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Comment by jgfoot

The Stanford Prison Experiment still gets a lot of ink, but unfortunately the criticisms of it do not. I recommend this article: http://www.swans.com/library/art17/barker82.html

"""over the past forty-plus years, the Stanford Prison Experiment has had a strong, and arguably detrimental impact upon both scholarly and popular conceptions of social psychology. Contrary to Zimbardo's misleading conclusions, ordinary people do not mindlessly and helplessly succumb to brutality; instead the evidence (even from his own experiment) seems to suggest that individuals tend to engage in brutality only when they truly believe that such actions are warranted -- acting upon ideas that are condoned by equally brutal group ideologies. The guards in Zimbardo's experiment were thus coerced by Zimbardo and his researchers to brutalize the prisoners; while the prisoners did not simply submit to the guards' brutality, but instead, actively resisted their oppression, both collectively and individually. This resistance was considered intolerable to Zimbardo, and as this article has shown, he utilized his system power to intervene to increase guard brutality and undermine the prisoners' collective will to resist their abusers."""

parent jgfoot 14 years ago

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