Remembering Phil Zimbardo (1933-2024) | Hacker News Reader

Remembering Phil Zimbardo (1933-2024)

psychologytoday.com

39 pointshaunter25 comments

I get that the writer of this article is great friends with Philip but I think it’s not fair to mention the Stanford Prison Experiment and then not mention the fact that it turned out to be a sham study.

https://scribe.usc.edu/the-stanford-prison-experiment-a-sham...

He responded to many of the accusations here:

https://www.prisonexp.org/response

Not to mention the article says it "was also instrumental in changing how people are treated during psychological research" -- Uhh, yeah, because the lack of ethical safeguards in the study became a major issue and we realized we needed to correct that. You don't get credit for ethics reforms by being the unethical person.

SPE was fraud, he told the guards to act like "tough guards" and then said publicly “the guards were given no specific instruction or training on how to be guards," which is what made it probably the most famous psychology study of all time.

https://gen.medium.com/the-lifespan-of-a-lie-d869212b1f62

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/6/14/17464516/st...

Archive link for Ben Blum’s article: https://archive.ph/kn1Eb

The two scientists who conducted “The BBC Prison Study” in the early 2000s wrote about the revelations in the Zimbardo archive material here: https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/time-change-story

Thibault Le Texier, whose book History of a Lie brought this information to light, wrote a summary paper in the American Psychologist: https://letexier.org/IMG/pdf/LeTexier_Debunking-the-SPE_Amer...

As if real prison guards in oppressive regimes spend a lot of time in ethics classes.

The idea behind SPE was not to ask if something could happen or how it should happen, but to ask how something did happen. It achieved the results it was intended to achieve, as did the similarly-"discredited" work by Milgram.

The conclusion in both cases was inescapable: if you order someone to commit an atrocity and they refuse, all you have to do is to ask the next person in line. You won't have to go very far or wait very long.

I watch his TED talk once a year about the psychology of evil and make me aware of the seven rules that he has established.

7 Processes that Grease the Slippery Slope of Evil

1. Mindlessly taking the first small step.

2. Dehumanization of others.

3. De-individuation of self (anonymity).

4. Diffusion of personal responsibility.

5. Blind obedience to authority

6. Uncritical conformity to group norms

7. Passive tolerance of evil through inaction or indifference

https://www.ted.com/talks/philip_zimbardo_the_psychology_of_...

I think Zimbardo's work on shyness is a valuable contribution that could resonate with the HN community, especially given the focus on introspection and analytical thinking here. His book on the subject [1] offers insights that might be relevant to many.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/672266.Shyness

Fun Fact: The Stanford Computer Science Department was (mostly) housed in Margaret Jacks Hall from 1980 - 1996, and if you went down to the basement where the department's mainframes and Arpanet IMP and phototypesetters lived, just around the corner were the "cells" where the Prison Experiment took place. Creepy.

:( This is even worse considering that the prison experiments turned out to be highly influenced by Zimbardo and eventually his wife put a stop to him more or less telling the guards to abuse the prisoners

Basically it’s a sca

Edit: source https://scribe.usc.edu/the-stanford-prison-experiment-a-sham...

It's not hard to find the hall. Grad student offices now, I believe.

So they still harbor the same amount of mental and emotional strain, is what you're saying?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Zimbardo

> Philip George Zimbardo (/zɪmˈbɑːrdoʊ/; March 23, 1933 – October 14, 2024) was an American psychologist and a professor emeritus at Stanford University. He became known for his 1971 Stanford prison experiment, which was later criticized severely for both ethical and scientific reasons. He has authored various introductory psychology textbooks for college students, and other notable works, including The Lucifer Effect, The Time Paradox, and The Time Cure. He was also the initiator and president of the Heroic Imagination Project.

The Lucifer Effect is a great book. It's thesis is "what makes good people do bad things". I recommend it to anyone considering doing bad things, or to anyone who knows good people who do bad things.

that book [0] appears to be mostly a re-telling of the situation, enactment and repercussions of the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) with some speculative material tacked on the front and back of that.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lucifer_Effect

And the Stanford Prison Experiment was somewhere between an extraordinarily poorly designed experiment and an outright hoax.

Have you read the Lucifer Effect? It seems like you might not have read the book.

Does the book contain an apology for perpetrating the hoax? If not I’m not particularly interested.

The Stanford Prison Experiment is the kind of thing that gives the entire field of psychology a bad reputation. It’s literally used as a case study in how not to design experiments.

I'm pretty sure we don't need to read his book to know that his experimental methodology lacks rigor and that the conclusions were not supported reliably by the evidence.

Is this the cheater Zimbardo who completely lied how the most popular prison experiment of the world was falsified?

At Stanford Zimbardo taught one of the most popular classes in the university, "The Psychology of Mind Control." From my roommates I understand he would talk about techniques of manipulation used by cults and despots.

It surprises me not at all that Zimbardo would be involved, in the end, with a project warning about Donald Trump.

RIP.

> It surprises me not at all that Zimbardo would be involved, in the end, with a project warning about Donald Trump.

But from a non-partisan perspective, it’s important to recognize that these kinds of psychological techniques are used by politicians across the entire spectrum.

Methods of persuasion and influence are used widely for all types of advertising and marketing, but some methods are employed more frequently by some groups than others.

Do you have statistics about that? I mean, the frequency doesn't affect the argument.

You mean he was warning about TDS? Surprising, given how he is the poster boy for "psychology is not a science"

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