What We Can Learn From the Stanford Prison ‘ Experiment ’

The Stanford Prison ‘Experiment’ is not so much an actual scientific experiment as it is a great piece of fiction, a piece of improvisational drama created by a budding psychologist at the time, Philip Zimbardo. So please, let’s stop calling it an “experiment” and let’s stop teaching it in psychology classes. It’s astounding how many people still believe the experiment to be a credible piece of research based on an objective set of hypotheses and scientific methodologies. As we’ve learned over the past decade, as more evidence has become available — and after another set of researchers failed to replicate the original experiment — there’s little doubt that the original study has little of scientific value to teach us. Other than how to tell a good story, one that others really want to believe. Philip Zimbardo is the Stanford psychologist who ran the study in 1971 and published his findings in Naval Research Reviews (1973) due to partial funding by the Office of Naval Research. He later published his findings to a far broader, national audience in that pantheon of scientific discovery, The New York Times Magazine (Zimbardo et al., 1973). It propelled Zimbardo into becoming one of the most recognizable national names in psychology — a pedigree he has arguably been trading on throughout most of his career. Ben Blum, over at Medium, has written an in-depth critique of the Stanford Prison Experiment, describi...
Source: World of Psychology - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Ethics & Morality General Psychology Research Violence and Aggression fake science Prison Experiment Stanford Prison Experiment Zimbardo Source Type: blogs