Can We Reverse The Stanford Prison Experiment?
blogs.hbr.org
blogs.hbr.org
"""over the past forty-plus years, the Stanford Prison Experiment has had a strong, and arguably detrimental impact upon both scholarly and popular conceptions of social psychology. Contrary to Zimbardo's misleading conclusions, ordinary people do not mindlessly and helplessly succumb to brutality; instead the evidence (even from his own experiment) seems to suggest that individuals tend to engage in brutality only when they truly believe that such actions are warranted -- acting upon ideas that are condoned by equally brutal group ideologies. The guards in Zimbardo's experiment were thus coerced by Zimbardo and his researchers to brutalize the prisoners; while the prisoners did not simply submit to the guards' brutality, but instead, actively resisted their oppression, both collectively and individually. This resistance was considered intolerable to Zimbardo, and as this article has shown, he utilized his system power to intervene to increase guard brutality and undermine the prisoners' collective will to resist their abusers."""
I've made some valuable unscientific, personal observations during this time. One is, that most people (I'd say 80%) do not speak up for themselves or others when it matters in groups with strict hierarchies.
Not only that, I think that most people don't have any basic moral convictions. Group punishment is highly effective.
I've learnt that sadistic, manipulative and narcissistic people thrive in such environments and if left uncontrolled, alike to a malign tumor that spreads rapidly to other parts of the body, they can impact the entire organization quickly.
Aye. The phrase "One bad apple (spoils the bunch)" is often misunderstood but applies dreadfully well to human organizations.
The more people in the group that have previously lived either in highly predatory enviroments, or have only seen life through TV tend to try and copy attitudes and behaviours as seen on TV.
If everybody start the same day, the most predatory get an advantage but they can't keep up with their image unless they form a subgroup. The subgroup enforces and the subgroup groupthinks. If they don't create a subgroup they soon become a nuisance and fade in to the background.
If everybody does not start at the same day then there is already an established group dynamic and people with social skills in competitive environments usually fit right in. I don't mean this always in a good way. A social skill that people adapted to was that, when nobody spoke to someone, they did not speak to him either. When they wanted to establish themselves they slowly tested their boundaries and tried to cease oportunities.
What most people did not see was that, after a few repetitions of the same procedure (new recruits) human behaviour given certain initial variables tended to repeat itself. That is bad for a predatory, freely evolving environment, but for somebody like me who had done and watched this again and again it was easy to control. The man in charge is the one who specifies how things will go.
People think they are smart and everything is a matter of intelligence. It isn't. You either know because you tested or because you studied social sciences (The second part is a guess).
So what happened: I learnt all there is to learn regarding rules and regulations. I failed one or two groups by applying everything I had seen in Hollywood movies,I was ignored and the situation turned in to a violent mess. Not violent against me but against each other... The next group I simply anticipated what would happen because I had already seen it (people attacking people, how somebody could sneak in drugs or how they used them) so it was an easy process that wasn't any more tiring for me or for them. I taught them all the rules and they would listen to me! I was very happy with myself. The recruits kept good relations to each other and they were model soldiers. So I ended my military service with a good feeling of giving.
Not a happy ending: One and a half year later I had to meet a friend of mine to a military hospital as he was being dismissed for medical reasons and nobody could drive him. There I met one of my recruits for whom I was very proud of, and I did't like what I was seeing. He looked like Charlie Seen after having served in Vietnam for 10years. Long story short, when they left my army recruit center, all of them had gained knowledge and it was better than most of their NCOs. They couldn't be forced by the book because they knew better, they knew how to assert themselves because I had shown them how it is done. They spent the rest of their days in the army manipulating people, getting power, and doing nothing themselves. Their behaviour still looked alike, and their behaviour repeated throughout the country.
Did not see that one coming.
I don't know how your author managed to read The Lucifer Effect and miss that. The last page he quotes from is page 194. The book is a good 400 pages long. The "unreflective" echo that Zimbardo gives ends a chapter offering evidence.
He spends the next two chapters answering it.
He also wrote http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/the_banality_of... which Barker apparently either found unworthy of mention or never read.
