267. Fact and fiction about Kitty Genovese: Manning, Levine, & Collins, 2007. Bystander apathy: Latané & Darley, 1970. 268. Stanford Prison Experiment: Zimbardo, 2007; Zimbardo, Maslach, & Haney, 2000. 269. No Germans punished for disobedience: Goldhagen, 2009. 270. Milgram replication: Burger, 2009. See Reicher & Haslam, 2006, for a
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partial replication of the Stanford Prison Experiment, but with too many differences to allow a test of trends over time. 271. Obedience might be even lower: Twenge, 2009. 272. Advantages of conformity
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. 2007. The Lucifer effect: Understanding how good people turn evil. New York: Random House. Zimbardo, P. G., Maslach, C., & Haney, C. 2000. Reflections on the Stanford prison experiment: Genesis, transformations, consequences. In T. Blass, ed., Current perspectives on the Milgram paradigm . Mahwah, N.J.: Erlbaum. Zimring, F. E. 2007. The great American crime
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Spee, Father Friedrich Spielberg, Steven Spierenburg, Pieter Spinoza, Baruch Spitzer, Steven Spock, Benjamin sports, violent sports fandom spree killers Springsteen, Bruce Sri Lanka Stalin, Joseph Stanford Prison Experiment Starr, Edwin state-based armed conflict states: borders of centralization of power in destruction of economic development of emergence of failed homicide rates in nonnuclear
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and drug culture homicides by in prison socialization of terrorists tribal elders defied by Yugoslavia Zacher, Mark Zambia Zebrowitz, Leslie Zelizer, Viviana zero-sum games Zimbardo, Philip Zimring, Franklin Zipf, G. K. Źiźek, Slavoj Zola, Émile ALSO BY STEVEN PINKER Language Learnability and Language Development Learnability and Cognition The Language Instinct How
Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought
by Andrew W. Lo · 3 Apr 2017 · 733pp · 179,391 words
ordered to continue. I don’t think I’ll ever look at culture the same way again. Even more notorious is the Stanford prison experiment, conducted by the Stanford University psychologist Philip Zimbardo in 1971. In the two-week experiment conducted in the basement of the Stanford psychology department, Zimbardo randomly assigned volunteers to the
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who thought that he was their friend? How can we prevent real-life Gordon Gekkos from convincing young minds that greed is always good? Psychologist Philip Zimbardo put it succinctly enough: resist situational influences.20 Since his original prison experiment, Zimbardo has investigated how good people can be influenced into doing evil
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Theoretical Biology 7: 1–16. ___. 1964b. “The Genetical Evolution of Social Behavior II.” Journal of Theoretical Biology 7: 17–52. Haney, Craig, Curtis Banks, and Philip Zimbardo. 1973a. “Interpersonal Dynamics in a Simulated Prison.” International Journal of Criminology and Penology 1: 69–97. ___. 1973b. “Study of Prisoners and Guards in a Simulated
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, and Andrew W. Lo. 2014. “Group Selection as Behavioral Adaptation to Systematic Risk.” PLoS ONE 9, no. 10: e110848. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0110848. Zimbardo, Philip G. 2007. The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. New York: Random House. Zweig, Jason. 2015. “The Day Wall Street Changed.” Wall Street
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, 412 writing, 165 Yang, Helen, 379 Yeager, Chuck, 13 Yeltsin, Boris, 242 Zak, Paul J., 338 Zeckhauser, Richard, 277–278 Zhang, Ruixun, 218, 220, 362 Zimbardo, Philip, 347, 387–388 Zingales, Luigi, 353–354 Zuckerberg, Mark, 55 Zweig, Jason, 281 Table of Contents Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Page Contents Introduction Financial
Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend
by Barbara Oakley Phd · 20 Oct 2008
those acts much more easily and for very different reasons. In relation to these ideas, Philip Zimbardo, a former president of the American Psychological Association, recently published The Lucifer Effect—a “penetrating investigation” of his famous 1971 Stanford Prison experiment involving college students who proved themselves capable of becoming sadistic prison guards or abjectly submissive
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Diana Chronicles (New York: Doubleday, 2007), pp. 151–52. 55. For an excellent review of the topic, see T. Carnahan and S. McFarland, “Revisiting the Stanford Prison Experiment: Could Participant Self-Selection Have Led to Cruelty?” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 33, no. 5 (2007): 603–14. 56. Heather, Rome; Ramsay MacMullen, Corruption
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Foundations.” 66. P. G. Zimbardo, C. Maslach, and C. Haney, “Reflections on the Stanford Prison Experiment: Genesis, Transformations, Consequences,” in Obedience to Authority: Current Perspectives on the Milgram Paradigm, ed. T. Blass, (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2000), p. 194; Philip G. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (New York: Random House
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, 2007), p. 32; T. Carnahan and S. McFarland, “Revisiting the Stanford Prison Experiment.” See also the excellent follow-on article that expands on Carnahan and McFarland
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of Scandal (New York: Broadway Books, 2004). 20. Adam LeBor, “Complicity with Evil” (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). 21. Carnahan and McFarland, “Revisiting the Stanford Prison Experiment.” 22. Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York: Harper & Row, 1974). 23. Myron Peretz Glazer and Penina Migdal Glazer, The Whistleblowers (New
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in psychopaths and dysfunction in right anterior superior temporal gyrus, 97–98 relation to love, empathy, guilt, and remorse, 100 Abu Ghraib, questionable nature of Philip Zimbardo's conclusions regarding, as described in The Lucifer Effect, 303–304n abuse. See child abuse academia difficulty of eradicating older beliefs about nurture in, 38
…
to personality disorders as well as positive personality traits), 69–83, 85–87, 314–15 older beliefs about personality and, 37–38 questionable nature of Philip Zimbardo's conclusions about evil, described in The Lucifer Effect, 303n–304n some children born with marked (genetic) tendency toward, 57–58 evolution Baldwinian, 263–64
…
, 156n, 162, 169–71 occurs in part because people can't believe Machiavellians, with their neurologically based sinister underpinnings, exist, 321–22 questionable nature of Philip Zimbardo's conclusions related to genocide, described in The Lucifer Effect, 303n–304n Samantha Power's “A Problem from Hell,” how and why genocide happens, 321
…
–42 HT serotonin receptor alleles. See 5-HT Hudson, William, a “TSU 3” hero, 279–80 Huettel, Scott, imaging studies of altruism, 100 human nature, Philip Zimbardo's questionable conclusions about, described in The Lucifer Effect, 303n–304n humiliation Mao, 239 in relation to antisocial personality disorder, 135 Sabin, Alfred, of Jonas
…
unquestioned love for his wife, 155 vasopressin and oxytocin hormones help produce feelings of, 83 Lowenstein, Roger (biographer of Warren Buffett), 318 Lucifer Effect, The (Philip Zimbardo), questionable nature of its conclusions, 303–304n lying. See especially manipulation; and also gaslighting; deceitfulness antisocial personality disorder and, 50, 135 borderline personality disorder and
…
psychopathic dysfunction and moral reasoning areas, 101 pathological liars and increased white matter, 106 Yixing teapots, 212–15, 382n1 Zhou Enlai (Chou En-lai), 239 Zimbardo, Philip (The Lucifer Effect), questionable nature of its conclusions, 303–304n Zimmermann, Warren, Ambassador calls Milosevic “con man,” 153 left speechless as gaslighting Milosevic pleads, “I
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