Episode 176: Situationism in Psych: Milgram & Stanford Prison Experiments (Part One)

0:00 Mark: Our question for episode 176 is something like, do difficult situations make good people act badly? And we read three articles. Stanley Milgram's Behavioral Study of Obedience, 1963 Philip Zimbardo's Interpersonal Dynamics in a Simulated Prison, 1973, and John Doris's Persons, Situations, and Virtue Ethics, 1998. For links to the articles and more information, Please check out partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer acting from the perverse incentive of trying to get good podcast ratings in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:31 Seth: This is Seth Paskin in Austin, Texas.

0:34 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:36 Dolan: This is Dolan Casey in Middleton, Wisconsin.

0:38 Dylan: And this is David Pizarro from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

0:43 Mark: Yay, Dave. Welcome.

0:44 Dolan: Yeah, welcome, Dave.

0:45 Dylan: Thank you so much for having me. It'll be weird to be on a real philosophy podcast.

0:51 Seth: What makes you think this is real?

0:54 Dylan: Real?

0:54 Wes: Er, so how did you end up on this podcast?

0:58 Dylan: I do a podcast with a philosopher, Tamler Sommers, called Very Bad Wizards. And I think, you know, we're podcast cousins. You guys are our forefathers. I know Tamler had been on the podcast. I had always been secretly desiring to be on the podcast. But as a psychologist, I'm a social psycholog psychologist by training. I've always been a closeted philosopher. So I was delighted to get the invitation by Mark.

1:21 Mark: Well, and we've been going on a little psychology run here with Robert Wright coming on, and then Dr. Drew, what we're going to talk about here hooks up with a lot of philosophy. In fact, I taught the Stanley Milgram article in an ethics class. But my original idea was, hey, David, why don't you come tell us some psychology experiments that you know, the scientific literacy of philosophers often gets criticized, and we have gotten that bit of feedback many times.

1:46 Wes: Despite the fact that Dylan is a

1:48 Dylan: physicist, the scientific literacy of psychologists gets criticized quite often as well. So I feel your pain.

1:54 Mark: So we could have a whole series on just things that philosophy students should know from science and from psychology in particular. But the ones that I knew about already, this Milgram one, it was easy enough to get a group of similar articles and focus our topic specifically on do people that we wouldn't suspect to become aggressive, get that way in certain situations? And the one that you added to our syllabus here was John Doris's Persons, Situations, and Virtue Ethics, which It was great to have a more current article that was a little more explicitly philosophically inclined in that he talks about Aristotelian virtue ethics and then this whole literature, apparently of psychologists who take virtue ethics seriously and make psychological theories based on that. So I didn't know anything about that literature. So that was an interesting crossover.

2:38 Wes: Yeah. So the question here is, to what extent is our behavior, including the degree to which it's ethical behavior or not, dependent on our character, and to what extent is it dependent on the situations we find ourselves in?

2:53 Dolan: A corollary, that question is just the interpretation of character as being the appropriate metric for how to talk about our personalities or who we are as people. And part of that might be just what do we mean when we talk about character at all?

3:11 Wes: Yeah. So like the most general description of someone's character might just be whether they're a good or a bad person. That's sort of one of the sorts of judgments we're used to making all the time. But we can also get more specific on the Aristotelian route and talk about courage and other sorts of virtues.

3:27 Dolan: But part of that also would be when we say, like something they're a good or a bad person, we're saying that that is the description of their character. Their character lines up as good or bad, and that says something about who they are in their being or their essence. And that also has two implications. One is that's the way they are, and that will endure over time. And it will also show up, manifest itself in particular ways in their behavior and the kinds of judgments they make and the way they interact with other people and interact in situations, so that you can predict something about how they will behave, how they will be based upon that understanding of their character.

4:11 Dylan: Right. And I think that those two points really are the important ones to highlight the stability of character, that is the stability of action or the dispositions that lead to action over time. And the underlying sort of. Maybe essential isn't necessarily the right word, but it's caused by something deeper and that is what's giving it its stability over time.

4:35 Mark: Do you have some introductory words for us?

4:37 Dylan: Yeah. So I'm glad that we started with these two sort of staples of the social psych tradition, Milgram and Zimbardo. Because although there is a whole bunch of work obviously since then, in social psychology. I mean, social psychology in some ways is defined as really how the situation shapes social behavior. There's almost sort of a built in assumption, probably based on years of research. In most social Psychology work that really we're pulled by the forces of the situation more than by anything like a stable character trait or disposition or personality.