"This drug thing, this ain't police work. No, it ain't. I mean, I can send any fool with a badge and a gun up on them corners and jack a crew and grab vials. But policing? I mean, you call something a war and pretty soon everybody gonna be running around acting like warriors. They gonna be running around on a damn crusade, storming corners, slapping on cuffs, racking up body counts. And when you at war, you need a fucking enemy. And pretty soon, damn near everybody on every corner is your fucking enemy. And soon the neighborhood that you're supposed to be policing, that's just occupied territory."
The Wire has been acclaimed specifically for its close representation (still obviously dramatized) with the reality of Baltimore. If you haven't watched all five seasons, you should do so.
I walk by a pretty busy drug corner on my way to work and it always fascinates me how organized it all is. One of the most interesting things I ever saw was two homeless guys fighting over some money when several of the drug dealers came over and broke it up. Self-policing to keep the police away.
People can forget that people who care about what they are doing innovate a lot more than people who just follow processes. If management cares most about following processes, so will everybody else.
Wow. Like Neil Diamond and Barbara Streisand.
Journalists have weird ideas about probability.
My experience in the education system is that bad behaviour is punished in very public way and good behaviour is never publicised and rarely get any recognition except when to cast a light on bad behaviour.
Edit: the article makes a poor job of explaining that losada line and so does wikipedia.
Source? I never heard of that.
It's like the story of the boy who cried wolf, its origins are lost in time and not very precise.
A man was tired of the local youths <doing negative behavior>, so he offered them a small amount of money ($2-3) when they'd <do negative behavior>.
The next week he came to them and told them "sorry, business was slow, all I can give you this week is $1/time." They weren't happy, but agreed.
The next week he went back and said "sorry, even slower, I can only afford $0.25/time now." The youths said "we're not doing this for $0.25!" and stopped <negative behavior> altogether.
Indeed, that's a better explanation. One variant has the kids playing soccer and yelling in the park near the old man's house, it would fit the story better.
My apologies, the story isn't à-propos enough and I though it was more universal.
Really? I mean, really? I'm gonna have to see some extraordinary evidence for this extraordinary claim before I believe that having police go round giving out free movie tickets for not-littering is sufficient to reduce recidivism by an astonishing factor of seven. And I've never heard of it before.
They've fired him anyways, apparently for suggesting that transit cops should ride in buses occasionally. http://taxpayer.com/blog/29-11-2011/bc-translink-lost-11-mil...
So the Police Chief DARES to intimate that the Police should get on the transit buses to bust these thieves...
And they fire him!?!?!?
Just... Wow...
I can see why most police would just 'go with the flow'. They are not given the requisite latitude to implement innovative ideas with respect to their jobs. And frankly, boarding buses to bust freeloaders is not particularly innovative. It's just something that is usually not done.
All I can find on the actual reasons he was fired is a nebulous "management style" bit http://www.canada.com/story_print.html?id=93d27fc9-b760-4cae...
I'm still trying to figure out the details of this guy's life and how the above story can possibly be correct. It seems like he was the chief only of the Vancouver transit police, right? So precisely which crime stats are we looking at, when we look at the recidivism rates?
And I agree that the evidence certainly is not widely available.
edit: And oddly enough when I googled "ward clapham recidivism" your comment was the first result.
New to me too, but entirely consistent with other research I've read on crime prevention.
Another reason for skepticism: googling "ward clapham recidivism" I found a bunch of pages suggesting the recidivism rate dropped not to 8% but to 5%, an equally unsourced and implausible-sounding number.
Of course recidivism rates depend on what you're measuring, anyway. 70% of burglars are re-arrested for burglary within three years of release, while only 3% of rapists and 1% of murderers get re-arrested for the same crimes.
The latter may well be due to the combination of (1) murder is (mostly) a young man's crime and (2) murder sentences are typically long enough that folks aren't young when they're paroled/released.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_Daniels#Discussion_of_Pe...
If they get very small prize for socially accepted behaviour, they cannot think they did sth socially accepted for that prize - that would mean they are cheap to buy. So they think they did it because they are the kind of guys, that do such things sometimes.
If I'm doing small acts of kindnes just because, it's hard to make this consistent with "fuck the others" attitude, stealing, etc. Easier to think I'm good guy overall, just made some mistakes before. Cognitive dissonance is a powerfull force.
But IANAP.