The Stanford Prison Experiment was massively influential. We just learned it was a fraud.

[Swordsmyth]

The Stanford Prison Experiment, one of the most famous and compelling psychological studies of all time, told us a tantalizingly simple story about human nature.
The study took paid participants and assigned them to be “inmates” or “guards” in a mock prison at Stanford University. Soon after the experiment began, the “guards” began mistreating the “prisoners,” implying evil is brought out by circumstance. The authors, in their conclusions, suggested innocent people, thrown into a situation where they have power over others, will begin to abuse that power. And people who are put into a situation where they are powerless will be driven to submission, even madness.
The Stanford Prison Experiment has been included in many, many introductory psychology textbooks and is often cited uncritically. It’s the subject of movies, documentaries, books, television shows, and congressional testimony.
But its findings were wrong. Very wrong. And not just due to its questionable ethics or lack of concrete data — but because of deceit.
A new exposé based on previously unpublished recordings of Philip Zimbardo, the Stanford psychologist who ran the study, and interviews with his participants, offers convincing evidence that the guards in the experiment were coached to be cruel. It also shows that the experiment’s most memorable moment — of a prisoner descending into a screaming fit, proclaiming, “I’m burning up inside!” — was the result of the prisoner acting. “I took it as a kind of an improv exercise,” one of the guards told reporter Ben Blum. “I believed that I was doing what the researchers wanted me to do.”
The findings have long been subject to scrutiny — many think of them as more of a dramatic demonstration, a sort-of academic reality show, than a serious bit of science. But these new revelations incited an immediate response. “We must stop celebrating this work,” personality psychologist Simine Vazire tweeted, in response to the article. “It’s anti-scientific. Get it out of textbooks.” Many other psychologists have expressed similar sentiments.

More at: https://www.vox.com/2018/6/13/174491...gy-replication

[timosman]

What about Milgram?

[thoughtomator]

That experiment was just a specific case of the more general Lucifer Effect, which is proven way beyond a reasonable doubt.

[timosman]

These experiments have proved ass kissing can be terminal and it should be banned.

[Anti Federalist]

This is nothing new to me.

I remember reading years ago that the "prisoner" subjects were instructed to react in over the top ways.

Still proves the point that people, given authority, will "follow orders", regardless.

[timosman]

This is nothing new to me.

I remember reading years ago that the "prisoner" subjects were instructed to react in over the top ways.

Still proves the point that people, given authority, will "follow orders", regardless.

We like to please and kiss ass.

[NorthCarolinaLiberty]

...many think of them as more of a dramatic demonstration, a sort-of academic reality show,...

Those inmates and guards could be tee vee stars today!

[Danke]

We I like to please and kiss ass.

ftfy

[timosman]

ftfy

First step - acknowledgement.

[CCTelander]

Those inmates and guards could be tee vee stars today!

Hell, they could become president!

[pcosmar]

We like to please and kiss ass.

Never was good at that..

Dropped High school rather than kiss ass. Got GED the same day.

Couldn't in the Army,, got out.
Didn't in Prison,, took my hits, returned some.
went AWOL from parole,, Turned myself in
Completed the parole.

I don't kiss ass,, nor do I expect mine to be kissed.

[timosman]

Never was good at that..

Dropped High school rather than kiss ass. Got GED the same day.

Couldn't in the Army,, got out.
Didn't in Prison,, took my hits, returned some.
went AWOL from parole,, Turned myself in
Completed the parole.

I don't kiss ass,, nor do I expect mine to be kissed.

Your story will make an average person think you should have kissed ass like everybody else. Kissing ass is mandatory in a polite society. You could observe how well it worked during Obama years.

[pcosmar]

Your story will make an average person think you should have kissed ass like everybody else. Kissing ass is mandatory in a polite society. You could observe how well it worked during Obama years.

I am not average. I am unique.

[thoughtomator]

I am not average. I am unique.

On RPF, all users are above average.

[timosman]

On RPF, all users are above average.

Statements like these usually signify an end of a political movement. Why not be more inclusive? Ass kissing is good. The plan was to break the glass ceiling with it.

[pcosmar]

The plan was to break the glass ceiling with it.

I thought it was "building a stairway to heaven".

[timosman]

I thought it was "building a stairway to heaven".

And the forests will echo with laughter.

[Swordsmyth]