And I think that these two papers make the point clearly in a way that the rest of social psychology on this topic is almost a footnote to these two papers because they were so strong and so influential. And I'm sure we'll talk about the ethics of these experiments. But I wanted to say a little quick story about the Milgram studies. Milgram was at Yale, and I happened to be a grad student in the psych department at Yale. And one day we were just exploring around the dark basement area of. As anybody who's familiar with these academic departments knows, there's always some weird dark storage area in the basement.

And we were just digging around the file cabinets, and we found a file cabinet that had faculty files from, like, back into the early 1900s. And we found Milgram's file in there. I don't think we should have looked at it. I don't think anybody knew it was there. But it had all of his tenure letters he had gotten rejected, I think, for tenure at Yale. And we sat there and we read all of these letters. And half of the people thought that what Milgram had done was horrible, that he was giving a bad name to psychology as a science, that he was unethical and he was a monster.

And the other half thought that he had sort of he was a genius, that he had made one of the biggest advances in psychology in the century. So that was fun. But whatever it was, I think those two had an indelible mark on psychology. And I like that Doris picks up really on this point and tries to say, does this have any implications for our philosophical theories of ethics?

6:50 Mark: So let's try to get the facts quickly about at least the Milgram experiment. Anybody in particular want to tell that story?

6:58 Seth: So. And, David, you can keep me honest here, but the Milgram experiment was intended to test the limits of people's obedience to authority. So the experiment was set up in such a way that people were brought in and they thought they were participating in a memory experiment where there would be a teacher and a learner and that they would be arbitrarily chosen to be on one side or the other, but it was rigged in such a way that they would be the teachers. And the premise of the experiment to determine the learning aspect of it was whether people responded to.

We'll call it negative stimulation. But I think in most of the things we watched or listened to or read they talked about punishment. So the idea was, is that the person who came into the experiment who thought they were randomly selected to be a teacher and the other participant was randomly selected to be a learner, their job would be to inflict pain through electric shock on a scale from very mild to lethal whenever the learner got an answer wrong. So essentially the participants were put in a situation where their role was to inflict punishment on a random person that they didn't have a personal association with at the direction of the so called scientist or the experimentor.

And the setup was rigged so that they would have to increasingly apply more and more shock to this person and the person would increasingly make errors so that they would have to increase the shock. And the question was whether or not the participants would withhold or refrain from applying the shock when they got the sense that the learner or the other participant was actually in pain. And the way it was set up with the shocks coming up on a scale, there was a certain point at which the learner cried out in pain and then was silent after that.

And there was a certain point at the end where it was clear that the shock was lethal, but the experimenter would just tell them, this is part of the experiment, you just need to complete it. And the question was, would people go all the way through with this or would they balk at the experimenter and opt out? And predictions beforehand were that only 1 or 2% or only a very small number would do it. And in fact something on the order of 70% of people go all the way through the experiment applying shocks after the learner fails to respond, in fact, breaching what would be a lethal dosage of electric shock if it were in fact true.

9:40 Dolan: I think that's a really good summary, Seth. I would make one quibble about it in that it's ambiguous in the experiment what the status of the highest shock is. It's noted as triple X and it's reinforced from the beginning that the shock is not going to cause permanent damage to them. So there's a little bit of conflation. The experimenter is downplaying the kind of effect, acknowledging that there's severe pain involved.

10:12 Seth: But no permanent damage.

10:14 Dolan: But no permanent damage.

10:15 Seth: Right. But the dial itself is marked as

10:18 Mark: like lethal, very dangerous, and then xxx.

10:22 Dolan: Yeah, dangerous, severe shock. And the last, the highest one is just xxx. And it's left ambiguous on how you interpret that.

10:29 Wes: So they're giving him contradictory cues.

10:32 Seth: This is decades before Vin Diesel.

10:35 Dolan: That's right, yes.

10:37 Dylan: I don't know if you guys have ever seen the film Obedience that Milgram put together, it's an old black and white film I showed in my intro psych class. It's very commonly shown. And the one thing that eases the ambiguity a little bit, although you're absolutely right to point out that the experimenter is purposefully not saying that it's not dangerous, is that the tape recording that they were playing back, sort of the standard audio that every participant heard as they were going through each stage of the shocks, the person is banging and yelling and saying, let me out. I can't take this anymore. I have a heart problem. Let me out. Let me out. And it's actually really distressing to listen to. And Milgram even says at the end of his original article that there was this sort of pull between the obedience cues and the do not harm cues. So it is not like he was saying, kill that person.

