zyphlar/stanford-prison-cites.txt

## stanford-prison-cites.txt
Sarah asserts, "I knew there were some sketchy things about the Stanford prison
experiment but whew this piece!"

Dan asserts, "A rare situation where even I don't care about the truth, either
they weren't monsters and we shouldn't say they were, or they were made monsters
and we still shouldn't say they were. Either way, grant them their peace. And we
should still worry about deference to authority."

Sarah asserts, "Not sure you caught the implications — that the basic premise of
the experiment, that there's a monster in all of us, exonerates systems... A
cultural belief that sadism is a spontaneous result of situational placement
rather than, say, carried out at the behest of your direct superiors as part of
a racialized system, seems to matter?"

Thomas assets, "Also the pretty frightening bit about how the experiment
contributed to the “nothing works” attitude that stymied prison rehabilitation
programs for decades."

Dan asks for a citation, but never gets it and seems uninterested in obtaining
it from the article on his own.

So! Citations:

CLAIM 1:

"the SPE's premise is that there's a monster in all of us [waiting to be
"unlocked by a situation], exonerates systems [because it presumes that the
"blame is inherent to the situation and not on the guards or their superiors.]

CITATION 1:

> The appeal of the Stanford prison experiment seems to go deeper than its
scientific validity, perhaps because it tells us a story about ourselves that we
desperately want to believe: that we, as individuals, cannot really be held
accountable for the sometimes reprehensible things we do. As troubling as it
might seem to accept Zimbardo’s fallen vision of human nature, it is also
profoundly liberating. It means we’re off the hook. Our actions are determined
by circumstance. Our fallibility is situational. Just as the Gospel promised to
absolve us of our sins if we would only believe, the SPE offered a form of
redemption tailor-made for a scientific era, and we embraced it.

> Many other studies, such as Soloman Asch’s famous experiment demonstrating
that people will ignore the evidence of their own eyes in conforming to group
judgments about line lengths, illustrate the profound effect our environments
can have on us. The far more methodologically sound — but still controversial —
Milgram experiment demonstrates how prone we are to obedience in certain
settings. What is unique, and uniquely compelling, about Zimbardo’s narrative of
the Stanford prison experiment is its suggestion that all it takes to make us
enthusiastic sadists is a jumpsuit, a billy club, and the green light to
dominate our fellow human beings.

> “You have a vertigo when you look into it,” Le Texier explained. “It’s like,
‘Oh my god, I could be a Nazi myself. I thought I was a good guy, and now I
discover that I could be this monster.’ And in the meantime, it’s quite
reassuring, because if I become a monster, it’s not because deep inside me I am
the devil, it’s because of the situation. I think that’s why the experiment was
so famous in Germany and Eastern Europe. You don’t feel guilty. ‘Oh, okay, it
was the situation. We are all good guys. No problem. It’s just the situation
made us do it.’ So it’s shocking, but at the same time it’s reassuring. I think
these two messages of the experiment made it famous.”

> “What the Stanford Prison Experiment did,” Cullen says, “was to say: prisons
are not reformable. The crux of many prison reforms, especially among academic
criminologists, became that prisons were inherently inhumane, so our agenda had
to be minimizing the use of prisons, emphasizing alternatives to prison,
emphasizing community corrections.”

> In an era of rapidly rising crime, this agenda proved politically untenable.
Instead, conservative politicians who had no qualms about using imprisonment
purely to punish ushered in a decades-long “get tough” era in crime that
disproportionately targeted African Americans. The incarceration rate rose
steadily, standing now at five times higher than in comparable countries; one in
three black men in America today will spend time in prison.

> It would, of course, be unfair to lay mass incarceration at Zimbardo’s door.
It is more accurate to say that, for all its reformist ideals, the Stanford
prison experiment contributed to the polarizing intellectual currents of its
time. According to a 2017 survey conducted by Cullen and his colleagues Teresa
Kulig and Travis Pratt, 95% of the many criminology papers that have cited the
Stanford prison experiment over the years have accepted its basic message that
prisons are inherently inhumane.

