Comment by AlbertCory | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AlbertCory | Hacker News Reader

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>> 81% accurately figured out the experimenter’s hypothesis

so what? Did they get a grade on their participation? I'd bet not. So why would they care what the hypothesis was?

>> The experimenters intervened directly in the experiment, either to give precise instructions, to recall the purposes of the experiment, or to set a general direction.

PZ says they said, "We noticed this morning that you weren't really, you know, lending a hand, and I was wondering if there's anything's wrong… We really want to get you active and involved because the guards have to know that every guard is going to be what we call a “tough guard”… what I mean by tough is [that] you have to be firm, and you have to be in the action… It’s really important… for the workings of the experiment [because] whether or not we can make this thing seem like a prison—which is the aim of the thing—depends largely on the guards’ behavior."

Sorry, but I don't see how this invalidates anything. If some of the guards were just phoning it in and not taking it seriously, they did need a talking-to.

Zimbardo’s claim was “normal people could behave in pathological ways even without the external pressure of an experimenter-authority.”

In fact what the experiment showed is that people can behave in pathological ways when Phil Zimbardo coaxes them into it.

How many guards were there, and how many were "interfered with" (as you put it)?

We also have the real-life Nazi Germany experience, where 1000's of previously-normal people did unspeakable things. And of course the Japanese behavior in China before that. You might call these "natural experiments."

With human social behavior it's just not possible to have a rigorously controlled experiment. Nor can you ever end up with rock-solid conclusions similar to those in physics. Even more recent behavioral economics experiments are full of artificial situations, like $10 "bets" because you can't use serious sums. All you can say about critiques of SPE is "compared to what?"

Those 1000 people were heavily coaxed into it. They were subject to years long propaganda painting ennemy as evil danger. That includes literal school system teaching them this. Propaganda had many facets including the idea that manly men must be without empathy toward enemy, that empathy is weakness and cruelty is strength.

A lot of those so-call normal people were literal Nazi party members who became such voluntarily. In particular, camps were run by SS - the elite of believers.

Literally nothing about Germany proves your thesis. Germany proves that it is possible to create political system under which you reward cruelty and consequently people become cruel. It shows that when politicians promote violence, violence can happen. It shows that when you punish opposition, opposition will be helpless.

Guards are coaxed to be tough: if you handle a dangerous criminal in a relaxed manner, they can try to escape killing you in the process.

"Tough" is dumb, and opposite if it is not necessarily "relaxed" but could be "cautious" and "thoughtful" instead

Which is something different then what happened in German camps.

"They were subject to years long propaganda painting ennemy as evil danger."

This only applies to Altreich citizens, who lived in Germany as of 1933. But the Holocaust involved a lot of people who weren't Altreich citizens.

Austria was only annexed in March 1938, and yet supplied its share of war criminals to the Nazi effort.

The Trawniki men, who guarded a lot of the concentration camps in the East, were Ukrainians who only came under German rule in summer 1941 and didn't even speak German. I would say that the influence of German propaganda on them was negligible compared to an Altreich citizen.

Still you can't ensure they were normal people to begin with. And you can't say that they weren't under strong influence. I bet there was a bit of "peer pressurre" from propagandized psychos where the poor Austrians were already on the "job".

The original claim was made about "large number of normal Germans". By the time of WWII, Ukraine was subject of genocide from two sides. And again, local camps guards were especially selected, coached and punished if they were not cruel enough.

OP referred to supposed process in which people spontaneously become super cruel. The claim that "it is possible to make people cruel by authorities" is something completely different.

He didn't coax them to pathological behavior:

--

My instructions to the guards, as documented by recordings of the guard orientation, were that they could not hit the prisoners but could create feelings of boredom, frustration, fear, and "a sense of powerlessness—that is, we have total power of the situation, and they have none." We did not give any formal or detailed instructions about how to be an effective guard.

Asking a person role-playing a guard in a prison simulation to be "firm" and "in the action" is mild compared to the pressure exerted by actual wardens and superior officers in real-life prison and military settings, where guards failing to participate fully can face disciplinary hearings, demotion, or dismissal. Although the research team asked all guards to be actively involved and firmly in control of the prisoners, it never instructed guards to employ brutality, and it explicitly banned the use of physical force.

--

"tough" and "firm" are dog whistles for multitude of pathological behaviors

Nitpick: those might be euphemisms but they’re not dog whistles. Everyone, not just some kind of people would understand the unstated meaning of those words.

Dog whistles are similar to shibboleths.

They’re extremely mild implications of the exact shape you’d expect actual guards to get while on the job, no?

Is your thinking that a prison guard (or analogous) would be told to be kind and forgiving, or not given any direction at all on the “right” way to behave?

> so what? Did they get a grade on their participation? I'd bet not. So why would they care what the hypothesis was?

- If you were a subject in an experiment, wouldn't you be curious about the experiment design and the hypothesis being tested?

- If you had a good guess as to the tested hypothesis, could that influence your behavior?

These questions are all posited from a modern, critical perspective, which is pointlessly fishing for theoreticals out of context.

If the experiment was via college students, it is unlikely that anyone thought about the experiment design much, because students. This may be true of any adults in that time and area, maybe, as a (unnoted) selection bias. There was an implicit cultural deference to authority in the 70s that doesnt exist now (the thinking of the counter culture was also very different). Finally, there was a weak understanding of what terminology (like subject) implied or the inherent dangers, much less the ethical perils.

> so what?

It affects subject behaviour and contaminates the experiment.

If the outcome of the experiment is obvious and predictable, how can you make it unpredictable? And how it demonstrates failure to reproduce? This sounds like a generic argument against psychological experiments, because you can't have them in perfect conditions, you have to see through imperfection.

Well yes, psychological experiments are super hard to do, often borderline impossible.

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