11:27 Wes: We should say for listeners who want to see it done, there's been a lot of replications and a lot of them videotaped. One of them, I watched one from the 2009 episode of BBC's Horizon. It was a science documentary series. I just watched a 14 minute clip. But it gave a really good sense of the experiment and the way it all worked, and it makes it a lot more believable. I think if you just read the paper, you. You might come away somewhat skeptical. But when you see it in action, it's really something.

11:58 Mark: Or you could see it acted out by professionals in the movie Experimenter, which stars Anthony Edwards of ER fame and Revenge of the Nerds fame as the dupe.

12:07 Dylan: Oh, really?

12:07 Dolan: Yes.

12:09 Dylan: And they also made a Stanford Prison Experiment movie. And I'm like, maybe it's too close to home for me, but I'm like, I wouldn't know.

12:14 Wes: I saw the trailer for that actually, when I was. It's amazing.

12:19 Mark: I watched it. Yes. It made it much more vivid than reading this paper.

12:24 Dylan: I would not pay to see that. Feels like work. But, you know, there's a lot of. There's. In reading the original. One thing I realized in doing my homework for Pel is that I rarely read these. You know, I've probably read the Milgram a couple of times and the Zimbardo maybe once. But there's a lot of detail in these papers that I think does get lost upon the retelling. And so it's really sort of nice to read the original author with all their caveats and their descriptors. And the Milgram one in particular is Just very elegant, you know, such a simple situation, at least to explain with a lot of work going into the setup. I mean, this was a really well done. They even talk about the engraving on the fake shock machine that they got professionally made.

13:10 Wes: Maybe we should talk a little bit about his conclusions. And it really does come across in the, you know, if you watch a videotape of the experiment, the extent to which the people who are administering the shocks are really reluctant and distressed after a certain point. I think they're made to believe that the person is objecting to the shocks after like a certain point, after like 225v or something like that. And it gets worse and worse from there. You know, I think he even describes people sort of breaking down and going into convulsions and all sorts of symptoms induced by the conflict created in them doing this.

And I think the conflict it bears emphasizing that people will try to back out of doing it. And then you have someone who's watching them administer the shocks and they will say, you must continue. It's essential to the experiment that you continue, or things like that. So you have an authority figure who is creating a conflict between the well being of the person who's receiving the shocks and the sort of higher goal of science and the integrity of the experiment itself. So it becomes a real moral conflict, I think, for the participants.

14:20 Dolan: And it's important to be clear about the integrity of the greater purpose. I think Milgram himself wants to extrapolate this. Not to necessarily talk about authority of science, but authority of any sort. Right. And the way in which the subjects of the experiment, part of the force of the pressure on them is that they're doing something for some kind of greater good that's part of the cell. I think there's actually a lot to unpack here about how that authority is working on them. The experimenter, while they are reinforcing this and saying that you really need to do this, they're not cajoling them, they're not inflicting punishment or threats on them themselves.

And in fact, in the Milgram experiment, they get paid at the beginning and they're told from the beginning that you'll get your money regardless. They're not even told. When they say they want to quit, they say, well, you're not going to get paid. Then none of that's true.

15:18 Wes: They do it out of a sense of obligation.

15:21 Dolan: They do it out of a sense of obligation. They're prodded and they're sort of pushed along and saying, well, to really to complete this task. There are a couple things in there. One is that they're prodded to do it for the sake of some kind of greater goal that they agreed to do earlier that they obligated themselves to. And also it is regularly reinforced that they are not actually harming the person.

15:46 Wes: They're given a way to rationalize their obedience. Yes, they're given strong incentives to obey, but not out of threat or out of just mere conformity, but out of a sense of moral obligation. And then they're given rationalizations that will tip the scales towards fulfilling that moral obligation. And finally they're put in a circumstance where they're obligations to the person who's supposedly receiving the shocks because they're not visible, because they were volunteers as well, because of the idea that there's not going to be any damage, that sense of obligation is dampened a little bit.

I mean, not dampened enough not to create extreme stress in the people, but just enough to continue. The other part of it that Milgram mentions is just what he calls the vagueness of expectation concerning what a psychologist may require of his subject and when he is overstepping the acceptable limits. And then the fact that they can't have a discussion really about that with anyone. If they could actually think about it or talk about it with someone, they might be able to come to some sort of conclusion in which they defy the experimenter. But they're put in a really murky circumstance and there's no ability for them to clarify it.

