Critical Situations

Burton, Howard; Zimbardo, Philip G.

doi:10.2307/j.ctv22jnpms

Cited by 1 publication

(3 citation statements)

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“…Earlier in 1971, Zimbardo had proposed to the students in his undergraduate seminar that they make presentations for half of the class meetings. Among the topics he proposed for them to consider were the impact of old age homes on their inmates, the street culture of the drug addict, people joining cults, and the effects of prisons on prisoners (Burton, 2016; Zimbardo, 2007b, p. 495).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In 47 years, Zimbardo has given the Toyon Hall experiment some credit only twice, in a book chapter (Zimbardo, 1975, pp. 37–38) and in a lengthy biographical interview recently published in digital form (Burton, 2016). Otherwise, the undergraduate is rarely credited as an instigator of the SPE, and he is hardly mentioned in articles and reports devoted to it.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…That is, I have to work in various ways with media, with reporters, with journalists, to reframe my work in ways that are accessible, easy to understand, and not too academic. (Burton, 2016)…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Debunking the Stanford Prison Experiment.

Texier

2019

American Psychologist

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Author NoteThibault Le Texier is associate researcher at the University of Nice.This research has been funded by the Région Centre, Ciclic Fund. I am particularly indebted to Richard Griggs for detailed comments and suggestions. I would like to thank too the participants in the Stanford prison experiment who agreed to answer my questions, along with Alex Haslam and the two other reviewers who discussed this paper in detail, James Lyle Peterson, Daniel Hartwig of the Stanford Library Special Collections, AbstractThe 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 fifteen 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 three 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 five decades, in spite of its flaws and shortcomings, are discussed. Keywords: Stanford prison experiment, P. G. Zimbardo, epistemology DEBUNKING THE STANFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT 3 Debunking the Stanford Prison ExperimentTo show that normal people could behave in pathological ways even without the external pressure of an experimenter-authority, my colleagues and I put college students in a simulated prison setting and observed the power of roles, rules, and expectations. Young men selected because they were normal on all the psychological dimensions we measured (many of them were avowed pacifists) became hostile and sadistic, verbally and physically abusing others -if they enacted the randomly assigned role of all-powerful mock guards. Those randomly assigned to be mock prisoners suffered emotional breakdowns, irrational thinking, and behaved self-destructively -despite their constitutional stability and normalcy. This planned two-week simulation had to be ended after six days because the inhumanity of the "evil situation" had totally dominated the humanity of the "good" participants.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%