One of Psychology's Most Famous Experiments Was Deeply Flawed.

Pedro_P

Psychology professor Philip Zimbardo, who is known for his 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, gives his final lecture on the psychology of evil. The famous experiment placed students in a mock prison under Stanford University and assigned them to act as either guards or prisoners. New findings suggest the experiment may have been deeply flawed.
Credit: Credit: Paul Sakuma/AP/REX/Shutterstock

▼ The Stanford Prison Experiment — the infamous 1971 exercise in which regular college students placed in a mock prison suddenly transformed into aggressive guards and hysterical prisoners — was deeply flawed, a new investigation reveals.
The participants in the experiment, who were male college students, didn't just organically become abusive guards, reporter Ben Blum wrote in Medium. Rather, Philip Zimbardo, who led the experiment and is now a professor emeritus of psychology at Stanford University, encouraged the guards to act "tough," according to newfound audio from the Stanford archive.
Moreover, some of the outbursts from the so-called prisoners weren't triggered by the trauma of prison, Blum found. One student prisoner, Douglas Korpi, told Blum that he faked a breakdown so that he could get out of the experiment early to study for a graduate school exam.
"Anybody who is a clinician would know that I was faking," Korpi told Blum. "I'm not that good at acting. I mean, I think I do a fairly good job, but I'm more hysterical than psychotic."
In the experiment, Zimbardo paid nine student participants to act as prisoners and another nine to assume the role of prison guards. The experiment, housed in a mock jail built in the basement at Stanford, was supposed to last two weeks. But Zimbardo's girlfriend convinced him to shut it down after six days when she saw the bad conditions, Blum reported.
Since then, results from the Stanford Prison Experiment have been used to show that unique situations and social roles can bring out the worst in people. The experiment has informed psychologists and historians trying to understand how humans could act so brutally in events ranging from the Holocaust to Abu Ghraib prison (now called the Baghdad Central Prison) in Iraq. Many psychology textbooks in universities across the country also describe the experiment.
But the new discoveries could change all that. (▪ ▪ ▪)

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soothsayer

This makes it really difficult to accept findings . So peer review fails and nobody takes steps to validate the experiment and posterity is taken for a ride

bsk

so what to believe, and what not to

jayyogeswarusa

No authentic information. How can one capitalize this information now?

anuragdani

Isnt there a movie made on this ?