It's the 40th anniversary of the Stanford Experiment. Student volunteers were screened for mental strength etc and then split into prison guards and prisoners. The experiment was meant to last two weeks but was abandoned after 6 days as the physical abuse being dished out was increasingly sickening. It's viewed as a watershed in experimentation (good and bad) and recreations have produced the same results. Question is, what does it tell us? Is it within human nature to be naturally sadistic and follow the pack when uniforms, symbols etc are introduced or does it prove that the notion of splitting groups into overtly strict heirarchal structures causes systematic assertion of dominance? What if the experiment were carried out with only women taking part and what difference would the involvement of whalespunk produce?
Question is, what does it tell us? ------- **** all. One of the "guards" basically admitted he decided to play up the bad cop routine on day 2 because he was bored and the rest just went along with it, there was nothing real about it at all. Anytime you use volunteers like this you will always get worthless results because they are all acting, some will be trying to portray what they think you want to see while others will be deliberately unhelpful. It's the equivalent watching kids play cops and robbers and assuming the cops were going to grow into gun toting maniacs and the robbers would be performing bank heists in 20 years time.
But the rest quickly followed suit. Doesn't that say something about heirarchy structures and peer influence or does it just suggest that if one person acts the ****, the rest of the pack are absolved? Also, stop avoiding the whalespunk aspect
It didn't prove anything. The vast majority of people in "power" like the police don't abuse it. I suppose those taking part in the Stanford prison experiment knew there wouldn't be any further consquences away from that environment (I believe so, can't remember in my Psychology A Level days) so didn't show their "true" behaviour if they truly had to be responsible for people.
I mentioned it to a guy in work this morning - I did it as part of psychology in uni (which was WAY more boring than it ought to have been) but he studied a lot of other case studies. He mentioned guys conditioning 9 month olds to fear anything by hitting metal bars behind them Surely Pavlov proved associated thought reaction without harrassing babies?
My bro done this with his son, though he didn't use metal bars and it was more comical. When the wee lad was a few months old he was always used to give him a big Ric Flair Wooooooooooo and the wee lad ended up laughing at it. He joked that he didn't want him growing up a whiney wee American kid. His other method was cheering when he fell over, means when he fell over and was a bout to cry he would see people cheering and he would just jump back up on to his feet. As for the experiment I read about it before and remember the BBC tried it again a few years back. The guards gave the prisoners a tough time and the cons starting giving each guard grief singling ones out for bullying. They brough a trade union speaker in as an con and things quickly changed, he made a list of demands and got his own way taking on the role of the "daddy." Very interesting.
I've done the bit in bold with all of my kids, pretty much - hate to see mother's rushing to their children with "oooh, are you alright?" and concerned faces for them to burst into tears. If you act as if everything's cool when they bump themselves at a young age, you can tell when they're at it and when they're genuinely hurt. My youngest is 9 months old (today, in fact) and claps all the time. Every time she claps, her older sisters say how clever she is so she just ****ing claps all the time now I never saw the BBC one but it's definitely interesting that the involvement of one character type changed the whole situation. Like I said, I'd like to see it recreated with a mix of sexes, one sex oppressing the other<stawner>, or just women - I'm fairly confident that the outcome would be significantly different.
Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. (see Europe circa 1938-1945) It's inherent in Human nature.
the whale spunk would probably have been seized by the guards as a lubricant ...Im buggered if I know what would have happened next.
There's some pretty crazy **** in there. Excellent read if you're interested in science/psychology/etc. please log in to view this image
The conditioning of the baby my workmate mentioned today is covered here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Albert_experiment Apparently, the things he was conditioned to fear as a baby, did not result in him having phobias of as an adult.
