"""over the past forty-plus years, the Stanford Prison Experiment has had a strong, and arguably detrimental impact upon both scholarly and popular conceptions of social psychology. Contrary to Zimbardo's misleading conclusions, ordinary people do not mindlessly and helplessly succumb to brutality; instead the evidence (even from his own experiment) seems to suggest that individuals tend to engage in brutality only when they truly believe that such actions are warranted -- acting upon ideas that are condoned by equally brutal group ideologies. The guards in Zimbardo's experiment were thus coerced by Zimbardo and his researchers to brutalize the prisoners; while the prisoners did not simply submit to the guards' brutality, but instead, actively resisted their oppression, both collectively and individually. This resistance was considered intolerable to Zimbardo, and as this article has shown, he utilized his system power to intervene to increase guard brutality and undermine the prisoners' collective will to resist their abusers."""
I've spent over 400 days in a closed environment with "special" group dynamics - the armed forces of Switzerland. Service is mandatory. I was made a NCO against my will.
I've made some valuable unscientific, personal observations during this time. One is, that most people (I'd say 80%) do not speak up for themselves or others when it matters in groups with strict hierarchies.
Not only that, I think that most people don't have any basic moral convictions. Group punishment is highly effective.
I've learnt that sadistic, manipulative and narcissistic people thrive in such environments and if left uncontrolled, alike to a malign tumor that spreads rapidly to other parts of the body, they can impact the entire organization quickly.
> I've learnt that sadistic, manipulative and narcissistic people thrive in such environments and if left uncontrolled, alike to a malign tumor that spreads rapidly to other parts of the body, they can impact the entire organization quickly.
Aye. The phrase "One bad apple (spoils the bunch)" is often misunderstood but applies dreadfully well to human organizations.
I spent 540 days in a series of closed environments and it isn't that simple.
I was chief sergeant in an army recruit center and every 45 days 130 people left and the system rebooted with another 130 people (in boot camp training...)
The more people in the group that have previously lived either in highly predatory enviroments, or have only seen life through TV tend to try and copy attitudes and behaviours as seen on TV.
If everybody start the same day, the most predatory get an advantage but they can't keep up with their image unless they form a subgroup. The subgroup enforces and the subgroup groupthinks. If they don't create a subgroup they soon become a nuisance and fade in to the background.
If everybody does not start at the same day then there is already an established group dynamic and people with social skills in competitive environments usually fit right in. I don't mean this always in a good way. A social skill that people adapted to was that, when nobody spoke to someone, they did not speak to him either. When they wanted to establish themselves they slowly tested their boundaries and tried to cease oportunities.
What most people did not see was that, after a few repetitions of the same procedure (new recruits) human behaviour given certain initial variables tended to repeat itself. That is bad for a predatory, freely evolving environment, but for somebody like me who had done and watched this again and again it was easy to control.
The man in charge is the one who specifies how things will go.
People think they are smart and everything is a matter of intelligence. It isn't. You either know because you tested or because you studied social sciences (The second part is a guess).
So what happened: I learnt all there is to learn regarding rules and regulations. I failed one or two groups by applying everything I had seen in Hollywood movies,I was ignored and the situation turned in to a violent mess. Not violent against me but against each other...
The next group I simply anticipated what would happen because I had already seen it (people attacking people, how somebody could sneak in drugs or how they used them) so it was an easy process that wasn't any more tiring for me or for them. I taught them all the rules and they would listen to me! I was very happy with myself. The recruits kept good relations to each other and they were model soldiers. So I ended my military service with a good feeling of giving.
Not a happy ending: One and a half year later I had to meet a friend of mine to a military hospital as he was being dismissed for medical reasons and nobody could drive him. There I met one of my recruits for whom I was very proud of, and I did't like what I was seeing. He looked like Charlie Seen after having served in Vietnam for 10years. Long story short, when they left my army recruit center, all of them had gained knowledge and it was better than most of their NCOs. They couldn't be forced by the book because they knew better, they knew how to assert themselves because I had shown them how it is done. They spent the rest of their days in the army manipulating people, getting power, and doing nothing themselves. Their behaviour still looked alike, and their behaviour repeated throughout the country.
There are valid criticisms of the SPE, but this isn't one of them. Zimbardo, in his work on heroism, later referenced exactly how he himself came to recognize the mistake: his fiancee came in, took one look, and was terrified by what she observed.
I don't know how your author managed to read The Lucifer Effect and miss that. The last page he quotes from is page 194. The book is a good 400 pages long. The "unreflective" echo that Zimbardo gives ends a chapter offering evidence.
It's hard to encapsulate the entirety of a TV show season in a comment, so I'm going to use a quotation instead. This is from The Wire, Season 4, Major Bunny Colvin:
"This drug thing, this ain't police work. No, it ain't. I mean, I can send any fool with a badge and a gun up on them corners and jack a crew and grab vials. But policing? I mean, you call something a war and pretty soon everybody gonna be running around acting like warriors. They gonna be running around on a damn crusade, storming corners, slapping on cuffs, racking up body counts. And when you at war, you need a fucking enemy. And pretty soon, damn near everybody on every corner is your fucking enemy. And soon the neighborhood that you're supposed to be policing, that's just occupied territory."
The Wire has been acclaimed specifically for its close representation (still obviously dramatized) with the reality of Baltimore. If you haven't watched all five seasons, you should do so.
I was always fascinated with the idea that "the game" has a certain way of being played -- I think Bodie says something of the sort when they're trying to set up Hamsterdam --
I walk by a pretty busy drug corner on my way to work and it always fascinates me how organized it all is. One of the most interesting things I ever saw was two homeless guys fighting over some money when several of the drug dealers came over and broke it up. Self-policing to keep the police away.
