The Lucifer Effect, 2

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gringoDan on June 11, 2018

This is a fascinating article about how much of the famous Stanford Prison Experiment was a sham.

The appeal of the Stanford prison experiment seems to go deeper than its scientific validity, perhaps because it tells us a story about ourselves that we desperately want to believe: that we, as individuals, cannot really be held accountable for the sometimes reprehensible things we do. As troubling as it might seem to accept Zimbardo’s fallen vision of human nature, it is also profoundly liberating. It means we’re off the hook. Our actions are determined by circumstance. Our fallibility is situational. Just as the Gospel promised to absolve us of our sins if we would only believe, the SPE offered a form of redemption tailor-made for a scientific era, and we embraced it.

It seems that we fell for the narrative fallacy every time this “research” was used as an explanation for behavior in the real world.

— The Lifespan of a Lie – Why can’t we escape the Stanford Prison Experiment?

— Hacker News

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2023.07.30 Sunday ACHK