Am I again the last person on the planet to learn about something big? It's all right -- it isn't as if this would be the first time (or one or the first several times) that has happened. Then I become the last blogger in the world to write about it, which is where we are.
What I'm on about is the recent wave of debunking articles about the Stanford Prison Experiment. This was the famous/notorious 1971 experiment in which (as the usual account goes) some young male volunteers were arbitrarily assigned the roles of "guard" or "prisoner" in a simulated prison environment. The role playing exercise turned shockingly real, and the "guards" took to torturing their "prisoners." The experiment was supposed to last for two weeks, but it was stopped after only six days for fear of irreversible injuries should it continue.
That is the usual account, anyway. It is nowadays often taught in undergraduate level on social psychology, and discussed together with the Kitty Genovese case and the even more famous Milgram experiment (in which an experimental subject is instructed by an authority figure to administer electric shocks to someone he thinks is another experimental subject -- but who is actually an actor). What these three data points have in common is the notion that evil behavior, or at least a turning of a blind eye to evil behavior (in the Genovese case) can be induced very easily in very ordinary people.
The plausible philosophical conclusion is: "don't blame the players, blame the game."
Now it appears that the Stanford Prison Experiment was a hoax. The guards weren't torturing the prisoners -- both guards and prisoners were putting on an act. For a detailed debunking study by Dr. Ben Blum:
In fact there have been efforts to debunk both the Milgram results and the first reports of what happened in the Genovese case. But at present I find this the most successful debunking thus far.
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