I tried to get one company I worked with to give people a small token of appreciation when they did something of significant value to the company. I recall more valuable time spent on the process of deciding who got them than the tokens were worth.
People can forget that people who care about what they are doing innovate a lot more than people who just follow processes. If management cares most about following processes, so will everybody else.
Not totally on topic, but how is that an "almost unimaginable coincidence"? Given the number of people who are involved in similar things, and the number of people at your average high school, it pretty much goes without saying that some people who go to high school together will later do similar things.
It contradicts the story of that old and wise guy who decided to give money to the children who were harassing him. Each time they spotted him and cursed him they would earn one dollar. In the end they stopped because it became "work".
My experience in the education system is that bad behaviour is punished in very public way and good behaviour is never publicised and rarely get any recognition except when to cast a light on bad behaviour.
Edit: the article makes a poor job of explaining that losada line and so does wikipedia.
Seems to me it was more likely they stopped because it wasn't giving them their jollies like they wanted. They wanted him to be angry angry. Instead, he calmly gives them money. Not fun.
> Seems to me it was more likely they stopped because it wasn't giving them their jollies like they wanted.
Indeed, that's a better explanation.
One variant has the kids playing soccer and yelling in the park near the old man's house, it would fit the story better.
My apologies, the story isn't à-propos enough and I though it was more universal.
A man was tired of the local youths <doing negative behavior>, so he offered them a small amount of money ($2-3) when they'd <do negative behavior>.
The next week he came to them and told them "sorry, business was slow, all I can give you this week is $1/time." They weren't happy, but agreed.
The next week he went back and said "sorry, even slower, I can only afford $0.25/time now." The youths said "we're not doing this for $0.25!" and stopped <negative behavior> altogether.
I am not sure there are any sources to this story, it's most likely made up to prove a point ("once it's work, it's no fun" and "old people are cunning") and there are variants but it's a rather commmon story told in classroom where I grew up (Belgium).
It's like the story of the boy who cried wolf, its origins are lost in time and not very precise.
Their approach was to try to catch youth doing the right things and give them a Positive Ticket. The ticket granted the recipient free entry to the movies or to a local youth center. ...
According to Clapham, youth recidivism was reduced from 60% to 8%. Overall crime was reduced by 40%. Youth crime was cut in half.
Really? I mean, really? I'm gonna have to see some extraordinary evidence for this extraordinary claim before I believe that having police go round giving out free movie tickets for not-littering is sufficient to reduce recidivism by an astonishing factor of seven. And I've never heard of it before.
If they get very small prize for socially accepted behaviour, they cannot think they did sth socially accepted for that prize - that would mean they are cheap to buy. So they think they did it because they are the kind of guys, that do such things sometimes.
If I'm doing small acts of kindnes just because, it's hard to make this consistent with "fuck the others" attitude, stealing, etc. Easier to think I'm good guy overall, just made some mistakes before. Cognitive dissonance is a powerfull force.
I believe the general principle, just not the actual numbers.
Another reason for skepticism: googling "ward clapham recidivism" I found a bunch of pages suggesting the recidivism rate dropped not to 8% but to 5%, an equally unsourced and implausible-sounding number.
Of course recidivism rates depend on what you're measuring, anyway. 70% of burglars are re-arrested for burglary within three years of release, while only 3% of rapists and 1% of murderers get re-arrested for the same crimes.
> 1% of murderers get re-arrested for the same crimes.
The latter may well be due to the combination of (1) murder is (mostly) a young man's crime and (2) murder sentences are typically long enough that folks aren't young when they're paroled/released.
Some people have made careers out of setting up incentive structures like this. Check out Aubrey Daniels.[1] He has a consulting company based around it.[2]
Actually, it just says the plan was scrapped because he was fired. All that means is he was the one in charge of the plan and nobody took it over after he left. That could have been the intent behind his firing, but it seems about as likely to be collateral damage.
You could be right.. all other sources were extremely tight lipped and would only state that it was down to a difference in philosophy. That was the only article I could find that actually had any indication of what sort of policies he was implementing there in the time leading up to him getting fired and so I am probably pretty guilty of making an inference based on far too little information.
So the Police Chief DARES to intimate that the Police should get on the transit buses to bust these thieves...
And they fire him!?!?!?
Just... Wow...
I can see why most police would just 'go with the flow'. They are not given the requisite latitude to implement innovative ideas with respect to their jobs. And frankly, boarding buses to bust freeloaders is not particularly innovative. It's just something that is usually not done.
Except that the article doesn't even imply that was why he was fired -- it merely says that his plans to put more police on buses have been squished since he was fired.
I'm still trying to figure out the details of this guy's life and how the above story can possibly be correct. It seems like he was the chief only of the Vancouver transit police, right? So precisely which crime stats are we looking at, when we look at the recidivism rates?
"""over the past forty-plus years, the Stanford Prison Experiment has had a strong, and arguably detrimental impact upon both scholarly and popular conceptions of social psychology. Contrary to Zimbardo's misleading conclusions, ordinary people do not mindlessly and helplessly succumb to brutality; instead the evidence (even from his own experiment) seems to suggest that individuals tend to engage in brutality only when they truly believe that such actions are warranted -- acting upon ideas that are condoned by equally brutal group ideologies. The guards in Zimbardo's experiment were thus coerced by Zimbardo and his researchers to brutalize the prisoners; while the prisoners did not simply submit to the guards' brutality, but instead, actively resisted their oppression, both collectively and individually. This resistance was considered intolerable to Zimbardo, and as this article has shown, he utilized his system power to intervene to increase guard brutality and undermine the prisoners' collective will to resist their abusers."""