The thing about the Zimbardo experiment is that nobody could ever even really try to replicate it. That's a big problem because, as you hopefully know by now-- I reference it frequently here-- psychology is undergoing what we are calling a "replication crisis." A lot of psychology, to be blunt, is total bullshit. A lot of it. Pick a study in a major journal. Maybe even a frequently-cited one. Try to replicate its core finding. You'll probably fail. Why? Because here's how the incentives are set up in psychology. Devise an experiment. Play around with the lab conditions and keep doing it until you find a "statistically significant" result. This is a joke about jelly beans and acne, but it really is how psychology works. Try replicating the green jelly bean thing, and you'll fail. Same thing with a lot of psychology.
Right now, that's what's happening with psychology. People are finally getting around to trying to replicate famous, and less-than-famous findings, and realizing that a lot of psychology is bunk. A lot of psychology that you probably believe is bunk.
Philip Zimbardo. The Stanford prison experiment. It could never be replicated if anyone wanted. Why not? Human subjects. If anyone went to their IRBs and said, "hey! You know how all of that psychology stuff keeps getting debunked? I wanna see if Zimbardo holds up. Can I please try replicating the Zimbardo prison experiment?" They'd get shut down faster than Trump trying to reach for his wife's hand! Getting a proposal through IRB requires demonstrating no reasonable likelihood of psychological damage to any human subject. Replicating Zimbardo? They'd tell me to go fuck myself if I proposed trying to replicate that precisely. There have been proposals for partial replications, and such, but really, fully replicating Zimbardo? Nope. No way.
That has put the whole shebang off-limits for the replication crisis.
But...
And, this is where it gets fun for me as a Berkeley Ph.D., Zimbardo is a fuckin' fraud. Remember all those sarcastic quote marks I put in the first paragraph? Yeah, that's because there was no experiment. As you may have read by now, Zimbardo coached everyone to play their roles in a specific, scripted way. Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit!
Fuckin' Stanford!
All of this raises some interesting questions for misanthropes like me. The Zimbardo "study" falls into the category of studies examining human capacity for evil. This raises two closely questions. First, is the lab the right setting for such an inquiry, and second, do we require the benefits of a lab?
Social science jargon. When done properly, social science works. Zimbardo was a fuckin' fraud, so please don't impugn all of social science for what that motherfucker did. Some of us are honest. #notallsocialscientists? Is that a thing? I don't know. I just write this pretentious, little blog. Anyway, internal validity versus external validity. When you conduct a study, internal validity refers to the extent to which your results are reflective of what actually happened within the bounds of your study. In a lab, you can control the variables, so you have a high degree of internal validity. If manipulating a variable, through random assignment, caused a change, you know what happened because you manipulated the variable. That's internal validity. External validity is the extent to which your results are reflective of what actually happens in a little place I like to call "reality." The world outside your lab. Social science experiments have a problem with this because lab settings, by their nature, have to get rid of a lot of realism. My empirical work is observational, so it has a higher degree of external validity, but I can't be as confident in the internal validity because I'm not experimentally manipulating any variables.
Zimbardo wasn't doing observational or experimental analysis. It was a con. And he would have gotten away with it, too, if it wasn't for some meddling kids. But, what about the concept of a lab setting for studying questions of human awfulness?
Is it the right setting? That depends on what you want to know. If your goal is to find out the conditions that increase or decrease an individual's propensity to act in a despicable manner, then experimentally manipulating those conditions in a lab can be appropriate. There have been questions raised about Milgram's methodology, consistency and the validity of his results too, but that's sort of what Milgram was addressing. On the issue of requirements, though, that's where you sort of lose me. I am an observational social scientist.
Yes, observation rather than experimentation. Science does not require experimentation, and anyone who says otherwise does not understand science. Think about what gets excluded from a definition that excludes observation. Astrophysics! Geology! Come on, people, think about this shit.
Albert Einstein never did an experiment in his life. The 1919 eclipse that made him famous was observation. Seriously, people, think about this shit.
Anyway, what can we learn about the human capacity for awfulness through observation-sans-experimentation? Plenty. That's basically why I am a misanthrope.
Here's where something like Zimbardo's study would have been useful, had it been real. Remember Abu Ghraib? Zimbardo got some time in the spotlight when that scandal came out because of a question of prison abuse. Prison guards tend to be shitbags. Not just military prisons because, well, there isn't as much choice there, but prison guards more generally. In fact, in general, people who seek out positions in which they have power over others tend to be fucking shitbags who abuse others. But, is it just that people who want power tend to be bad people, or because Lord Acton was onto something? The way to tell, if you are trying to get that specific, is by randomizing who has power, and who is powerless. Zimbardo was full of shit. He gave everyone a script, and said, "it's actin', baby, actin'!" Sorry, that's, "Acton."
Does the world randomize enough, though, that observation-sans-experimentation will suffice? Let's deal with race. As whiteness is currently socially-defined, I am white. I didn't choose to be white. Some people have mixed heritage and can "pass" as one race or another because race is a social construct, but most of us didn't choose our races strategically in any way. That creates a power dynamic. What do people do with that? Not in the lab, but in the real world? Actual events. Historical, and current. That's some pretty ugly shit, isn't it?
We can talk about the history of slavery, segregation, and all that, but racism is still around, and still a big part of American life. Case in point: Donald Trump. There are three constants about Donald Trump: lying, bragging and racism. He flies his racism flag high. The Onion has had some difficulty in the Trump era because satire requires exaggeration, and it is hard to exaggerate a figure who is as absurd as Trump. Consider this one: "Panicked John Kelly Ushers Half-Naked Trump Away From Podium As President Shouts Support For Eugenics." The only part about that piece that is really exaggerated is the "half-naked" part. Trump is a fucking racist. And he's not alone. If he were, he wouldn't be President.
This is the part where you tell me that he "didn't win the popular vote," or some shit like that, and I then remind you why you shouldn't try to calculate the popular vote. More importantly, Trump won a clear majority of the white vote. White people fuckin' love his shit. At the very least, they tolerate it. And that tells you something. They (may I avoid the first person plural pronoun, please?) didn't choose their position of power and they act in a way that creates things like... what we just saw on immigration.
And worse.
Most of the nation recoiled at the image of screaming children torn from their parents. Not Stephen Miller, and probably not really Donald himself because they're racist psychopaths. Inability to feel empathy combined with hatred of anyone with dark skin, and those sick fucks got off on the images.
This is the point, though, at which I remind you of the 10,000 or so people who die every day due to waterborne pathogens around the world. That's before we talk about malaria, which we could address, not with water treatment facilities, but with simple netting. How about the exploitation upon which our consumer products depend? On what device are you reading this? Did exploited children make it? Probably. I'm not joking. You know that, right? Right? How many Americans give a rat's fucking ass about this? I have a hard time finding any. Why? They're too obsessed with the fashion choices of a vacuous, Slovenian gold-digger with no self-respect. Oh, and never forget the plagiarism thing! I never forget plagiarism!
Yeah, Americans are fine letting that shit happen because it happens to dark-skinned people in what Trump calls "shithole" countries. But, show them the faces, and confront them with the sounds of the screaming children, and they act differently.
What's the deal?
The deal is that people don't want to be confronted with the consequences of their actions, but this is exactly the policy that the American people voted to create, and it is not a break from history.
If anyone seriously claims to be morally repulsed, then how will they vote? There's a midterm election coming up in 5 months, and a presidential election in 2.5 years. There's an opportunity to do something about it.
What are white people gonna do about it?
I don't need a controlled experiment by some hypothetical, honest version of Philip Zimbardo to tell me, and neither do you. Observational methods work just fine here.
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