[Cyborg] Stanford Prison Experiment followup

[Ted Smith]

On Thu, 2011-07-14 at 08:22 -0400, Eric Boyd wrote:
> http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2011/julaug/features/spe.html
> 
> It's amazing how different the different participants stories are 
> compared to the standard story.  I think especially telling is the one 
> guard who says he planned what came over him - he lead the efforts of 
> the guards to break down the prisoners.  It strikes me that without him, 
> the entire experiment may have turned out quite differently.  How would 
> the world be different if the Stanford Prison Experiment had resulted in 
> people playing guitars happily for 2 weeks?
> 
> Eric

I'm sure he took that account from his journal, where he wrote down his
plan before participating in the experiment and got it dated and
notarized.

If the Stanford Prison Experiment was people playing guitars happily for
two weeks, people would deny that situations have stronger effects on
people's behaviors than static personality traits. This is quite
different from today, where people deny that situations have stronger
effects on people's behaviors than static personality traits, and
there's a lot of empirical evidence to back up that claim, like the
Milgram studies, the Stanford Prison Experiments, the Robber's Cave
experiment, Asch's line study, and every study on correspondence
bias/fundamental attribution error, to name a few.

</rant>
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