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Comment by CamperBob2 | Hacker News Reader

What I find interesting are the people who are absolutely fanatical about disputing Zimbardo's conclusions. It's as if it's very important to them personally to be able to classify potential perpetrators of atrocities into two simplistic categories, People Who Do Stuff Like That and People Who, Somehow, Magically, Don't. Any experiments that might reveal human nature as the ultimate culprit are considered politically incorrect and unacceptable to perform.

Yes, the Stanford Prison Experiment was a dumpster fire. But so was the Nazi regime. When you want to study dumpster fires, you could do worse than to start a small-scale dumpster fire of your own and see how things progress.

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Well said. I think it's instinctual to want to believe there is some intrinsic, insurmountable difference between us and them (people who do morally repugnant things). At the heart of it, it's tribalism.

This quote from Solzhenitsyn springs to mind. I have always kept it close to heart:

>If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

> Well said. I think it's instinctual to want to believe there is some intrinsic, insurmountable difference between us and them (people who do morally repugnant things). At the heart of it, it's tribalism.

Or maybe they’re just tired of crap science that just won’t die.

When you want to make your point, just use “Lord of the Flies” instead. It makes compelling, similar points about the human condition. But it just does it as a novel, not as a fake experiment.

For a more solid experiment, there's the BBC prison study: http://www.bbcprisonstudy.org

Different conclusions, just as fascinating.

> It's as if it's very important to them personally to be able to classify perpetrators of atrocities into two simplistic categories, People Who Do Stuff Like That and People Who, Somehow, Magically, Don't.

You don't see why that is something a person might want to believe, if at all possible? Humans have done some pretty terrible things; I think that being able to say "Yeah, but I wouldn't do that" is almost as important (regardless of truthiness) as believing in free will.

I mean, sure, maybe everyone would have done those horrible things, and maybe we don't have free will... But it's clear that you will make better decisions if you act as if you have free will... if you act as if you have some power to stop or at least not contribute to the horrible things that happen in the world.

So... yeah, I'm personally quite sympathetic to people who feel it's really important to believe that not all of us would become nazis.

You don't see why that is something a person might want to believe, if at all possible?

The people I respect want to know the truth, even if it's upsetting or disillusioning. I think Zimbardo and Milgram were similarly motivated, even if their methods were questionable.

We are, after all, talking about a scientific experiment here. Starting with a conclusion and looking for evidence to justify it is what the researchers are being criticized for, so we need to avoid making the same mistake in support of our own comforting biases.

Yes, even if your comforting bias is pro-Zimbardo.

Sigh, here come the ad hominems. I do not have a "pro-Zimbardo bias," whatever that is. I wouldn't know Zimbardo if he came to the door selling encyclopedias.

I have read Solzhenitsyn, Mayer, Ma Bo, and any number of other authors who have recounted similar 'experiments' that also took place outside the comforting oversight of a peer-reviewed ethics committee, though. At some point, patterns emerge and conclusions are drawn.

>The people I respect want to know the truth, even if it's upsetting or disillusioning.

Even if it makes you dramatically less effective?

As far as I can tell, the best evidence is that we probably don't have free will in a way we would find meaningful.

However I can tell you that you will have a much better life if you act as if you have free will, in spite of that evidence.

Even if I'm wrong on that point of fact, and I could be; this isn't really my field, my point stands. Would you prefer to believe in something, even if the 'upsetting or disillusioning' side of that belief is that truly believing it would cripple you as a human?

It's an interesting question, all right. In some ways it's similar to the question of whether we'd be off as a species if the resources we spend on religious institutions and practices were directed toward rational ends.

I'm unquestionably less 'effective' as a member of society because I'm not religious, and I might even be happier if I took advantage of the free social capital that comes with participation in communal irrationality. But at some point, it would threaten my sense of self-actualization. I don't want to die feeling like a successful, happy fraud. Do you? For the same reason, I don't want to pretend that Zimbardo's results can be ignored because of the unscientific manner in which they were obtained.

> Yes, the Stanford Prison Experiment was a dumpster fire.

It was a scientific dumpster fire as well. What was the control group exactly?

If there had been a control group, it would have consisted of prisoners held by guards who didn't behave anything like prison guards are trained to behave.

So whether that would be useful is a matter of opinion, I guess. In the real world, you don't always have the luxury of controlled experiments. Ask astronomers, climatologists, paleontologists, or any number of other practitioners about that.

Except that, you are the one who makes simplistic categories. You want it to be about human nature and don't want it to be about ideologies and opinions.

"It is human nature to escalate abuse within week in position of power" and "we can make people escalate abuse quickly if we indoctrinate them right" are very different conclusions with very different implications.

If you are really interested in Nazi regime, you would do better if you would study history, what happened when Nazi were still small, what real Nazi were saying, ideas and fears that shaped German opinions, journals of contemporary people, what opposition did and how they lost, that sort of thing.

You will find better understanding of historical German actions in there then in single study on few American students.

I have. The conclusion I've reached is that we're incredibly fortunate that few of those circumstances exist in the US today. If they did, the outcome would be the same, because -- get ready for this, it's a radical statement -- we're no different than the Germans.

The Nazis were not aliens or monsters or demons. They were us. Just a matter of the right (wrong) circumstances combined with the right (wrong) leadership, that's all.

That's basically what the infamous psychological experiments of Milgram and Zimbardo showed, when all of the academic hair-splitting and infighting is said and done. Their observations were, and are, a big problem for anyone who's invested in the "Some people are just evil monsters" model.

Oh yeah, we are very different then Germans. We have different values and political system. We have overall much lower levels of violence. We could become like Germans, but overall, we are not nearly there. Hitler did not became leader randomly and his ideas and opinions were not formed randomly. His competitors for power were different then him.

Among other things, the social darwinism and race believes of Nazi were formed by bad contemporary science (and misuse of it). They believed themselves to be rational and the right kind of man. Guess someone needed to hair split those ideas more loudly long before.

The academic hair splitting matters. The truth matters and the truth here is that this particular experiment did not shown what Zimbardo claimed to show.

In practical politial consequences of time, this experiment was used as argument that you can't possibly make prison less abusive. It did not shown that at all, it shown only that it is possible to make it abusive if you want to. Difference matters, because if you stop trying, well then conditions won't improve.

> fanatical about disputing Zimbardo's conclusions

What you're misrepresenting as "fanaticism" is simply a strong but justified emotional reaction to what the debunking of Zimbardo implies.

An emotional reaction triggered by the revelation of a revealed hostile bias against normal people just like themselves by formerly trusted scientists, formerly trusted journalists, and other formerly trusted opinion leaders.

Interesting times ahead.

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