So I think that's important as well.

17:00 Dolan: Yeah, they're all alone and apparently there are follow up experiments that controlled for other variables. And Milgram apparently sort of redid this over and over again. Maybe David, you can clarify this.

17:11 Dylan: That's right. That's actually, it's not in the original paper, but he did a number, you know, probably reported on 17 or 18 follow ups where he was testing various moderators of the effect. That is, what variables could you manipulate that would make this effect go up or down? And one of the important ones was having the weight of the research institution was important. That is, when people weren't told that it was Yale University, when they were given another sort of unknown university name, they were less likely to do it. So that's a big part of the situation.

I think you guys are saying it right. That is, Milgram was creating a very ambiguous situation and stacking the deck in favor of this. Not in an unfair way because nobody thought that's maybe another thing we should talk about that Most people never thought that anybody would go that far. He actually asked people to predict. He asked some students who are psych majors, senior psych majors, to predict how many people would go all the way. And some of his colleagues. And nobody thought that somebody would go all the way with the shocks. But he's creating this sort of situation.

And then he did a really good job of unpacking it. So if the person was. If you could see the person getting shocked, people were way more likely to stop.

18:23 Dolan: Well, I also would have wanted to not just ask everyday college seniors about what they would have thought, but let's ask the class of con artists and master manipulators what they think would happen.

18:38 Dylan: Absolutely.

18:40 Dolan: And besides, the effect of Yale wasn't there, like, if the guy was wearing a lab coat, that mattered. It mattered how close they were to the victim.

18:50 Wes: The victim, the learner, the imaginary victim. Learner, the learner.

18:57 Dolan: But that list of things seems to me to be like, again, it becomes a primer on how to manipulate people. You isolate them from being able to normalize the situation with respect to other people. You provide subtle and overt cues regarding authority that are common in their culture. The list would go on about the way in which you amplify the effect of obedience with respect to authority.

19:30 Wes: I'm having a flashback here, too. The beginning of the 1984 Ghostbusters. Do you remember that?

19:36 Dolan: Yeah.

19:36 Wes: Dr. Peter Venkman, who's trying to see if people are really psychic, supposedly, and administering shocks. There's a guy behind the table who actually is doing really well at guessing what's on the card, and he's shocking him anyway and using the whole setup just to seduce women who have come in to be subjects. So speaking of manipulation, he's the ultimate manipulator and persuader. And kind of slimy in the beginning.

20:05 Dylan: Yeah, exactly. And, you know, it's also, I think, worth pointing out that Milgram actually had all of the participants in the study receive a shock. So they knew that there was at least something that wasn't very ambiguous. I don't remember what level he gave them a shock, but it was at a very low level. And you could feel the sort of pain.

20:25 Wes: Yeah.

20:26 Dylan: We've actually, in our lab, done experiments where we actually had people shock themselves. We bought a real shock machine. When I did that study, and I first gave myself a shock, I think at 20 volts, I was like, damn, there is absolutely no way that.

20:43 Wes: Yeah, no, I've done that, too.

20:46 Dolan: I have a bit of a nerdy question. About that, which is when you bought your shock machine. It's voltage at line out of the

20:57 Dylan: wall, like line amps, you know, I don't remember. What I can tell you is this it for sure didn't go up to 450 volts.

21:09 Dolan: The nerdy thing that I'll say is that I've been shocked by 50,000 volts before.

21:13 Wes: Oh my God.

21:14 Dolan: Well, here's the deal. In air, sparks will jump at 50,000 volts per inch, basically in dry air. And the reason it doesn't kill you is because it's a very, very tiny amount of current and it hurts like a son of a bitch, but it won't come close to killing you.

21:33 Dylan: Yeah.

21:33 Dolan: So when I heard about this like being line voltage. Right. So if it's basically an infinite amount of current available, like you basically put a dial on the, on your wall socket. I guess that's what I'm imagining. And then we're talking about if you ever stuck your fingers in a wall socket.

21:48 Wes: Yeah. What is it?

21:49 Dolan: It's 110 volts in the U.S. is 220 in England.

21:53 Dylan: Yes. I've stuck my finger in a light bulb socket by mistake.

21:57 Dolan: It's smart.

21:58 Dylan: That hurts. In our study we only had people go up to 80 volts. And what I do remember is you have to buy very special shock machines that are cleared for use with humans and animals because the last thing you would want is one of those things to go wrong.