> “What struck me later in life was how all of us lost our scientific
skepticism,” Cullen says. “We became as ideological, in our way, as the climate
change deniers. Zimbardo’s and Martinson’s studies made so much intuitive sense
that no one took a step back and said, ‘Well, this could be wrong.’”

> Most criminologists today agree that prisons are not, in fact, as hopeless as
Zimbardo and Martinson made them out to be. Some prison programs do reliably
help inmates better their lives. Though international comparisons are difficult
to make, Norway’s maximum-security Halden prison, where convicted murderers wear
casual clothing, receive extensive job-skill training, share meals with unarmed
guards, and wander at will during daylight hours through a scenic landscape of
pine trees and blueberry bushes, offers a hopeful sign. Norwegians prisoners
seldom get in fights and reoffend at lower rates than anywhere else in the
world. To begin to ameliorate the evils of mass incarceration, Cullen argues,
will require researching what makes some forms of prison management better than
others, rather than, as the Stanford prison experiment did, dismissing them all
as inherently abusive.

CLAIM 2:

"[rather than] sadism spontaneously arising from a situation [as the SPE seems
"[to show], [the body of evidence indicates that sadism tends to arise
"[explicitly from authority figures instead.]"

CITATION 2:

> Despite the Stanford prison experiment’s canonical status in intro psych
classes around the country today, methodological criticism of it was swift and
widespread in the years after it was conducted. Deviating from scientific
protocol, Zimbardo and his students had published their first article about the
experiment not in an academic journal of psychology but in The New York Times
Magazine, sidestepping the usual peer review. Famed psychologist Erich Fromm,
unaware that guards had been explicitly instructed to be “tough,” nonetheless
opined that in light of the obvious pressures to abuse, what was most surprising
about the experiment was how few guards did. “The authors believe it proves that
the situation alone can within a few days transform normal people into abject,
submissive individuals or into ruthless sadists,” Fromm wrote. “It seems to me
that the experiment proves, if anything, rather the contrary.” Some scholars
have argued that it wasn’t an experiment at all. Leon Festinger, the
psychologist who pioneered the concept of cognitive dissonance, dismissed it as
a “happening.”

> A steady trickle of critiques have continued to emerge over the years,
expanding the attack on the experiment to more technical issues around its
methodology, such as demand characteristics, ecological validity, and selection
bias. In 2005, Carlo Prescott, the San Quentin parolee who consulted on the
experiment’s design, published an Op-Ed in The Stanford Daily entitled “The Lie
of the Stanford Prison Experiment,” revealing that many of the guards’
techniques for tormenting prisoners had been taken from his own experience at
San Quentin rather than having been invented by the participants.

> In another blow to the experiment’s scientific credibility, Haslam and
Reicher’s attempted replication, in which guards received no coaching and
prisoners were free to quit at any time, failed to reproduce Zimbardo’s
findings. Far from breaking down under escalating abuse, prisoners banded
together and won extra privileges from guards, who became increasingly passive
and cowed. According to Reicher, Zimbardo did not take it well when they
attempted to publish their findings in the British Journal of Social Psychology.

> A few years later, after deciding to write a book about Alex’s story, I
discovered evidence that he hadn’t told the whole truth about his involvement.
When I confronted him, he confessed to me that his choice to participate in the
bank robbery [which was suggested to him by his superiors in the military] was
freer and more informed than he had ever let on before. Accepting responsibility
was transformative for him. It freed him from the aggrieved victim mindset in
which he had been trapped for years. Zimbardo’s “situational forces” excuse had
once appeared to give my cousin a way to believe in his fundamental goodness
despite his egregious crime, but seeing the personal growth that came with
deeper moral reckoning, I began to wonder if it had really done him a service.
	Sarah asserts, "I knew there were some sketchy things about the Stanford prison
	experiment but whew this piece!"