Stanford professor who changed America with just one study was also a liar


The first pseudopatient — “David Lurie” in his notes — was very clearly Rosenhan himself.
“It all started out as a dare,” Rosenhan told a local newspaper. “I was teaching psychology at Swarthmore College, and my students were saying that the course was too conceptual and abstract. So I said, ‘OK, if you really want to know what mental patients are like, become mental patients.’ ”
Soon after that, Rosenhan went undercover for nine days at Haverford State Hospital in Haverford, Pa., in February 1969. His diary and book describe a host of indignities: soiled bathrooms without doors, inedible food, sheer boredom and ennui, rank disregard by the staff and doctors. Rosenhan even witnessed an attendant sexually assault one of the more disturbed patients. The only time Rosenhan was truly “seen” as a human by the staff was when an attendant mistook him for a doctor.
The experience was harrowing. After nine days, he pushed for a release and made sure that his undergraduate students — who were planning to follow him as undercover patients into the hospital — would not be allowed to go. Colleagues described a shaken, changed man after his experience.
I dug deeper. If his own students were forbidden from pursuing the experiment after this dismaying event, who were the others who had willingly followed in Rosenhan’s footsteps? Why did they put their mental health — even their lives — on the line for this experiment?
The further I explored, the greater my concerns. With the exception of one paper defending “On Being Sane in Insane Places,” Rosenhan never again published any studies on psychiatric hospitalization, even though this subject made him an international success.
He had also landed a lucrative book deal and had even written eight chapters, well over a hundred pages of it. But then Rosenhan suddenly refused to turn over the manuscript. Seven years later, his publisher sued him to return his advance. Why would he have given up on the subject that made him famous?
I also started to uncover serious inconsistencies between the documents I had found and the paper Rosenhan published in Science. For example, Rosenhan’s medical record during his undercover stay at Haverford found that he had not, as he had written in his published paper, only exhibited one symptom of “thud, empty, hollow.” Instead, he had told doctors that he put a “copper pot” up to his ears to drown out the noises and that he had been suicidal. This was a far more severe — and legitimately concerning — description of his illness than he had portrayed in his paper.


Meanwhile, I looked for the seven other pseudopatients and spent the next months of my life chasing ghosts. I hunted down rumors, pursuing one dead end after the next. I even hired a private detective, who got no further than I had.
After years of searching, I found only one pseudopatient who participated in the study and whose experience matched that of Rosenhan: Bill Underwood, who’d been a Stanford graduate student at the time.
The only other participant I discovered, Harry Lando, had a vastly different take. Lando had summed up his 19-day hospitalization at the US Public Health Service Hospital in San Francisco in one word: “positive.”
Even though he too was misdiagnosed with schizophrenia, Lando felt it was a healing environment that helped people get better.
“The hospital seemed to have a calming effect. Someone might come in agitated and then fairly quickly they would tend to calm down. It was a benign environment,” Lando, now a psychology professor at the University of Minnesota, recalled in an interview.
But instead of incorporating Lando into the study, Rosenhan dropped him from it.
Lando felt it was pretty obvious what had happened, and I agree: His data — the overall positive experience of his hospitalization — didn’t match Rosenhan’s thesis that institutions are uncaring, ineffective and even harmful places, and so they were discarded.
“Rosenhan was interested in diagnosis, and that’s fine, but you’ve got to respect and accept the data, even if the data are not supportive of your preconceptions,” Lando told me.
Rosenhan, I began to realize, may have been the ultimate unreliable narrator. And I believe it’s possible some of the other pseudopatients he mentioned in his study never existed at all.
As a result, I am now seriously questioning a study I had once admired and had originally planned to celebrate. In my new book “The Great Pretender” (Grand Central Publishing), out this week, I paint the picture of a brilliant but flawed psychologist who was likely also a fabulist.
It wasn’t what I intended, and I feel conflicted about my findings. I have so enjoyed dropping into Rosenhan’s world and getting to know his mind and his loved ones — but I have no doubt that his creation, one that touches all of our lives, is flimsy at best. And it’s time for the world to see the study for what it really is.


It’s not the first time a paper published by an esteemed journal has been called into serious question, or even exposed as an outright lie. There was Dutch social psychologist Diederik Stapel, once renowned for finding a correlation between filthier train platforms and racist views at an Utrecht station, who is now infamous for inventing data.
Philip Zimbardo, the architect of the famous prison study, which took place in Stanford’s basement in 1971, has also come under fire. Zimbardo and his researchers recruited students and assigned them roles as “inmates” or “guards.” Guards abused inmates; inmates reacted as real prisoners. A 2018 Medium piece tracked down the original participants in that study and exposed serious issues — including the fact that Zimbardo had coached the guards into behaving aggressively.
Psychologist Peter Gray told me that he sees the work of researchers such as Zimbardo and Rosenhan as prime examples of studies that “fit our biases … There is a kind of desire to expose the problems of society but in the process cut corners or even make up data.”
This may explain Rosenhan. He saw real problems in society: The country was warehousing very sick people in horror houses pretending to be hospitals, our diagnostic systems were flawed and psychiatrists in many ways had too much power — and very little substance. He saw how psychiatric labels degraded people and how doctors see patients through the prism of their mental illness. All of this was true. In many ways, it is still true.
But the problem is that scientific research needs to be sound. We cannot build progress on a rotten foundation.
In disregarding Lando’s data and inventing other facts, Rosenhan missed an opportunity to create something three-dimensional, something a bit messier but more honest. Instead, he helped perpetuate a dangerous half-truth.
And today, what we have is a mental health crisis of epic proportions. Over 100,000 people with serious mental illnesses live on the streets, while we are chronically short of safe housing and hospital beds for the sickest among us.
Had Rosenhan been more measured in his treatment of the hospitals, had he included Lando’s data, there’s a chance a different dialogue, less extreme in its certainty, would have emerged from his study, and maybe, just maybe, we’d be in a better place.

More at: https://nypost.com/2019/11/02/stanfo...s-also-a-liar/

[pcosmar]

I would posit that MKULTRA has had more of a influential effect..on America.


It is still the Gross Abuse of Psychiatry.