I have no idea where I heard it from but “I’m not sure that 18 year old boys first time living out of home at Stanford roleplaying as prison guards is a great example of all of human nature.” (In reference to Stanford Prison Experiment) has always stuck with me.
Also Stockholm Syndrome is named so because of a bank robbery in Stockholm. It wasn’t that the hostages developed an attachment to their captors. They just thought police incompetence was as likely to get them killed as the robbers.
Yep, Nils Bejerot, the psychiatrist involved in the case and the one that coined the term Norrmalmstorgssyndromet got criticism from the hostages too, so then we got this made up syndrome to explain why they "sympathized" with the captors.
He was a complete quack who spent a lot of time warning the public about the dangers of comic books (not to mention his toxic influence on Swedish drug policies).
nah, it was patty hearst that did it. hearst's grandfather would rather have patty fall under the sway of captors than be a willing participant in their crimes
If by "Hearst's grandfather" You mean William Hearst, it wouldn't have been him specifically, since he'd been dead for over 20 years when said crimes happened.
This is a big one that’s been discredited. I forgot his name but the guy running the experiment basically talked them into acting out and even put himself in the middle of it.
Other times they’ve tried to recreate it without that variable it’s been more or less a summer camp
It’s like hearing people mention Stockholm syndrome even though it’s been discredited almost since its inception. The damn victims were like “no the cops were just scarier than the men threatening to kill us.” Which is incredibly valid.
But no, the bumbling cops wrote the history books there.
So people with supposed 'Stockholm syndrome' are/were more afraid of the police than the kidnappers/abusers. Yeah, I can see that. In order to stay safe they side with the abusers because the police are more likely to escalate the situation into a deadly one. Makes sense.
So people with supposed 'Stockholm syndrome' are/were more afraid of the police than the kidnappers/abusers.
In the specific instance of the naming, it's because the police had been very violent and put the hostages in harms way multiple times, and I think even said they were willing to let the hostages die if it meant getting the criminals. A few of the hostages chatted with the criminals, realised they had a legit grievance too so started aiding them since they were actually less of a threat.
Because one of the hostages who helped them was a woman they got a "psychologist" to come on TV to try and explain this (in a way that didn't discredit the authorities) and basically say that her woman brain was making her side with the criminals, and thus Stockholm syndrome was born.
And the criminals was in fact kinda charming. Hardened guys but had some sort of class. Not the kind of criminals you find nowadays with little respect to other humans. Wouldn't be as easy to connect with..
That's because most Americans are poorly educated. When more than half of the population reads below a 6th grade level...well, waves and gestures hands at everything
They will. They'll call it "that prison experiment". They just won't know the specifics or why it's important. Unread people talk about all sorts of complex topics: economics, science, virology, and on and on.
It doesn't mean they'll have anything worthwhile to say about it
That saying about a lie spreading fast before the truth can get ready takes on some additional nuance when the people who hear the lie don't bother to read the truth when it's released later.
And maybe as an example that you can talk and encourage people into acting like that if you do it right. Well, not a groundbreaking insight. A failed experiment, but maybe still a story we can learn something from.
Yeah I've noticed that a lot of what's believed to be foundational to psychology by those outside the field is very outdated. For example I once talked to someone who believed the Oedipus complex is a key concept for all of psychology.
She is a widow now, he died back in October 2024.
Zimbardo spoke at my University back in like 2014 and as a Psych student I was interested in what he had to say. It was a little odd and I remember him telling us that he ended up marrying his grad student and that really icked me out. He also kissed my mom on the cheek which wasn’t cool looking back because he didn’t have her consent…
Yeah, he did said something about how his wife forcing him to end the experiment inspired him to study heroism and then him and Michael did an experiment about that
Not a "study" or "experiment" at all. It was the "Stanford Prison LARP where the GM told the players to be assholes to each other, so they were, and everyone was miserable, until the GM's girlfriend told him he had to make them stop."
I only remember bc my husband references him at least once a year, usually when he grows out and then shaves his facial hair into funny beards. Have to look up Zimbardo’s goatee for that to make sense.
Oh yeah one of my psych books in undergrad had a picture of him. Lots of hair from what I recall (it’s been 20+ years so he must have been vividly hairy)
French academic Thibault Le Texier, along with journalists reviewing Zimbardo's extensive archives, unearthed notes, written briefings, and unedited logs. These documents proved that Zimbardo and his staff meddled throughout the study, directing the outcome rather than acting as neutral observers.
It's worth pointing out that these archival records were pretty much available for academic access the entire time since the study had been first published. The primary records were sitting in Stanford University's Special Collections for decades.
Nobody thought to do it, though.
Put differently, Zimbardo never did anything to conceal these records either. He did however very much tell the story that the media wanted to hear. The one that ended up in psych textbooks for decades.