	Dan asserts, "A rare situation where even I don't care about the truth, either
	they weren't monsters and we shouldn't say they were, or they were made monsters
	and we still shouldn't say they were. Either way, grant them their peace. And we
	should still worry about deference to authority."

	Sarah asserts, "Not sure you caught the implications — that the basic premise of
	the experiment, that there's a monster in all of us, exonerates systems... A
	cultural belief that sadism is a spontaneous result of situational placement
	rather than, say, carried out at the behest of your direct superiors as part of
	a racialized system, seems to matter?"

	Thomas assets, "Also the pretty frightening bit about how the experiment
	contributed to the “nothing works” attitude that stymied prison rehabilitation
	programs for decades."

	Dan asks for a citation, but never gets it and seems uninterested in obtaining
	it from the article on his own.

	So! Citations:

	CLAIM 1:

	"the SPE's premise is that there's a monster in all of us [waiting to be
	"unlocked by a situation], exonerates systems [because it presumes that the
	"blame is inherent to the situation and not on the guards or their superiors.]

	CITATION 1:

	> The appeal of the Stanford prison experiment seems to go deeper than its
	scientific validity, perhaps because it tells us a story about ourselves that we
	desperately want to believe: that we, as individuals, cannot really be held
	accountable for the sometimes reprehensible things we do. As troubling as it
	might seem to accept Zimbardo’s fallen vision of human nature, it is also
	profoundly liberating. It means we’re off the hook. Our actions are determined
	by circumstance. Our fallibility is situational. Just as the Gospel promised to
	absolve us of our sins if we would only believe, the SPE offered a form of
	redemption tailor-made for a scientific era, and we embraced it.

	> Many other studies, such as Soloman Asch’s famous experiment demonstrating
	that people will ignore the evidence of their own eyes in conforming to group
	judgments about line lengths, illustrate the profound effect our environments
	can have on us. The far more methodologically sound — but still controversial —
	Milgram experiment demonstrates how prone we are to obedience in certain
	settings. What is unique, and uniquely compelling, about Zimbardo’s narrative of
	the Stanford prison experiment is its suggestion that all it takes to make us
	enthusiastic sadists is a jumpsuit, a billy club, and the green light to
	dominate our fellow human beings.

	> “You have a vertigo when you look into it,” Le Texier explained. “It’s like,
	‘Oh my god, I could be a Nazi myself. I thought I was a good guy, and now I
	discover that I could be this monster.’ And in the meantime, it’s quite
	reassuring, because if I become a monster, it’s not because deep inside me I am
	the devil, it’s because of the situation. I think that’s why the experiment was
	so famous in Germany and Eastern Europe. You don’t feel guilty. ‘Oh, okay, it
	was the situation. We are all good guys. No problem. It’s just the situation
	made us do it.’ So it’s shocking, but at the same time it’s reassuring. I think
	these two messages of the experiment made it famous.”

	> “What the Stanford Prison Experiment did,” Cullen says, “was to say: prisons
	are not reformable. The crux of many prison reforms, especially among academic
	criminologists, became that prisons were inherently inhumane, so our agenda had
	to be minimizing the use of prisons, emphasizing alternatives to prison,
	emphasizing community corrections.”

	> In an era of rapidly rising crime, this agenda proved politically untenable.
	Instead, conservative politicians who had no qualms about using imprisonment
	purely to punish ushered in a decades-long “get tough” era in crime that
	disproportionately targeted African Americans. The incarceration rate rose
	steadily, standing now at five times higher than in comparable countries; one in
	three black men in America today will spend time in prison.

	> It would, of course, be unfair to lay mass incarceration at Zimbardo’s door.
	It is more accurate to say that, for all its reformist ideals, the Stanford
	prison experiment contributed to the polarizing intellectual currents of its
	time. According to a 2017 survey conducted by Cullen and his colleagues Teresa
	Kulig and Travis Pratt, 95% of the many criminology papers that have cited the
	Stanford prison experiment over the years have accepted its basic message that
	prisons are inherently inhumane.

