6 ms·

Isn’t that a reproduction of the (well-criticized) Stanford experiment, which already didn’t need to be demonstrated because we already demonstrated it with the

by tajen 8y ago

Isn’t that a reproduction of the (well-criticized) Stanford experiment, which already didn’t need to be demonstrated because we already demonstrated it with the Nazi horror?

cellularmitosis 8y ago
But it did need to be demonstrated. "That could never happen here, not in our country" needed to be refuted.
otakucode 8y ago
The distinction here is some further evidence of the actual mechanism through which this operates, and, critically, evidence that we can actively work to improve our ability to challenge immoral authority. The $64 billion dollar question, though, is whether anyone in society will see it as reasonable to expect themselves or anyone else to abandon their intuition which tells them to follow without question, the 'natural' and 'automatic' response that they identify most strongly with their 'self', and train themselves to contradict and contravene that part of themselves. As is so often the case, you can't fix the flaws that your emotional and intuitive processing of the world brings about if you venerate intuition and emotion and denigrate any attempts to change it.
- mockingbirdy 8y ago
  Then we would need to train everyone to be essentially an ubermensch - they need to be able to operate on meta-levels and use metacognition all the time. This is a hard task, you need cognitive resources (which means you have enough sleep, food, resilience, mental energy and a stress-free environment) and a lot of time and it's also very demanding to doubt essential beliefs about oneself and ones' own values. So I don't really think that most people will do it. It's just too cumbersome and frankly, they have other things to do and the current mode works for them most of the time. When it fails, something like the Nazi regime happens (for various reasons, not only due to lack of advanced metacognition), but high expectations won't help us, anyway. - - - I think a good solution is to build a system which generally uses balance mechanisms to keep power divided - we can't expect all people to be highly self-aware and self-critical. Unsurprisingly, that's exactly why we use democracies. Unfortunately, those systems stop to work when the majority of people lack advanced metacognition or don't have the required cognitive resources or lack information and understanding. Unfortunately, this can happen pretty fast.
  - otakucode 8y ago
    I'm not sure exactly what 'ubermensch' implies, but I think I understand the point of what you are saying. And I agree, it is unreasonable, even biologically, to expect human beings to effectively perform at their mental peak continuously. Brains don't work that way. But, that's also not necessary. The vast majority of situations we face in day to day life don't really call on us to be able to muster complex well-reasoned arguments with nuance. When deciding whether to buy a gift for a partner, you're fine to go with whether that feels like the right thing to do. The problem comes in when people take a positive stance against ever trusting the use of reason. Where they see someone stepping back, and dealing with a topic dispassionately, and alarm bells start going off. They immediately distrust the person, and if their conclusions contradict the gut intuitive reaction they have to a topic, they will side with the intuitive reaction. The 'intuitive reaction' of human brains is essentially documented in any comprehensive list of common logical fallacies. They were things we feel ought to be true, but we know are not. Things like a terrible person can't make good points, if a person is wrong about one thing they must be wrong about others, if things happened close together spatially or temporally they must be causally connected, if something is natural it must be better than artificial, etc. At that point, it doesn't matter if anyone in the group is practicing metacognition and solid reasoning, because they will be actively resisted for precisely that. Societies view of intellectualism changes on the scale of centuries. It was at a height before World War I, almost to the point of fanaticism. It made people willing to believe that science and reason would usher in a utopia by default, because it was not capable of doing otherwise. Then, mustard gas rolled down hillsides into trenches. Mechanized tanks crawled battlefields. The creations of science were used to wreak the most horrible suffering, and society paused at that. By the time the