I like your point about the Haslam study simply adding texture to Zimbardo’s findings.
I think taken together the two studies provide a better picture of human behavior than separated. Unfortunately too many psychologists get caught up in pissing matches with one another, to see that pooling their research may provide better analysis. It may be the competitive nature of the field that causes this - after all there are only so many financial grants and teaching positions available.
With so many of these highly polarised debates, nature vs. nurture etc. it seems the most you can say at the end of the day is that both or neither are important.
I've never been comfortable with broad or sweeping generalizations regarding human behavior. I remember ages ago getting into a debate with a friend over the nature vs. nuture arguement - she was a sociology major. I disagreed with her assessment that it was all based on genetics. Just as I disagree that it is all based on family history. There are too many exceptions.
I think the difficulty we have is we want a formula, we want to put people and things into neat little categories, file them away, and deal with them on the basis of the category in which we've placed them. I like Angel because he is brooding hero and conflicted. Or I like Spike because he's a bad-boy vamp/rogue. But if the character is drawn well and realistically - he's of course not so easily definable. The same is true with Haslam and Zimbardo or anyone discussing Abu Gharib - it's easier, I think, to place these people into a category -than deal with the fact that their behavior is far from predictable and any one of us may have done the same things if placed in the right situation not necessarily a similar one. My demon after all may not be the same as yours - or place me in a position of playing prison guard to a bunch of blond perky cheerleaders who tortured my brother or me or my neice - and well...who knows. I'd like to think I'd do no harm, but I have no way of knowing unless I'm in the situation and see what plays out.
I do think these contrived situations, whether scientific experiment or reality show, are probably biased towards bringing the worst out in people..
Agreed. And the main reason I dislike reality shows - because they aren't real. They are contrived role-playing games set up in a simulated environment that is controlled by whomever is producing the show. The Apprentice for instance - has a dog handler who rounded up dogs for a project the contestants had to do the previous season since no one wanted their dog washed, and it would look horrid if no one for either team showed up. (The project was to do a dog grooming in two different parks. Market it and get people to let them wash their does in the space of a day.) Another example - Trading Places (similar to Changing Rooms - the BBC version), a popular tv series about homeowners switching abodes and decorating one another's room or apartment in the space of two days, does not complete the work in the space of two days, many items are premade and prebought, and a good portion of the work is done off-site. Same with scientific experiments - the volunteers like those in the reality show, know they can leave at any time. In Survivor - these people are just a few miles away from showers and good food. They can leave whenever. If a medical problem arises? They are air-lifted out quickly. It's make-believe. And the situations are contrived to set them against each other at the outset. People are deliberately chosen to conflict.
In reality these things don't quite happen the same way. Even the two prison studies - the people selected in Zimbardos were all just university students. Not all walks of life. In Haslam's they were all British and from a similar group. Not different nationalities which happens in most prison settings and certainly happened in Abu Gharib.
Social psychologists attempt to recreate real situations in a bottle in order to analyze it, but I'm not sure reality can be neatly contained and I'm not sure it can be analyzed without falling into the trap of making all sorts of faulty assumptions based on the scientists own personal biasis.
no subject
I think taken together the two studies provide a better picture of human behavior than separated. Unfortunately too many psychologists get caught up in pissing matches with one another, to see that pooling their research may provide better analysis. It may be the competitive nature of the field that causes this - after all there are only so many financial grants and teaching positions available.
With so many of these highly polarised debates, nature vs. nurture etc. it seems the most you can say at the end of the day is that both or neither are important.
I've never been comfortable with broad or sweeping generalizations regarding human behavior. I remember ages ago getting into a debate with a friend over the nature vs. nuture arguement - she was a sociology major. I disagreed with her assessment that it was all based on genetics. Just as I disagree that it is all based on family history. There are too many exceptions.
I think the difficulty we have is we want a formula, we want to put people and things into neat little categories, file them away, and deal with them on the basis of the category in which we've placed them. I like Angel because he is brooding hero and conflicted. Or I like Spike because he's a bad-boy vamp/rogue. But if the character is drawn well and realistically - he's of course not so easily definable.
The same is true with Haslam and Zimbardo or anyone discussing Abu Gharib - it's easier, I think, to place these people into a category -than deal with the fact that their behavior is far from predictable and any one of us may have done the same things if placed in the right situation not necessarily a similar one. My demon after all may not be the same as yours - or place me in a position of playing prison guard to a bunch of blond perky cheerleaders who tortured my brother or me or my neice - and well...who knows. I'd like to think I'd do no harm, but I have no way of knowing unless I'm in the situation and see what plays out.
I do think these contrived situations, whether scientific experiment or reality show, are probably biased towards bringing the worst out in people..
Agreed. And the main reason I dislike reality shows - because they aren't real. They are contrived role-playing games set up in a simulated environment that is controlled by whomever is producing the show. The Apprentice for instance - has a dog handler who rounded up dogs for a project the contestants had to do the previous season since no one wanted their dog washed, and it would look horrid if no one for either team showed up. (The project was to do a dog grooming in two different parks. Market it and get people to let them wash their does in the space of a day.) Another example - Trading Places (similar to Changing Rooms - the BBC version), a popular tv series about homeowners switching abodes and decorating one another's room or apartment in the space of two days, does not complete the work in the space of two days, many items are premade and prebought, and a good portion of the work is done off-site. Same with scientific experiments - the volunteers like those in the reality show, know they can leave at any time. In Survivor - these people are just a few miles away from showers and good food. They can leave whenever. If a medical problem arises? They are air-lifted out quickly. It's make-believe. And the situations are contrived to set them against each other at the outset. People are deliberately chosen to conflict.
In reality these things don't quite happen the same way. Even the two prison studies - the people selected in Zimbardos were all just university students. Not all walks of life. In Haslam's they were all British and from a similar group. Not different nationalities which happens in most prison settings and certainly happened in Abu Gharib.
Social psychologists attempt to recreate real situations in a bottle in order to analyze it, but I'm not sure reality can be neatly contained and I'm not sure it can be analyzed without falling into the trap of making all sorts of faulty assumptions based on the scientists own personal biasis.