22:16 Mark: So it seems like there's a falsely quantitative aspect to this that clearly the reason that people would stop at a certain point is because of. Well we said, you know, at 150 volts is when the person is going to start objecting or is going to stop responding altogether. And it was those cues by the victim that generally indicated a change where a group of people would stop at or near one of those points. Not like that they had knowledge of the physics of voltage and were like wait a second. 150. That's a lot like. No, I, I don't have a goddamn clue. Other than a 9 volt battery. Yeah.

22:52 Wes: Well also the triple X and the word danger.

22:55 Mark: Yeah.

22:56 Wes: Strong cue. So.

22:57 Dylan: Right.

22:59 Wes: Well they ranked it. Yeah. Slight shock, moderate shock. Strong, very strong, intense, extreme intensity. And then danger. Severe shock. And then at xxx.

23:10 Dolan: Yeah. And the numbers basically line up with something that is of the order of magnitude of what somebody might casually understand. If it said, you know, zero to three, up to one and a half volts. Right. Ended at 1.5 volts and called that extreme shock. It seems like a lot of people would know, well, I have a 1.5 volt battery in my pocket. I can stick my tongue on it. It doesn't matter.

23:31 Mark: Right, right.

23:32 Dolan: I mean, again, I think that this is in line with the way in which the authority is working. Right. There are signs that are familiar that help reinforce that, and what Mark just described is part of that. It doesn't even matter if it's true.

23:45 Dylan: Right, Yep. And I don't. You know, I should have said at the beginning that as context for this, like, what Milgram was really trying to do here, you know, and he doesn't shy away from this, is as sort of the. The origins of most social psychology was that people were trying to figure out how the Nazis did what they did. Right. I mean, it's just straightforwardly, what the hell could have made that happen? And I think this is where people either love or hate Milgram because of what they think about how this demonstration relates to Nazi Germany.

24:20 Wes: Now, you can imagine that some people would be in the camp of thinking obedience. The idea of obedience plays a strong role. And then others might object to that and think that there's something else, like sadism.

24:31 Dylan: Yeah. I think that one of the things that people hear when they hear about the Milgram experiments and that this was sort of purported to as an explanation for what happened in Nazi Germany, they do not want to accept that this wasn't anything but actual bad intention and evil action. And they don't want to believe that anybody is capable of doing this.

24:52 Wes: Just the bad people.

24:54 Dylan: Just the bad people, they want to be able to impugn and blame. And so there is sort of a banality of evil perspective that Milgram is coming from, where he's not being apologetic at all, but he is saying sort of there but for the grace of God goes everybody, or at least 26 out of 40 people. Because if I can get regular people to do this in a lab, basically shock someone until they're unresponsive, then stacking all of these effects upon each other over some historical period where you have the ultimate authority in the nation, slowly guiding the actions of its citizens, then it seems as if we could have been capable of doing that had we been living at that time and place. And people, I think a lot of people just don't want to accept that.

25:38 Mark: Well, there are clear dissimilarities between this short time frame and particular situation in an educational institution and stuff. I think we should get the Stanford Prison Experiment out, since we've laid out the facts the first one. Lay out the facts the second one. So we can kind of talk about ethical implications of both of these together, because that was something that ran over multiple days. So it was taking a bunch of screened students. So Milgram didn't do any screening for his people. It was just, you know, people from the community within a certain age range.

But in this Stanford prison experiment, it was ask all these college students if they had history of mental illness or try to detect sadistic tendencies, give them these personality tests and try to get the most stable, normal, you know, above average intelligence, but emotionally mature enough individuals, they could get flip coin in terms of which ones are going to be assigned to be prisoners and which ones are going to be assigned to be guards. Create this a fake prison environment out of a basement academic hallway with three cells. And then, you know, give the guards some minimal guidelines.

And then the experimenters themselves, some of them sort of act as the warden or the superintendent, had some other sort of routine things that were built in, like visiting day and, and how the meals would run and having a count three times a day, you know, during each shift of guards, but otherwise letting things go. So it wasn't the experimenter telling these guards be sadistic, but they found that the sadism among the guards, sadistic behavior just jumped in almost immediately. And the guards had dark sunglasses and everybody's wearing uniforms to kind of de.

Individuate them. And then among the prisoners who just had numbers that they're supposed to call each other by, or, you know, there wasn't a lot of personal talk using their names or anything like that, some of them rebelled, but most of them, you know, got very passive and depressed. A few of them freaked out and they had to stop the whole experiment after six days. It was supposed to run two weeks because too many of them were freaking out. But the overall pattern had become clear by that point. That's supposed to present a different side of this banality of evil thing that we saw in Milgram.