concentration camps were unveiled after the end of the eugenics (all widely accepted as true and reasonable by the scientific community of the time), the horror wasn't new. And the 20th century kept the hits on coming, with tragedy after tragedy laid at the feet of science and reason. We may know now that all of those people made critical errors and overreached with hubris or were outright corrupt, but that doesn't matter terribly much to the person who never understood it well to begin with. All they know is that it's not a sure thing, and it can lead to stupendous tragedy. The tragedies born by anti-intellectualism, such as Pol Pots purging of intellectuals, Maos similar practices that resulted in profound starvation and the deaths of millions, couldn't get much airtime in the face of society shrinking away from reason. I don't think this is a simple problem. In fact, I have often referred to it as the single biggest problem facing the human species. Civilization includes its own undoing. At the beginning, lethal danger, famine, disease, and other terrors of the past make people willing to try anything - even dispassionate reason. And then they build a civilization. Whose primary, if not sole, goal is to remove danger from the lives of as many as possible. This must, absolutely must, include removing the dangers which motivated the willingness to reason and ignore intuition. Given enough time, arguing for expansion of the infrastructure of civilization becomes harder. Given more time, arguing for maintenance of the existing infrastructure becomes harder. People revert to relying on intuition if for no other reason than it is easier and no longer bears many negative consequences. And when the infrastructure begins to fail, and danger re-asserts itself, it is naive to think people would see the error of their ways and return to reason. There is no historical basis for such a hope. The mother whose unvaccinated child dies of measles does not blame herself. No, they will blame not having gone far enough. They will blame what remains of the infrastructure, and call for it to be dismantled. And they will continue until humanity returns to its 'default state' of slogging through the mud, racked with disease, starving, killing each other over whose god is stronger.
mcherm 8y ago
First of all, I believe that it DOES need to be demonstrated -- repeatedly, to lots of people, so we can change how we respond to such a situation. But more relevantly, this experiment was not attempting to "demonstrate" the effect. It was attempting to better understand the effect. That, in particular, is research that we badly need. (PS: I'm defending the idea of performing this sort of experiment, not the specific experimental protocol followed. In particular, I question whether applying negative judgements to people is actually a valid proxy for causing harm.)
zakm 8y ago
a) Trying to understand historical events with many variables via deliberate scientific experimentation is a reasonable thing to do. b) The Stanford Prison Experiment has always been under a ton of scrutiny, and is a good example of flashy events heavily covered in intro psych courses that are viewed with a lot more skepticism in the professional community (so I have read, anyway). c) More info recently came out about it recently, actually: https://cosmosmagazine.com/social-sciences/new-evidence-shows-stanford-prison-experiment-conclusions-untenable https://cosmosmagazine.com/social-sciences/new-evidence-show... d) Repetition of scientific findings is one of the main pillars of science. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
- slowburning 8y ago
  while the fact remains that everyone should derive his or her own opinion on this highly sensationalized study, Philip Zimbardo's response is worth reading http://www.prisonexp.org/response/ http://www.prisonexp.org/response/
watwut 8y ago
There were too many factors contributing to the Nazi events. You cant simply point at it and make definitive conclusion over some bare-bone simple events. You also cant assume that 1933 Germans would react the same way to the authority then 2018 Dutch.
- LinuxBender 8y ago
  Not to mention, the world is much more connected now. Most German citizens were unaware of the death camps until the end of the war.
  - watwut 8y ago
    They knew full well about other abuse that was done to Jews, opposition and others too. Nazi were pretty bad openly, beating Jews in streets, beating people who shopped in Jewish stores, taking away their possessions, restricting their rights. All that long before they invented death camps.