	> “What struck me later in life was how all of us lost our scientific
	skepticism,” Cullen says. “We became as ideological, in our way, as the climate
	change deniers. Zimbardo’s and Martinson’s studies made so much intuitive sense
	that no one took a step back and said, ‘Well, this could be wrong.’”

	> Most criminologists today agree that prisons are not, in fact, as hopeless as
	Zimbardo and Martinson made them out to be. Some prison programs do reliably
	help inmates better their lives. Though international comparisons are difficult
	to make, Norway’s maximum-security Halden prison, where convicted murderers wear
	casual clothing, receive extensive job-skill training, share meals with unarmed
	guards, and wander at will during daylight hours through a scenic landscape of
	pine trees and blueberry bushes, offers a hopeful sign. Norwegians prisoners
	seldom get in fights and reoffend at lower rates than anywhere else in the
	world. To begin to ameliorate the evils of mass incarceration, Cullen argues,
	will require researching what makes some forms of prison management better than
	others, rather than, as the Stanford prison experiment did, dismissing them all
	as inherently abusive.

	CLAIM 2:

	"[rather than] sadism spontaneously arising from a situation [as the SPE seems
	"[to show], [the body of evidence indicates that sadism tends to arise
	"[explicitly from authority figures instead.]"

	CITATION 2:

	> Despite the Stanford prison experiment’s canonical status in intro psych
	classes around the country today, methodological criticism of it was swift and
	widespread in the years after it was conducted. Deviating from scientific
	protocol, Zimbardo and his students had published their first article about the
	experiment not in an academic journal of psychology but in The New York Times
	Magazine, sidestepping the usual peer review. Famed psychologist Erich Fromm,
	unaware that guards had been explicitly instructed to be “tough,” nonetheless
	opined that in light of the obvious pressures to abuse, what was most surprising
	about the experiment was how few guards did. “The authors believe it proves that
	the situation alone can within a few days transform normal people into abject,
	submissive individuals or into ruthless sadists,” Fromm wrote. “It seems to me
	that the experiment proves, if anything, rather the contrary.” Some scholars
	have argued that it wasn’t an experiment at all. Leon Festinger, the
	psychologist who pioneered the concept of cognitive dissonance, dismissed it as
	a “happening.”

	> A steady trickle of critiques have continued to emerge over the years,
	expanding the attack on the experiment to more technical issues around its
	methodology, such as demand characteristics, ecological validity, and selection
	bias. In 2005, Carlo Prescott, the San Quentin parolee who consulted on the
	experiment’s design, published an Op-Ed in The Stanford Daily entitled “The Lie
	of the Stanford Prison Experiment,” revealing that many of the guards’
	techniques for tormenting prisoners had been taken from his own experience at
	San Quentin rather than having been invented by the participants.

	> In another blow to the experiment’s scientific credibility, Haslam and
	Reicher’s attempted replication, in which guards received no coaching and
	prisoners were free to quit at any time, failed to reproduce Zimbardo’s
	findings. Far from breaking down under escalating abuse, prisoners banded
	together and won extra privileges from guards, who became increasingly passive
	and cowed. According to Reicher, Zimbardo did not take it well when they
	attempted to publish their findings in the British Journal of Social Psychology.

	> A few years later, after deciding to write a book about Alex’s story, I
	discovered evidence that he hadn’t told the whole truth about his involvement.
	When I confronted him, he confessed to me that his choice to participate in the
	bank robbery [which was suggested to him by his superiors in the military] was
	freer and more informed than he had ever let on before. Accepting responsibility
	was transformative for him. It freed him from the aggrieved victim mindset in
	which he had been trapped for years. Zimbardo’s “situational forces” excuse had
	once appeared to give my cousin a way to believe in his fundamental goodness
	despite his egregious crime, but seeing the personal growth that came with
	deeper moral reckoning, I began to wonder if it had really done him a service.