Philip Zimbardo, psychologist behind the 'Stanford Prison Experiment' dies at 91 | Hacker News Reader

Philip Zimbardo, psychologist behind the 'Stanford Prison Experiment' dies at 91

news.stanford.edu

29 pointsJerry216 comments

At a quick skim, this doesn't seem to mention all the controversy over the validity of that experiment:

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

It does mention that it is controversial and was criticized for its experimental design. I think that is sufficient for what is essentially a eulogy for a deceased colleague.

I’m not sure what other commenters on here expect, but it would be extremely inappropriate to use this announcement as a venue to systematically criticize his research… I’m pretty sure that has been done already in a more appropriate forum.

In the 80s, 90s, and 00s, he was mostly known for his work on shyness and anxiety. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/672266.Shyness

Also his work is largely regarded as a historical cautionary tale and has been poured over by infinity textbooks so there's really nothing more to say about it.

Except it is simultaneously cited by many people as demonstrating some intrinsic aspects of human nature.

Anyone who has done their research know the experiment is bollocks. There’s countless others out there touting it as informative.

At least flawed business case studies get cycled out once a new case study becomes de rigueur. Soft science tend to use flawed studies long after their flaws are exposed. Few people would use Welch's management style as one to follow but a number of people still think there are Unit731s inside everyone waiting for orders.

Regardless of how valid it is, it makes for some great movies.

The namesake 2015 movie was almost as much of a pain to watch as being in the experiment itself would have been.

Too ironic "To this day, it is used as a case study in psychology classes to highlight both the psychology of evil as well as the ethics of doing psychological research with human subjects."

should read

"To this day, the thoroughly debunked session is used as a case study in psychology classes to highlight both the psychology of 'publish or perish' as well as the fundamental flaws in the science psychology pretends to have"

But it doesn't, because that would require the field admitting it is deeply flawed

> highlight ... the ... ethics of doing psychological research with human subjects

this part is true regardless of the experiment's flaws

Reminder that psychology is in a reproducibility crisis; with ~30%-50% of studies being unable to be reproduced.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/psycholo...

In which case, it's fairly safe to say... you're not that much worse off by following your gut and flipping a coin.

Are other fields really better than psychology in that respect?

I failed to reproduce published work everytime I tried. In one case I was only able to reproduce results by using carefully selected starting parameters I received privately from the author; in another case the author just told me that the algorithm was very unstable and required a lot of tweaking (not mentioned in the paper) to work, and another author didn't tell me about the boundary conditions used in the paper that were left out because they were too busy. Those were papers from physics & computer graphics.

The cynic inside me assumes that non-reproducibility is pretty much the default for most published papers.

I can't even reproduce CPU-Z benchmark results, on any hardware that I had, so... what's new?

Discovering Psychology on PBS was a great series.

Kind of sad that this piece published by stanford, a supposed beacon of academic excellence and rigor, does not mention at all the issues with this now debunked study.

Are they? Seems like a lot of bunk science from them has been revealed recently. Who knows how much more is still yet to be uncovered. Not to mention some famous parents.

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