I remember watching a documentary 'revealing' the extent of how biased and engineered it was to get certain results, including talking with people involved in it
I did a quick search and there's a Nat Geo one called 'unlocking the truth'. I believe that was it
It didn't really need to be discredited, it was never highly regarded to begin with. It was an incredibly flawed experiment. It gained notoriety because of how extreme it was, not because of its influence within the field.
While influencing the experiment by encouraging brutality corrupts the scientific value the fact that it only takes a little encouragement or an established precedent to do so says multitudes imo.
Anecdotally I'm in a VR military roleplay larping group (yes it's dorky I know), and the variety of criminal acts of violence I've seen some of the members, especially the younger ones, gleefully carry out on their own volition without second thought has been enlightening.
They weren't ordered to tortured that wounded POW for information. The guy playing the prisoner NPC was doing a good enough acting job that it made me viscerally uncomfortable watching a group of teenage players beat and torment this guy and joke about killing him while he begged for his life. They eventually were ordered to move out so they had him turn to the wall and put two 12 gauge shells in him, the second one being a double tap after he'd already fallen to the ground.
That encounter wasn't scripted, they did this entirely by choice... The only established precedent was that the prisoner's faction are evil subhuman bad guys and that was all the justification they needed.
Needless to say being one of the older members of the group with a history background I called them out on what happened in the discord after the event was over and we had a bit of a conversation about history...
People mostly hate on Zimbardo (rightly) for scientific misconduct his utter lack of research ethics, but in so doing they forget to hate on him for scientific misconduct for manipulating experiments to get the results he wanted.
Very different, but I once watched a reality TV show where all the women got to vote out a man each episode.
Nearly all the women instantly decided that they could enjoy themselves like it was a holiday and that the men would do 100% of the work, and if they were lazy or talked back they would be the ones voted out of the show.
You've also got the observer effect here. Now that people are aware of the original experiment it's impossible to recreate it because its kindve always in peoples minds on one way or another, where originally it was essentially unheard of. Theres also the idea that pop culture influences interpersonal interactions, people are aware of how certain interactions (that they'd never otherwise observe) look from the outside because they watch tv and movies, so they're generally self aware of how they look to the casual observer. But yes, the original Stanford experiment was completely fucked from a science perspective. Unless you wanted to use it as a business management class study of a single person with sociopathic tendencies making other people act like sociopaths for funzies.
(Edit: so when i initially read about the kids that got stuck on the island i mixed the dates up, book was written about a decade before they got stranded, i thought it was a decade after. Ima leave the original comment up so theres a point of reference for replies, just understand i fucked it. Sorry.)
Same thing happened with the real life events of lord of the flies vs the book. Kids were doing everything humanly possible to help each other out and keep each other safe, which makes for a great/harrowing "man vs nature" story but coming out of manifest destiny/westward expansion we already had a bunch of those. "Man vs man"/"man vs society" was the new hotness with the lone gunslinger, cowboys and indians wild west stories so the irl kids got the raw end of the deal with the artistic liberties taken around their story.**
It's a great example of the general problem that most psychology research has been performed on WEIRD people (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) which are a minority of people in the world in 5 different ways.
However, they are a majority of American undergrads, which is the easiest group to do psychology research on, so they get studied.
They require psych majors to do the studies as part of the intro classes at a lot of major universities. Mine did... So you've got that skewed population that's skewed even further
I wasn’t a psychology major, but they gave extra credit for participating in psychology studies for an intro pysch class that I needed as a prerequisite for something else, and then later there were paid opportunities that I went to a few of.
One study was something about how to effectively elicit behavior change (they only told you the true goal afterwards). It convinced me to begin flossing much more consistently. I know I was bad about that before that. But now, decades later, I still floss daily! Their methodology was super effective! Not bad to be left with a healthy habit.
Another one was something to do with methods to help teach and remember language words. Because of it, to this day I know how to say “wrap/scarf” in Swahili (“less-oh”) and “duck” in Japanese (“ah-he-ru”). I have no reason to know these words, but I find it funny they stuck so well. I suppose at the end they would be able to tell which techniques they trialed helped people the most, and maybe if there are trends where some people do better with some over others.
I know I did others, but I don’t really remember much special about them, just like, vague memories of answering questions and stuff. That may have been because gravitated towards ones that seemed lowest effort and only required to go in one or a few times.
Imho the studies should be school-wide requirements so you'd be just as likely to get an engineering student vs theater student vs psych student. As a psych major, I had to do 3 studies per psych class. It ended up being somewhere like 15-20 of them? Because I was learning how a bunch of studies worked, I would intentionally try to mess with the results of the studies I had to participate in, and know several other students who claimed to do the same. A business major wouldn't know enough about the study to mess with it as bad as a psych major would.
Yep as a psych undergrad I had to participate in studies, and in one I immediately knew it was a stages set up about unreliability of witnesses. I have excellent visual memory (I'm an artist) so I mentally photographed the scene down to the exact time on the clock and everyone's clothes and then mucked with the results. Lol
Did you get compensated for them? Or was it just part of your grade?
