Stanford Prison Experiment

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There was a study done by Professor Philip Zimbardo in 1971, which divided people into two groups: guards and prisoners, and within days the prison guards had become brutal monsters and the prisoners hapless victims, showing that authority corrupts, prisons are bad, and victims are noble. If you're ever read or seen this in News, you are a victim of FakeNews. The truth is it was a faked study that has never been reproduced (despite many efforts), and the real truth is that humans will play along with a sham for money, and the News will lie for attention. Both were magnified because it fit a leftist agenda, that Cops/Authority/Humans are fundamentally bad and need the liberals to protect us from them.


What do we know about the flaws in the study:

  • Zimbardo was not impartial and had egged both sides on (to be violent or victims).
  • One prisoner admitted he faked his breakdown, and led a "rebellion" as part of the "act".
  • They were tainted by knowing it was a game/experiment and they couldn't be hurt (and encouraged to ham it up).
  • The guards had been told by Zimbardo to be nasty, and his graduate student playing the warden was goading all the guards to be more brutal.
  • The guards claimed that they thought this was an improv exercise (game), so played along the role they were told to play: not neutral guard but the bad guy in "Cool hand Luke".
  • Zimbardo claimed it was all genuine, even though people on both sides of the experiment disagreed.

The Press and liars on the left, repeated this "study" because it the comforting lie was confirmation bias to 1971 hippies who wanted to see "the man" (and all authority) as evil and the individuals as noble. But the conclusions shouldn't have been that humans are inherently evil when in power, but that humans will often do what they're told and play along with games, especially when paid. And especially if they're college students at Stanford, in the early 1970's.

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