27:30 Wes: Well, what do you mean a different side?

27:31 Mark: Just in that it wasn't a 15 minute experience with somebody directly telling you what to do.

27:37 Wes: This seems like a much more poorly designed experiment. It's kind of open to interpretation whether he told them to be sadistic. Many of the guards weren't sadistic, it turned out. And then the one who was sort of being the ringleader of the sadism, Dave Eshelman was his name, and they called him John Wayne. He's basically imitating a character in Cool Hand Luke, the prison warden, down to the Southern accent. So you get the sense. I watched a 30 minute documentary on this, which I also recommend people do. You get the strong sense that they're not just engaged in a experiment, but they feel pressured to roleplay.

One side feels pressured to be the stereotypical prison guard and the other side feels pressured to play the stereotypical prisoner. And one thing Eshelman says in his interview is it started out it was just boring because the prisoners did what they were supposed to do, the guards did what they were supposed to do. And he, out of that boredom, he wanted to liven it up. So that's when he started his sadistic stuff.

28:32 Dolan: Yeah. And it's pointed out in the article that the guards get some kind of minimal training.

28:37 Seth: Right.

28:38 Dolan: And when I read that, I thought, well, even though the training is more now than it was, what this is 1963.

28:44 Mark: 1973, yeah.

28:45 Dolan: Okay. Nevertheless, I don't believe that guards got no training in 1972. So it would seem that you would be left with emulating a role playing, as Wes said, based upon what you think guards act like, based upon movies and television. I guess I'm just coming down on the experimental variable question.

29:04 Dylan: You really notice the tightness of the Milgram experiment when it's juxtaposed directly with the Zimbardo experiment. In the Milgram experiment, there's like four prods that were given. There's audio tape interaction. It's very, very tightly controlled. And this is loose. Just let's capture audio whenever we want to. Let's let them do whatever they want. Even when they were coming up with the rules of the prison. It sounds from the paper as if the way they did that was by discussing it with the people who had been randomly assigned to be guards.

I think at best, what both of these studies are showing is a mere demonstration of what can happen. Not a very good. Especially in this, in the prison experiment case. Not a very good scientific study for how to make it happen. Right. It could be that that one guard, Eshelman, was a necessary ingredient. It may have gone very differently had it not been for him. Honestly, Zimbardo. Zimbardo's a little weird himself. Might have. Might have gone.

30:01 Mark: And this has not been repeated hundreds of times in the way Milgram's.

30:05 Wes: Yeah, that's. I was going to say that interviews with him. Yeah, he obviously had an agenda.

30:10 Dylan: He took on the role of the. Of the prison warden.

30:13 Wes: Exactly.

30:13 Dylan: Very, very seriously.

30:14 Wes: Yeah.

30:15 Mark: The way he writes it up is a major Part of his agenda is not, can we get the guards to act sadistically? But is the. To analyze the prisoner experience. Right. So that's not even an element in Milgram that he wanted to show that you might think that people in actual prisons don't reform the way you'd like them to because they're just bad people. Bad people are the people who get locked up in prison. And he wanted to show that these normal, well adjusted kids would very quickly behave in these sort of inhuman ways, you know, as prisoners. What they would undergo in terms of being demeaned in this way would not be helpfully interpreted as something that would rehabilitate a normal person or rehabilitate anyone.

30:54 Wes: Well, it's about what explains deplorable conditions in prisons. So he talks about the dispositional hypothesis, and that's where you talk about stereotypical characters in prisoners. You know, they're just criminal types. And then stereotypical characters in guards. They're sadistic and uneducated people who take those sorts of jobs. His hypothesis is that, no, it's not a matter of individual dispositions, but it's the structure of the situation, the structure of the authority. Yeah. So we established functional equivalence for the activities and experiences of actual prison life, which we expected to produce qualitatively similar psychological reactions in our subjects.

Feelings of power and powerlessness, of control and oppression, of satisfaction and frustration, of arbitrary rule and resistance to authority, of status and anonymity, of machismo and emasculation. So instead of explaining deplorable prison conditions in terms of character types of prisoners and guards, you explain it in terms of the way prisons are structured to put people in certain kinds of roles, and they will fulfill those roles.

