Explain the Stanford Prison Experiment to me

Explain the Stanford Prison Experiment to me
Is there anything more to it than "If you give someone power over other people, there is an increased chance that person will become a major dickhead."?

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Nope that about sums it up. It just shows that people in a position of power will inevitably abuse that power, and that people who are in a submissive role will tend to play their part and just accept poor treatment if they believe their abuser has higher authority. Basic human nature.

humans are sadistic if left unchecked.

Those types of experiments which are repeatable across all cultures were originally done to figure out why Nazis were so obedient in following orders and cited as a defense in war crimes trials. The ultimate authority in that case was the Vatican. Invoking Godwin's Law.

Is psychology science? Also I'm pretty sure one of the prison guards was actually just a dick beforehand

It depends, does science require controlled variables and repeatable experiments that lead to models capable of useful predictions?

Nope, you're forgetting the element of responsibility. The teachers were given orders by the scientists to be major dickheads, so they didn't feel responsible for their actions.
It's more like "If you give someone power over other people and he doesn't have to fear any consequences from his actions, there is an increased chance that person will become a major dickhead."

The way I've always seen it interpreted is "people tend to fall into assigned roles. Cashiers act like cashiers because they're cashiers. Prison Guards act like Prison Guards because they're Prison Guards."

If being the dick is the norm, you won't feel bad about being a dick.

If you are interested in more studies on why prisoners are subservient to a less amount of Guards/Correctional Officers, I would look up a researcher name Gresham Sykes, a Soviet Russian citizen.

Sykes did a study in the late 1950s about American prisons. He was confused at why prisoners allowed themselves to be controlled and ruled over. When Sykes looked more into it he found that "control" of prisoners was an illusion, and the prisoners and guards had an unspoken agreement to where guards would look the other way for minor infractions and the prisoners would try to just serve out their sentence.

If you would like to read more about this study, the name of the study is "Pains of Imprisonment". I am currently learning about the society of prison in my Criminology courses

Wrong, I've looked over the study and the researcher told them to just be prison guards, they took that upon themselves to turn into power-hungry dickheads.

How many times was the Stanford prison experiment actually reproduced?

I misspoke, the actual study I was referring to is "Society of Captives", "Pains of imprisonment was a later study around the same topic.

I think it got shut down after a few times because of morality and psychological harm.

psychology isn't science

Well people should stop referring to the conclusions that were drawn as incontrovertible truth then. So sick of people of referencing psychological """""""science""""""" as definitive when the studies are never reproduced. Same with the milgram experiment.

How is it not?

True it is a soft science, but a science nontheless.

>they were just following orders
So was Hitler.

well they did reproduce it and found the same result each time, and since it had a high risk of causing psychological harm, they shut it down.

Different study, in this study the researcher only gave the "guards" minor instructions, the rest was in the hands of the guards

It's a study in ethics in psychology.
When you get involved with your study, you're bound to fuck up everything.

The researcher put himself as warden of the prison, and suspended the rights to leave the experiment that he had given at the beginning of the experiment.

I've heard of that one but I think the original was called the Milgram experiment. From wiki.
>The experiments began in July 1961, in the basement of Linsly-Chittenden Hall at Yale University,[3] three months after the start of the trial of German Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram devised his psychological study to answer the popular question at that particular time: "Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?"[4] The experiments have been repeated many times in the following years with consistent results within differing societies, although not with the same percentages around the globe.
There were other studies done, some indicate females are more susceptible to these experiments, also many people lose faith in humanity after understanding the full repercussions. For example looking at China, one of the oldest cultures on earth, are also one of the most totalitarian and suppressed societies on earth.

>An overblown bullshit like almost everything that comes from the pseudoscience called psychology.
Read:
skeptoid.com/episodes/4102

I don't know, some people can just be dickheads.

You should pick ally.