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A comment on The Stanford Prison Experiment was hugely influential. We learned it was a fraud (2018). Parent comment

Re:The Stanford Prison Experiment was hugely influential. We... by watwut on Friday December 15, 2023 @02:32AM (#38651881)
Those 1000 people were heavily coaxed into it. They were subject to years long propaganda painting ennemy as evil danger. That includes literal school system teaching them this. Propaganda had many facets including the idea that manly men must be without empathy toward enemy, that empathy is weakness and cruelty is strength.

A lot of those so-call normal people were literal Nazi party members who became such voluntarily. In particular, camps were run by SS - the elite of believers.

Literally nothing about Germany proves your thesis. Germany proves that it is possible to create political system under which you reward cruelty and consequently people become cruel. It shows that when politicians promote violence, violence can happen. It shows that when you punish opposition, opposition will be helpless.

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Re:The Stanford Prison Experiment was hugely influential. We... by GoblinSlayer on Friday December 15, 2023 @05:04AM (#38652665)
Guards are coaxed to be tough: if you handle a dangerous criminal in a relaxed manner, they can try to escape killing you in the process.
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Re:The Stanford Prison Experiment was hugely influential. We... by scotty79 on Friday December 15, 2023 @06:36AM (#38653129)
"Tough" is dumb, and opposite if it is not necessarily "relaxed" but could be "cautious" and "thoughtful" instead
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Re:The Stanford Prison Experiment was hugely influential. We... by watwut on Friday December 15, 2023 @11:49AM (#38655920)
Which is something different then what happened in German camps.
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Re:The Stanford Prison Experiment was hugely influential. We... by inglor_cz on Friday December 15, 2023 @05:05AM (#38652670)
"They were subject to years long propaganda painting ennemy as evil danger."

This only applies to Altreich citizens, who lived in Germany as of 1933. But the Holocaust involved a lot of people who weren't Altreich citizens.

Austria was only annexed in March 1938, and yet supplied its share of war criminals to the Nazi effort.

The Trawniki men, who guarded a lot of the concentration camps in the East, were Ukrainians who only came under German rule in summer 1941 and didn't even speak German. I would say that the influence of German propaganda on them was negligible compared to an Altreich citizen.

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Re:The Stanford Prison Experiment was hugely influential. We... by scotty79 on Friday December 15, 2023 @06:34AM (#38653123)
Still you can't ensure they were normal people to begin with. And you can't say that they weren't under strong influence. I bet there was a bit of "peer pressurre" from propagandized psychos where the poor Austrians were already on the "job".
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Re:The Stanford Prison Experiment was hugely influential. We... by watwut on Friday December 15, 2023 @11:53AM (#38655965)
The original claim was made about "large number of normal Germans". By the time of WWII, Ukraine was subject of genocide from two sides. And again, local camps guards were especially selected, coached and punished if they were not cruel enough.

OP referred to supposed process in which people spontaneously become super cruel. The claim that "it is possible to make people cruel by authorities" is something completely different.

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