The Stanford prison experiment tapes were so stupid when I watched them in AP psych and so stupid when I watch this film about them. Literally they couldāve all sat and played cards and got $15 a day to tell ghost stories all day and be best friends. But masculinity and whiteness and power created this violent irrationality that positioned young ass men to be met with brutality and trauma and disrespect even when it was obviously taken too far. and it makes no sense. If someone put me in a room with Black girls and said I would get paid $90 a day (thatās the equivalent apparently) to be a prison guard, do you know how fast Iād be sitting with them and learning about them and exchanging Instagrams and like.. sleeping.. like what the fuck was the point of any of thatā¦
My psych teacher introduced us to this study and literally before she showed us was like ādonāt ever confuse a study based on one type of person (white men/boys) to be an example of an Everyman situation. There is strong evidence that if this was recreated with diversity, or even just with girls, that the results would have been drastically different. This is an example of bias and sexism in the medical research community.ā
āOther, more subtle factors also shaped the experiment. Itās often said that the study participants were ordinary guysāand they were, indeed, determined to be ānormalā and healthy by a battery of tests. But they were also a self-selected group who responded to a newspaper advertisement seeking volunteers for āa psychological study of prison life.ā In a 2007 study, the psychologists Thomas Carnahan and Sam McFarland asked whether that wording itself may have stacked the odds. They recreated the original ad, and then ran a separate ad omitting the phrase āprison life.ā They found that the people who responded to the two ads scored differently on a set of psychological tests. Those who thought that they would be participating in a prison study had significantly higher levels of aggressiveness, authoritarianism, Machiavellianism, narcissism, and social dominance, and they scored lower on measures of empathy and altruism.ā http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/the-real-lesson-of-the-stanford-prison-experiment
The thing about this study is that whether or not itās generalizable to the public is debatable at best.
But itās certainly generalizable to the population of people who tend to be drawn to prison system and law enforcement jobs because thatās exactly the demographics that tend to show up in those positions.
