“While it’s true that some guards and prisoners behaved in alarming ways, it’s also the case that their environment was designed to encourage—and, in some cases, to require—those behaviors. Zimbardo himself has always been forthcoming about the details and the nature of his prison experiment: he thoroughly explained the setup in his original study and, in an early write-up, in which the experiment was described in broad strokes only, he pointed out that only “about a third of the guards became tyrannical in their arbitrary use of power.” (That’s about four people in total.)So how did the myth of the Stanford Prison Experiment—“Lord of the Flies” in the psych lab—come to diverge so profoundly from the reality?”
“While it’s true that some guards and prisoners behaved in alarming ways, it’s also the case that their environment was designed to encourage—and, in some cases, to require—those behaviors. Zimbardo himself has always been forthcoming about the details and the nature of his prison experiment: he thoroughly explained the setup in his original study and, in an early write-up, in which the experiment was described in broad strokes only, he pointed out that only “about a third of the guards became tyrannical in their arbitrary use of power.” (That’s about four people in total.)So how did the myth of the Stanford Prison Experiment—“Lord of the Flies” in the psych lab—come to diverge so profoundly from the reality?”
I blame this post for causing my attempt to write a light-hearted short story in the vein of P.G. Wodehouse to turn much darker and more realistic about what privileged white men in the early 20th century would actually do with a mysterious amulet.
I blame this post for causing my attempt to write a light-hearted short story in the vein of P.G. Wodehouse to turn much darker and more realistic about what privileged white men in the early 20th century would actually do with a mysterious amulet.
newyorker.com – The Real Lesson of the Stanford Prison Experiment | The New Yorker
“While it’s true that some guards and prisoners behaved in alarming ways, it’s also the case that their environment was designed to encourage—and, in some cases, to require—those behaviors. Zimbardo himself has always been forthcoming about the details and the nature of his prison experiment: he thoroughly explained the setup in his original study and, in an early write-up, in which the experiment was described in broad strokes only, he pointed out that only “about a third of the guards became tyrannical in their arbitrary use of power.” (That’s about four people in total.)So how did the myth of the Stanford Prison Experiment—“Lord of the Flies” in the psych lab—come to diverge so profoundly from the reality?”
newyorker.com – The Real Lesson of the Stanford Prison Experiment | The New Yorker
“While it’s true that some guards and prisoners behaved in alarming ways, it’s also the case that their environment was designed to encourage—and, in some cases, to require—those behaviors. Zimbardo himself has always been forthcoming about the details and the nature of his prison experiment: he thoroughly explained the setup in his original study and, in an early write-up, in which the experiment was described in broad strokes only, he pointed out that only “about a third of the guards became tyrannical in their arbitrary use of power.” (That’s about four people in total.)So how did the myth of the Stanford Prison Experiment—“Lord of the Flies” in the psych lab—come to diverge so profoundly from the reality?”
I blame this post for causing my attempt to write a light-hearted short story in the vein of P.G. Wodehouse to turn much darker and more realistic about what privileged white men in the early 20th century would actually do with a mysterious amulet.
I blame this post for causing my attempt to write a light-hearted short story in the vein of P.G. Wodehouse to turn much darker and more realistic about what privileged white men in the early 20th century would actually do with a mysterious amulet.