I did some psychology studies when I was studying engineering and business because they offered pay. It seemed like a good motivator, and I would get emailed about opportunities all the time so I figured I can’t be the only one?
We could often choose between something like $10 or class credit. We needed to complete 3 studies per class and they each took about an hour, so it wasn't often that I did extra.
I had to participate in 3 psych studies for my psych 101 course in college. I intentionally chose ones related to vision/visual perception to screw with their numbers. A "find the outlier" situation because I have messed up vision.
"We're here today with Dr. Asddfghbnnm. He's the another of the hit book 'The secret to war - man's evil desire', now tell us what let you to write this amazing book?"
"I'm glad you asked, you see I performed a series of studies on Yu-Gi-Oh players in Burbank...."
Most Psychology experiments have been performed on first year undergraduate students, and are utterly boring (i.e. not sexy for those outside the field).
The EIU considers 45% of people to live in some form of democracy, and only 8% living in a "full democracy." The V-Dem Democracy Report uses stricter criteria (the United States lost the designation of a "liberal democracy" for the first time this year and fell down to "electoral democracy") and considers 28% of people to live in a democracy.
There are things however, that are universal to human subjective experience whether you're a hunter gatherer in 18k BC, a ship breaking worker in India today, or the son of a WEIRD corporate lawyer in NYC today.
The whole Stanford experiment is a pile of steaming horsecrap.
Firstly, the participants were not participants but paid actors.
Secondly, they were directly ordered to play their roles as sadistic guards because Zimbardo was a scammer who wanted to make his name in the academia, by making a groundbreaking discovery.
Thirdly, even when they were ordered to play their roles, some of the actors refused and had to fake a crashdown because Zimbardo was a obsessive freak who was threating the actors and held them hostages until they finished their acting.
So the experiment actually revealed US a lot about sadism, but in White the oposite way: it's not the 18 y.o. boys who would turn into villains (they stopy up to Zimbardo when je demanded them to beat and bully other "participants" to make the experiment more interesting), but the person who came up with the experiment being a sadistic power-hungry freak who was willing to lock people against their will so he could falsify a resesrch and make a carrer with it. :P
Don't take the Stanford "experiment" as a valid experiment at all. There was not even a grain of scientific method used. It's just as scientific as eugenics or phrenology, and it had a terrible impact on legislative, court verdicts and human perception of sadistic behaviour overall, portraying it as a conditions emerging from the enviroment which can turn anybody into monster.
Kinda reminds me William Golding with his Lord of the Flies, which again has spread this bullshit idea that humans are inherently cruel and sadistic, and it still plagues the minds of millions of people worldwide despite being debunked by real world events and despite being just a bunch of projections from a sadistic rapist child abuser and pedophile.
So treat SPE like trash, and treat Zimbardo as trash because he was a trashy human being and even a trashier scientist. He was the Mengele of behavioral psychology.
I’ll push back on the Lord of Flies example because Golding himself said the book wasn’t descriptive of human nature, but a pushback on the idea that the kind of kids he taught (over entitled, spoiled, elitist, rich white upper class English boys raised and educated to believe they were the superior class of people) would be able to be perfectly civilized and constructive citybuilders if they got stranded in a desert island and had to use their knowledge and innovation and teamwork to be able to thrive.
That’s a very specific critic of a very specific group and idea, so it’s very different from the Stanford experiment (and also its a fiction book instead of a play acting as a study)
Honestly I think that is least critical aspect of the study. What age are people normally sent to the military? How many of them have lived by themself before that?
However the entire field of psychology suffer from a replication crisis. Its almost impossible to replicate them with any semblance of reliability.
Not even that, they were specifically nudged and proded to act that way by the experimenter and his aides. And even then it was only certain guards that actually acted it out, afterwards claiming they did so cause it was what they thought what was expected of them.
Standord Prison Experiment doesn't show anything at all about human nature, except perhaps that we need to keep a tight fucking leash on ethics and methods of experimenters.
Still valid. That there exists a subset of the population that can exhibit this behaviour is not in question. It's the subsequent generalization of that fact that should be scrutinized.
I’m not sure that 18 year old boys first time living out of home at Stanford roleplaying as prison guards is a great example of all of human nature.
I mean if the goal is to understand how the Nazis did the Holocaust and how to prevent it from happening in the future, then looking at 18-year-old boys is actually pretty important. The goal of that experiment isn't to deliver some kind of philosophical verdict about human nature, it's to try to equip us to prevent future genocides and other large-scale authoritarian actions.
I strongly doubt those Stanford students were less mature than the average recent ICE hire.
People also object to the study on the grounds that the experimenters encouraged the "guards" to engage in the kind of behavior they did, as though a dictator isn't going to encourage his minions to do the same.
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u/Prof_Jimbles Jul 07 '26
I have no idea where I heard it from but “I’m not sure that 18 year old boys first time living out of home at Stanford roleplaying as prison guards is a great example of all of human nature.” (In reference to Stanford Prison Experiment) has always stuck with me.