In an episode of the Freakonomics podcast they talked about similar skepticism about Phillip Zimbardo’s Stanford prison guard experiments. The ‘guards’ felt subtly encouraged to become abusive to the ‘prisoners’.
The ‘guards’ felt subtly encouraged to become abusive to the ‘prisoners’.
If being merely subtly encouraged to become abusive resulted in the guards being abusive, that is an important result. In contrast, Milgram’s electric shock experiment used a man in a white coat explicitly telling the subject to give the shocks.
I agree it is an interesting result but it isn’t really the way the study has been portrayed. The takeaway, before hearing about this, was that anyone with power will start to abuse it, on their own, if just left to their own devices. But this is not, it now seems, what really happened in the Zimbardo prison guard experiments. So just like with the Milgram shock experiments, important information was missing causing the results to imply a more negative picture of human nature.
In an episode of the Freakonomics podcast they talked about similar skepticism about Phillip Zimbardo’s Stanford prison guard experiments. The ‘guards’ felt subtly encouraged to become abusive to the ‘prisoners’.
If being merely subtly encouraged to become abusive resulted in the guards being abusive, that is an important result. In contrast, Milgram’s electric shock experiment used a man in a white coat explicitly telling the subject to give the shocks.
I agree it is an interesting result but it isn’t really the way the study has been portrayed. The takeaway, before hearing about this, was that anyone with power will start to abuse it, on their own, if just left to their own devices. But this is not, it now seems, what really happened in the Zimbardo prison guard experiments. So just like with the Milgram shock experiments, important information was missing causing the results to imply a more negative picture of human nature.