by tajen 8y ago

Isn’t that a reproduction of the (well-criticized) Stanford experiment, which already didn’t need to be demonstrated because we already demonstrated it with the Nazi horror?

cellularmitosis 8y ago

But it did need to be demonstrated. "That could never happen here, not in our country" needed to be refuted.

otakucode 8y ago

The distinction here is some further evidence of the actual mechanism through which this operates, and, critically, evidence that we can actively work to improve our ability to challenge immoral authority. The $64 billion dollar question, though, is whether anyone in society will see it as reasonable to expect themselves or anyone else to abandon their intuition which tells them to follow without question, the 'natural' and 'automatic' response that they identify most strongly with their 'self', and train themselves to contradict and contravene that part of themselves. As is so often the case, you can't fix the flaws that your emotional and intuitive processing of the world brings about if you venerate intuition and emotion and denigrate any attempts to change it.

mockingbirdy 8y ago
Then we would need to train everyone to be essentially an ubermensch - they need to be able to operate on meta-levels and use metacognition all the time. This is a hard task, you need cognitive resources (which means you have enough sleep, food, resilience, mental energy and a stress-free environment) and a lot of time and it's also very demanding to doubt essential beliefs about oneself and ones' own values. So I don't really think that most people will do it. It's just too cumbersome and frankly, they have other things to do and the current mode works for them most of the time. When it fails, something like the Nazi regime happens (for various reasons, not only due to lack of advanced metacognition), but high expectations won't help us, anyway. - - - I think a good solution is to build a system which generally uses balance mechanisms to keep power divided - we can't expect all people to be highly self-aware and self-critical. Unsurprisingly, that's exactly why we use democracies. Unfortunately, those systems stop to work when the majority of people lack advanced metacognition or don't have the required cognitive resources or lack information and understanding. Unfortunately, this can happen pretty fast.
- otakucode 8y ago
  I'm not sure exactly what 'ubermensch' implies, but I think I understand the point of what you are saying. And I agree, it is unreasonable, even biologically, to expect human beings to effectively perform at their mental peak continuously. Brains don't work that way. But, that's also not necessary. The vast majority of situations we face in day to day life don't really call on us to be able to muster complex well-reasoned arguments with nuance. When deciding whether to buy a gift for a partner, you're fine to go with whether that feels like the right thing to do. The problem comes in when people take a positive stance against ever trusting the use of reason. Where they see someone stepping back, and dealing with a topic dispassionately, and alarm bells start going off. They immediately distrust the person, and if their conclusions contradict the gut intuitive reaction they have to a topic, they will side with the intuitive reaction. The 'intuitive reaction' of human brains is essentially documented in any comprehensive list of common logical fallacies. They were things we feel ought to be true, but we know are not. Things like a terrible person can't make good points, if a person is wrong about one thing they must be wrong about others, if things happened close together spatially or temporally they must be causally connected, if something is natural it must be better than artificial, etc. At that point, it doesn't matter if anyone in the group is practicing metacognition and solid reasoning, because they will be actively resisted for precisely that. Societies view of intellectualism changes on the scale of centuries. It was at a height before World War I, almost to the point of fanaticism. It made people willing to believe that science and reason would usher in a utopia by default, because it was not capable of doing otherwise. Then, mustard gas rolled down hillsides into trenches. Mechanized tanks crawled battlefields. The creations of science were used to wreak the most horrible suffering, and society paused at that. By the time the concentration camps were unveiled after the end of the eugenics (all widely accepted as true and reasonable by the scientific community of the time), the horror wasn't new. And the 20th century kept the hits on coming, with tragedy after tragedy laid at the feet of science and reason. We may know now that all of those people made critical errors and overreached with hubris or were outright corrupt, but that doesn't matter terribly much to the person who never understood it well to begin with. All they know is that it's not a sure thing, and it can lead to stupendous tragedy. The tragedies born by anti-intellectualism, such as Pol Pots purging of intellectuals, Maos similar practices that resulted in profound starvation and the deaths of millions, couldn't get much airtime in the face of society shrinking away from reason. I don't think this is a simple problem. In fact, I have often referred to it as the single biggest problem facing the human species. Civilization includes its own undoing. At the beginning, lethal danger, famine, disease, and other terrors of the past make people willing to try anything - even dispassionate reason. And then they build a civilization. Whose primary, if not sole, goal is to remove danger from the lives of as many as possible. This must, absolutely must, include removing the dangers which motivated the willingness to reason and ignore intuition. Given enough time, arguing for expansion of the infrastructure of civilization becomes harder. Given more time, arguing for maintenance of the existing infrastructure becomes harder. People revert to relying on intuition if for no other reason than it is easier and no longer bears many negative consequences. And when the infrastructure begins to fail, and danger re-asserts itself, it is naive to think people would see the error of their ways and return to reason. There is no historical basis for such a hope. The mother whose unvaccinated child dies of measles does not blame herself. No, they will blame not having gone far enough. They will blame what remains of the infrastructure, and call for it to be dismantled. And they will continue until humanity returns to its 'default state' of slogging through the mud, racked with disease, starving, killing each other over whose god is stronger.

mcherm 8y ago

First of all, I believe that it DOES need to be demonstrated -- repeatedly, to lots of people, so we can change how we respond to such a situation. But more relevantly, this experiment was not attempting to "demonstrate" the effect. It was attempting to better understand the effect. That, in particular, is research that we badly need. (PS: I'm defending the idea of performing this sort of experiment, not the specific experimental protocol followed. In particular, I question whether applying negative judgements to people is actually a valid proxy for causing harm.)

zakm 8y ago

a) Trying to understand historical events with many variables via deliberate scientific experimentation is a reasonable thing to do. b) The Stanford Prison Experiment has always been under a ton of scrutiny, and is a good example of flashy events heavily covered in intro psych courses that are viewed with a lot more skepticism in the professional community (so I have read, anyway). c) More info recently came out about it recently, actually: https://cosmosmagazine.com/social-sciences/new-evidence-shows-stanford-prison-experiment-conclusions-untenable https://cosmosmagazine.com/social-sciences/new-evidence-show... d) Repetition of scientific findings is one of the main pillars of science. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

slowburning 8y ago
while the fact remains that everyone should derive his or her own opinion on this highly sensationalized study, Philip Zimbardo's response is worth reading http://www.prisonexp.org/response/ http://www.prisonexp.org/response/

watwut 8y ago

There were too many factors contributing to the Nazi events. You cant simply point at it and make definitive conclusion over some bare-bone simple events. You also cant assume that 1933 Germans would react the same way to the authority then 2018 Dutch.

LinuxBender 8y ago
Not to mention, the world is much more connected now. Most German citizens were unaware of the death camps until the end of the war.
- watwut 8y ago
  They knew full well about other abuse that was done to Jews, opposition and others too. Nazi were pretty bad openly, beating Jews in streets, beating people who shopped in Jewish stores, taking away their possessions, restricting their rights. All that long before they invented death camps.