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Leonardo said:
TheBoost said:
"The Stanford Prison Experiment," a famous sociology experiment, proved nothing except that people have no idea how a good experiment is designed.
When you bring it up, and I rip every single aspect of the experiment to shreds, you can't follow up with "Yeah, but don't you agree with the results anyways?"
I've studied it for uni and found it fascinating. I'm interested in hearing your rebuttal.
It's not about people being good or bad. It's the 'experiment' itself was flawed on so many levels it's not even worth reading about.
-Sample size was 24 white male Stanford students. This is so unacceptably small as to make the experiment worthless out of hand.
-Self selection. All the volunteers specifically came in because they were attracted to an experiment about prisons. This alone would make any results borderline meaningless.
-No control group. No pre-testing. No repeatablility.
-But the main kicker for me is overwhelming bias. Zimbardo, the experimenter, specifically wanted to prove people were bad. Then he himself took a play-acting role in the experiment guiding the process. That alone makes all his results garbage.
He should have designed the experiment, then not even been involved. To jump in and manipulate it as "The Warden" changed it from science to really intense LARPing.
It wasn't an experiment by any real scientific standard. It was a publicity stunt