31:58 Dylan: The reason that maybe people don't rehabilitate is because we put them in these situations where we're not giving them much of a chance to rehabilitate. As many times as I've taught and I've read about the Zimbardo experiment in both of these papers, it's still really odd and distressing to read the descriptions of the behavior of the people in the studies. And so he's talking about prisoners. He says the most dramatic evidence of the impact of the situation upon the participants was seen in the gross reactions of five prisoners who had to be released because of extreme emotional depression, crying rage, and acute anxiety. Milgram talks about people basically having seizures, and these are really, really severe consequences for being in a psychological study.

32:40 Dolan: Maybe this goes back to the character question at the beginning. It juxtaposes with the normalization of all the participants at the beginning. So both sets of experiments, they go some way to try to have people that everyone would judge as a normal person. So in Milgram's case, they more or less randomly select people through advertisements and get a cross section of society. But in accounting for them, I don't believe that, at least in the paper we read, they did any kind of assessment of the individuals formally, but used the sort of luck of the draw out of normal everyday people, assuming a kind of normal distribution to everyday people.

And then in the Zimbardo experiment, they take a lot of pains to assess people beforehand and. And doing a variety of psychological profile tests and showing that, for instance, the measures that they use for the selection of guards and the selection of prisoners, they fall on the same scale in that they're all more or less normal people. So when you juxtapose that, if you take it at face value that you have people acting both in these extreme manners, but also then, as you pointed out, David, that the effect of the psychological experiment is profound, it makes you wonder, did people have PTSD as a result of having participated in this experiment, or did they have nightmares in realizing that, oh, my God, I did this thing that if you'd asked me beforehand if anybody would have done it, I would have said no.

34:10 Mark: Both papers make a point that nobody was harmed in a lasting way. We took measures at the end of the experiment with exit interviews and stuff to make sure that they were okay. And both of those claims seemed rather dubious. So. So with Milgram, with Milgram, just look at the Wikipedia article on this, and there's like a whole Milgram skepticism.

34:32 Wes: You could defend Milgram. I think Zimbardo is just completely unethical.

34:37 Dylan: It's like, yeah, I mean, because of these two studies, we have very strict measures about what we're allowed to do and what we're not allowed to do, and I think that's good. Some people have said, you know, we learned the most from those, and now we can't even do them. But.

34:52 Dolan: Well, what about. I mean, I watched the same video that Wes referred to, and I was talking to my wife about these experiments, and she's a physician and has done some work in psychology as well. And, you know, her first thought is, well, that's just completely unethical.

35:06 Dylan: Yeah.

35:08 Dolan: And I was just trying to get my head around it, especially for the Milgram one. And then I watched the BBC thing, and this was made, I don't know, just a couple years ago or something.

35:18 Seth: Right.

35:19 Wes: 2009.

35:20 Dylan: These situations, they strike me as grossly unethical, but reality TV can get away with a lot. It's much stricter guidelines for what we can do, actually in a psychology lab.

35:31 Dolan: Yeah. I guess Survivor is a kind of version of this psychological experiment.

35:34 Dylan: Right, right.

35:35 Dolan: Without the ethical guidelines, there's just money at the end.

35:39 Dylan: Right. But yeah, because of Milgram, the minute somebody says, I don't want to be in this experiment anymore, we have to let them go like the first time they say it, or else it's a gross violation of the human subjects protocol.

35:50 Wes: I mean, I don't think Milgram is any more unethical than like say, high school.

35:56 Dylan: That's right.

35:56 Wes: At least for me.

35:58 Dylan: He's just systematically.

36:00 Wes: High school is horrific. That's a. That's a crime against.

36:05 Dolan: Anyway, I wondered a lot about, in the Zimbardo one, about the kinds of measures that they're making, the kinds of assessment we're making about people's normalcy and the kinds of characters they have. Because one of the forces of the conclusion has to do with the ability to assess normal people and their characters at the beginning, I guess, on the one hand, see what big an effect a situation has on them and sort of contradict the notion of character. And I wondered about the kinds of measures that were made in the Zimbardo of ways of actually getting to what somebody's sort of character is like and then whether that was sort of controlled for in any way.

36:45 Dylan: Right. So in the Zimbardo study, they do give people a series of measures that I guess at the time were standard measures of personality. One of them is the Comrey scale where it's measuring trustworthiness, orderliness, conformity, activity, stability, extroversion, masculinity. And a lot is made of there being no difference. So there's a lot talked about. There's no difference between this and the population scores. These people weren't any different from the normal population. And the prisoners and guards weren't any different from each other.

