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Just FYI, this is an old article. He died on October 24th.
Also, he was instrumental in exposing torture in Iraq, no matter what his earlier unethical experiment did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Zimbardo#Testimony_at_Trial_of_Abu_Ghraib_Prison_Guards
studied evil
more like was evil
Did he do anything besides the Stanford Prison Experiment that I just don’t know of? Because if that’s all, I’d be more inclined to say that he’s just stubbornly wrong rather than evil. But maybe you know something I don’t
Well the experiment followed zero ethical guidelines, so in a way a type of evil
Vsauce’s “Mindbreak” series on YouTube did an episode on the Stanford Prison experiment and Zimbardo’s later work in life if you want to check it out.
What a fucking fraud
The only thing useful about that study was his vile behavior and how everyone at the university went along with it.
Hell, he was still working at a University in Palo Alto just a few years ago.
Even after admitting all the horrible shit he did, he kept teaching (and probably kept banging his students like he did back then) until only a few years ago.
He might not have stopped at all.
Nope, there was something else useful. That he specifically did because of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Zimbardo#Testimony_at_Trial_of_Abu_Ghraib_Prison_Guards
Zimbardo is part of a generation of psychology that struggled with why modern European people did a Shoah. Or rather a generation that sought to confirm through experiment that the Germans were alright and it was really all Hitler’s fault. Or at least a small number of evil Germans who caused the whole mess.
It’s auspicious to bring this up now because just watching the news these days makes a fool of Zimbardo.
I remember some popular YouTuber ran an experiment trying to re-create the conclusions that Zimbardo had come to. The results contradicted his conclusions and they confronted him. He continued to defend his experiment. He seemed like a rather stubborn man.
Humm, so we have two similar experiments with different outcomes?
That just seem to indicate that we don’t have enough data.
I don’t think anyone has been able to recreate his experiment. He’s accused of manipulating it to fit his narrative. He denies these accusations, of course.
**denied
One of the biggest reasons I don’t trust that experiment is just knowing that the USA has a prison industrial complex, and doesn’t run prisons particularly well, which does lead to abuse, but pretty much never the kinds of situations the experiment reported.
You would expect this experiment to be reaffirmed at least occasionally in the real world, outside of extreme cases like Abu Ghraib.
