Even if this is true, whose fault is it? Is it Zimbardo's? Or is it all the academics and media hacks who ran with their own mistaken understanding of what the experiment was actually testing, without bothering to check their understanding against what Zimbardo actually published? (Not to mention all the supporting information that he went to great trouble to make publicly available, as he describes in his response.)
> one has to wonder why he never corrected the record
Trying to correct mistaken or intentionally false claims in the media is a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. Very few scientists have the time or the wherewithal to do this. Zimbardo published several peer-reviewed papers, as he describes in his response; that's the "record". Anyone who takes media descriptions of any scientific research as accurate is kidding themselves.
> its failure to replicate
Zimbardo's response specifically addresses this point (both in discussing the claimed failure to replicate by a British research team, and in describing other research which has replicated the main findings), so I don't think you can just help yourself to this claim.
Wrong. Merely trying is in-fact incredibly easy to do, but there is no record of Zimbardo taking a single step in that direction. You don't have a case.
You must be joking. In addition to the peer-reviewed papers he published, he gave media interviews, he testified in Congressional hearings, he published an article in the New York Times Magazine, he published a popular book, he made a PBS series, he made all of the study materials publicly available, he was an expert witness in three trials...
It seems to me that the one who doesn't have a case is you.
Because if he did then it would be highly surprising to me that despite having written a popular book it took until a few years ago and a research paper (not a popular book, not media interviews, etc that he gave where he corrected the record) for people to realize that the conclusion they had drawn about the experiment was wrong?
So apparently what he couldn’t achieve through multiple popular media sources was conveyed very rapidly through a research paper?
Really I’m being needlessly kind here. He only changed his tune once called out, and his claims that this was what the experiment was about all along are in direct contrast to his communicated intent from the beginning. What do we call it when you publish something that says A, while knowing A is untrue? Scientific fraud.
How is that supposed to be convincing?
The study itself described what they thought it might be able to demonstrate. The fraud is Zimbardo's. He was pretty clear that he was testing the hypothesis that the guards would become tyrants. He told the guards to become tyrants.
He literally looks like the devil in Rick and Morty. There's some other classic villains I'm sure are a more apt comparison but I can't think of any at the moment. https://rickandmorty.fandom.com/wiki/Lucius_Needful
That could be said about plenty of psychologists and sociologists. I hate that the general public thinks of the social sciences on the same level as other branches of science.
au contraire. He addresses it point by point, in detail. What you don't like is that he doesn't agree with you.
I find it to be thoughtful and thorough, although imbued with the passion that launched the experiment (and instructions) in the first place, which I surmise may be part of the critique you find unanswered?
May I ask which specific critiques you believe survive his response and impugn the study?
> the nearly 50 years between the experiment and its failure to replicate.
Obviously Zimbardo (and, it seems to me, a substantial chorus of reputable sociologists and prison reformers) have a different impression. I think we can safely characterize the response to the replication critique to be:
a) The attempts to replicate the study which have actually attempted to imbue the participants with the cultural and psychological accurements of prison life (including, sometimes, express expectations of toughness and control, which are real and documented aspects of standing orders at many prisons) have in fact successfully replicated the SPE - the NSW is the one Zimbardo cites in his response of course.
b) The popular "failure" in replication by the BBC, which is cited all over the internet every time this comes up (though I presume from your cautious wording, is not part of your critique) is very poorly constructed and has little in common with the parameters of the SPE.
c) Real-world prisons which have been studied at length, including some domestic maximum security or supermax prisons and also some detainment during the "global war on terror", have exhibited very similar outcomes to some of those observed in the SPE.
d) It is not possible in an academic context to perform the SPE anymore, as neither the instructions given nor the consent to prolonged stressful conditions are generally permitted in human experimentation anymore.
I find the SPE to be highly imperfect, but failure to replicate is not among the criticisms which seem to me to be justly leveled against it.
Maybe that is true. In which case he would be a terrible scientist rather than a fraudulent one. Even so, that still makes the legacy of the SPE false, and one has to wonder why he never corrected the record in the nearly 50 years between the experiment and its failure to replicate.