research psychologist: my goal is to uncover universal truths of the mind. I want to strip out the social conditioning and lay bare the essential facts of the human condition.

research psychologist: to do this I will study 40 white 20-year-olds who attend the University of Ohio

I studied psychology in university for eight years and if I catch you praising the Stanford Prison Experiment I will simply have no choice but to set you adrift in a hot air balloon
@VeryBadLlama my wife is a Psychology teacher and has spoken of this many times. I'm pretty sure she's been to a couple of talks from the guy who's study it is. I was at a party once with many learn-ed people in this field. During a conversation about it I nodded sagely and said "ah yes, Phillipa Bazingo" and I can tell you that the awkward silence was absolutely epic.
@VeryBadLlama I studied psych for four years and I didn’t get any closer to understanding why I decided to study psych.

@VeryBadLlama Does it count if I praise it as meta textual experiment, and pretend the actual thing was, in fact, a mental exercise that people wildly misunderstood? The psych equivalent of when someone says they are going to perform Schrodinger's cat. Then use that to study people who use it like it has profound meaning, as they have lost the thread.

Kind of like post Freud when people started intentionally putting in phallic objects into art, a very selective mass hysteria.

@Oggie @VeryBadLlama As ‪@ZachWeinersmith‬ pointed out, the experiment has developed a meta layer https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/zimbardo
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Zimbardo

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Zimbardo

@VeryBadLlama Yikes! There are people who think that was a good idea?
@VeryBadLlama Pfft, if you're going to pick an unethical psychological torture experiment conducted at a prestigious college that remains well-known for reasons unrelated to the value of the research, you should pick the Murray experiment.
@VeryBadLlama In his Book "Human kind - a hopeful history" (ISBN 978-1-4088-9895-6) #RutgerBregman had that #experiment mentioned on several occassions. Among other things, he laid out how this experiment was #manipulated to fit #Zimbardo's assumptions.
@VeryBadLlama No praise for the Stanford Prison Experiment here. Just a note that that it was not original & I suspect copied from theater. It was preceded by 8 years by a play called “The Brig” by The Living Theater in NYC in ‘63. It had the same results among student actors in a school production prior to The Stanford study. Watched from the lighting booth.
@VeryBadLlama if I recall correctly at least one of the “prisoners” later admitted he faked a mental breakdown so he could get out early to go work on a paper

@VeryBadLlama Wouldn't the appropriate punishment be... prison?

😬

(Sorry, I'll see myself out.)