I'm not familiar with this particular personality scale, but it is sort of in that same family of personality scales that we would use nowadays. Something like extroversion and trustworthiness. These are self report scales about your own personality traits. It's a small subject, it's not a lot of people. So that when he compares prisoners and guards and says there's no significant difference between the two, there's never enough power, statistical power, to make any conclusions about that. He couldn't find something. If There really was. Yeah.

37:49 Dolan: I mean the numbers are written out to the hundredths place.

37:54 Dylan: Yeah.

37:54 Dolan: And I sort of read it the way you did, which is, is that average on that number good to plus or minus 10, plus or minus 20, in which case there's no difference between any of them. There's no resolution at all.

38:09 Dylan: Every once in a while they get a significant finding here. One of the criticisms that has been raised about the Zimbardo study is that even though people were randomly assigned to prisoner and guard, these were all people who were responding to an ad about being in an experiment about prison. And so people have said, well, you didn't have the right measure. But the sorts of people who.

38:31 Wes: Exactly. And he uses the phrase prison life.

38:35 Dylan: Exactly. Yeah. That's something that you would want to avoid. Right.

38:39 Seth: And we're all like 18 to 20 year old white males, probably from.

38:44 Dylan: Yeah. With the exception of one oriental as it says. So I have a feeling that if you wanted to show people being mean to each other within a day or two, you would kind of pick these people.

38:58 Dolan: So one thing that makes you want to do experiments like this, even if you constructed them better, is you want to try to have controls to understand people's reactions to situations and understand those effects and construct a good experiment. The other way to do it is sort of through observational techniques in which you control for those things post hoc. And has anybody sort of tried to call that out out of epidemiological data contrasting it directly with the Zimbardo experiment that you know of?

39:33 Dylan: I don't know whether anybody's done anything like this. It's hard because Zimbardo's main point is that this can happen to anybody. And so he's almost purposefully trying to ignore individual differences or else I think he would have done a bit of a different job in looking at measures of individual difference. I would have gotten these people screened by an actual psychiatrist probably to try to get some better metrics. It seems like these were all just self report scales. But I don't know if anybody's looked at a large scale at. I mean, I'm sure in criminology people have looked at individual differences that might predict deviant behavior.

And we certainly know a lot about the precursors to antisocial personalities and psychopathy. But it's sort of a different point than Zimbardo was trying to make. He really wants to say anybody can do this. So I think you would need to really sample from the population and put them in a kind of situation like this. And nobody's really done that since this.

40:29 Dolan: But I'm also thinking there's other circumstances that are very prison, like. Right. Be them boarding schools or high school, and they may not have the same kinds of confinement, but you still have this effective social situation and interaction that people have on each other.

40:48 Dylan: Yeah. You know, what has come close to that are the sort of famous intergroup experiments. In one sort of famous paper on the. It's called the Robbers Cave experiment, they got boys who were at camp and assigned them to be in different groups and had them compete with each other and sort of measured the intergroup aggression.

41:07 Dolan: Lord of the flies.

41:08 Dylan: It was very much Lord of Flies. And then they actually went out of their way to try to undo some of that intergroup hostility by giving them common goals to achieve. And they showed that the intergroup aggressive behavior went down when they had a common goal. So in one case, they had their bus, got a flat tire and they. They all had to work together to fix it. Right. So you have had stuff like that. It's an interesting question, though, to what extent we've missed out on learning about some of this behavior because we can't experimentally do it anymore. I'm not saying we ought to, but I think we're really constrained by selection bias when we're looking in the real world, like the kinds of people who are sent to boarding schools or military schools or whatever.

41:49 Dolan: I mean, this is a little bit of drift, but aren't there classic examples among early child psychologists where they're raising their children according to some kind of deviant prescription to try to see how it affects them? Or maybe that's just a kind of nightmare situation that you would invent for a movie.

42:06 Dylan: Yeah, I don't know about that. Although developmental psychologists are weird. There are people who have filmed every single hour of their children's lives in an attempt to figure out questions like how they acquire language. There's one researcher who. Who literally had video going throughout the entire first few years of their child's life to try to analyze the data.

42:25 Mark: Well, I raised my kids in an all black and white room until they, you know, I finally then introduced them to color at age 9 to, you know, see how that would work.

42:34 Dylan: I never knew what red was until now. Are you guys convinced about this General? Because I think this, as I said before, this is the thrust of so much social psychology that, hey, man, anybody can do this. Were these convincing demonstrations to you that at least the situationist view is to be taken seriously?