The Stanford Prison Experiment

Vsauce was given enough budget to produce high-quality psychological studies in exchange for YouTube premium and he just decided to make it free for all of us to watch. What a legend

My favorite dude was the one going “There’s no difference if you close your eyes or open them.” 👁👄👁. ➖👄➖

I want to see the flipside of michael's experiment where they choose only people who are pre-disposed and see what happens before and after demand characteristics are introduced. I'd also love to see the most neutral individuals with no predisposition to either violence or kindness.

A weakness of this experiment is its lack of validity. While they reduced demand characteristics, normative social influence and conformity still played a part. Once one person pressed their button, the others may have felt inclined to press their control if they were nervous about being the first to do so out of fear of being seen as 'cruel'. While Vsauce was basing the groups on having similar personalities, no two people are the same and will have other aspects of themselves playing a part in their individual decision-making.

"Dr Zimbardo" sounds like some sketchy character from classical scooby doo and i love it

I am still not paying for YouTube Red.

the noise experiment doesn't say much because the team knew that they were going to be buzzed too by the noise, meanwhile the guards in the prison knew they would suffer no consequences due to their actions and cruelty, and i think that these people from the noise experiment would have been more cruel if they were prison guards and would have also been dehumanized sooner or later

12:41 Michael: “I would love to do the experiment again.” Jared: (almost gets up and walks away)

I can see my self as the dude seeing no difference between closing his eyes and having them open

Zimbardo sounds so much like a cartoon villain

that guy who was noted as the most neferious guard is such an evil guy

I'm surprised that nobody was suspicious of the 'up till level 7 it's not dangerous' thing. That they have been told they could bother the other team with a sound that could permanently damage someone's hearing should have made it obvious that it was fake. Maybe that's also why team 2 figured it out. After that experiment with the fake painful shocks and Stanford, a lot of ethical restrictions were made. I do think Michael's criticism of the Stanford experiment is totally valid.

12:16 Vsauce: ..., can anonimity, power and depersonalization alone lead to evil? Me: * points at twitter *

"It's so weird, there's no difference if you... close your eyes or open them, it's really weird." - this guy was my favorite

You need incentive for this to work. If you did this exact same experiment but said if they finished their puzzle before the other team they would get $1000 I guarantee you the results would be wildly different. Them incentive role is fulfilled in the Stamford prison experiment partly by Zambardo telling them to be more like a guard.... while not the same as monetary incentive its still gives the "guards" a reason to act like guards. This was missing from your experiment.

Something important to note here is they're called "guards" and "prisoners", if you called them "carers" and "people who need care" you'd get a completely different result, even if everything else was the same.

having dark rooms like that is dangerous, mobs could spawn

Controversial experiment: exists Vsauce: lets do it again

"I would love to so the stanford prison experiment again" -Michael, Vsauce. Lol

It would be interesting to see if the test groups were not selected based on their compassion. Zimbardo said the Stanford experiment had a fairly average distribution of personality characteristics, which surely plays an integral role in the outcome of the experiment. The cloak of anonymity and demand characteristics obviously plays a huge role, but in this experiment the most aggressive behaviour we saw was retaliatory even if they COULD turn the volume up and intensify the frequency without repercussions in the second phase. Now, imagine if the test group had a more average distribution of characteristics AND more subjects. 4 people in a dark room becomes very intimate and even though you can't see eachother I assume they didn't TRULY feel completely anonymous due to the groups small size. An observation I made was that the subjects often told the group what they were doing. How high they turned it and "I'm not going to let go of the button....ok that's enough". Which tells me that these people sought feedback from the group about wether what they were going to do was acceptable or not. My hypothesis is that a bigger group creates a larger sense of anonymity and the need for feedback from the group would not be as strong. Another hypothesis is that in a group of more evenly distributed personality traits there would be someone that has less of a problem increasing the volume and intensity, which COULD result in others being more willing to accept using a higher volume and intensity as well. We've all probably heard or used some version of the "They did it, so I did it too" argument. We all want to conform(heard mentality) to a group regardless of if we feel anonymous or not and that need for conformity can make us do things we normally wouldn't do. The bystander effect also comes into play. The bigger the group the less likely someone are to intervene even if they consider it to be wrong. So no, EVERYONE isn't inherantly sadistic if given anonymity, power and instruction, but that doesn't mean they don't have it in them if someone around them "sets the bar". In other words, the experiment was flawed in the sense that subjects were intentionally selected and that helped to achieve a specific outcome, but it does tell us that anonymity, power and direction alone does not inherantly mean that the subjects will resort to abuse of power and sadism. If this expriment would have had larger test groups and a wider distribution of personality traits my hypothesis is that the results would have been very different. I'm not and expert, however I have studied psychology.