Zimbardo appears to recognize this in his book about the experiment The Lucifer Effect, the thesis of which is that there aren't "bad apples" so much as "bad barrels," i.e. otherwise normal people can turn sociopathic in situations where sociopathic behavior is normalized or expected. Even assuming that the experiment was good science (it wasn't), the conclusion that it represents evidence that humans are inherently cruel and selfish seems like a major misinterpretation of both the researchers' hypothesis and their findings.
this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2023
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otherwise normal people can turn sociopathic in situations where sociopathic behavior is normalized or expected
Israel.
Settler colonialism is the “bad barrel”
There was a study that claimed that if you aren't WEIRD (Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic) psychology is basically pseudoscience. It even goes further to say that if you're a mainline liberal psychology has better outcomes for you.
I don't think they teach SPE after the first psych 101 module in the first sem of undergrad, experiments like that and the Milgram experiments are the reason ethics approval board exists and became a necessity.
Psychology has a repeatability problem
Research in general does, but yeah, there are a lot of biases involved that need to be controlled for in psych experiments. Turns out measuring objective correlates of subjective behavior isn't so easy after all.
And when it does appear in intro psych courses, it's almost always in a "this was fucked up we can never let this happen again" type of way, though I doubt they really explore all the ways that it was fucked up, nor how that study and its cultural impact continue to do harm
most of the time they act like the problem was that the thin veneer of society was removed, and not that a researcher did some bad shit for no reason.
the first clickbait social experiment (gone wrong)
In school they sorta paired this with Lord of the Flies when we were reading that one. There really wasn't any examination of the context in which it was written and how it was more a critique of how British boys would sail off to do horrible things in the colonies and come back as "real men" but with nobody to brutalize they split themselves and brutalized each other. Saw a few videos on the experiment a while ago where the 'researchers' would encourage awful behavior and tell people to keep going even when they were uncomfortable in doing it. It was such a fabricated study. Plainly Difficult has a lot of interesting looks at some awful science that's outright criminal and immoral.
when a group of boys was shipwrecked in real life, they helped each other
The boys went to Catholic school. Clearly the moral here is that protestants are evil.
Any psychology research done by a krakkker is sus
As a mayo psych researcher, I wish I could say this wasn’t true, but I also hate most psychology research and discourse. Not all fields are as bad as others, but god damn is a lot of psychology regressive
I’m several years into grad school, and every year I spend more time reading critical theory from sociologists or political theorists, and less time reading psychological research 🤷
more time reading critical theory from sociologists or political theorists, and less time reading psychological research
You've probably read this, but I'm linking it because it has a sources list.
https://www.hamptonthink.org/read/capitalism-and-mental-health
Any psychology research done by a krakkker is sus
s/psychology/medical in general
Is that an (unterminated) sed commmand?
yup