- But actually, at least judging from the Mouse Utopia and the Stanford Prison Experiment?
- It’s made up from whole cloth.
It studied this by having students divided into prisoners and guards.
- And supposedly it proved that, driven by peer pressure, these arbitrarily chosen prisoners and guards fell into their roles. Right?
- It’s been quoted everywhere, over and over again.
Well, apparently not. This article admits that:
This one is a little more candid...data collected from a thorough investigation of the SPE archives and
interviews with 15 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 3 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.
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