Conversations About Social Psychology

Howard Burton

• Publisher: Ideas Roadshow
• Year: 2021
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9781771701259
• Subtopic: Cognitive Psychology & Cognition
• Index: Psychology

FIVE BOOKS IN ONE! This collection includes the following 5 complete Ideas Roadshow books featuring leading researchers providing fully accessible insights into cutting-edge academic research while revealing the inspirations and personal journeys behind the research. A detailed preface highlights the connections between the different books and all five books are broken into chapters with a detailed introduction and questions for discussion at the end of each chapter: I. Being Social - A conversation with Roy Baumeister, Professor of Psychology at the University of Queensland. This thought-provoking conversation explores Roy Baumeister's unique combination of biological and psychological thinking from recognizing essential energetic factors involved with willpower and decision-making, to framing free will in evolutionary biological terms to measuring the numbness associated with social rejection as a form of analgesic response, and more. II. Mindsets: Growing Your Brain - A conversation with Carol Dweck, Professor of Psychology at Stanford University. This extensive conversation provides behind-the-scenes, detailed insights into the development of Carol Dweck's important work on growth mindsets and fixed mindsets: how different ways of thinking influence learning ability and success.III. The Mind-Body Problem - A conversation with Janko Tipsarevic, founder and CEO of Tipsarevic Tennis Academy in Belgrade, Serbia. Janko Tipsarevic is a former professional tennis player, with a career-high singles ranking of world No. 8. Find out what it takes to achieve excellence in professional sports, what mindset is needed to reach one's true potential and a penetrating and inspirational window into the social psychology of professional tennis.IV. The Science of Emotions - A conversation with Barbara Fredrickson, Professor of Psychology at the UNC at Chapel Hill. Topics covered by this extensive conversation include Barbara's work on the science of positive emotions, including her broaden-and-build theory, the undoing effect and upward spirals, while highlighting relevant evolutionary-driven hypotheses together with measurement details of empirical studies.V. Critical Situations - A conversation with Philip Zimbardo, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Stanford University. Philip Zimbardo relates his intriguing life history and the survival techniques that he developed from the particular dynamics of his upbringing in the Bronx to his quarantine experiences and the impact that the different experiences in his youth had on the development of his personal situational awareness and how that influenced his psychological research, and more.Howard Burton is the creator and host of Ideas Roadshow and was the Founding Executive Director of Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.

Critical Situations

A conversation with Philip Zimbardo

Introduction

Should Have Knowns

When you first start delving into Philip Zimbardo’s infamous 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, two words immediately pop to the surface.

The first is “classic”. Nearly half a century after those six intense days in August when 24 summer students had rapidly metamorphosed into sadistic guards and riotous prisoners, the study has long established itself as one of the most famous experiments in the history of social psychology, standing firmly alongside Stanley Milgram’s work a decade earlier as a formidable demonstration of the powerful effects of situational forces on human behaviour.

The second word, though, is “controversial”. Ever since the results of the study were announced, there were strong voices raised against it on ethical, statistical and procedural grounds. Some said that the numbers involved were too small to prove anything, while others maintained that circumstances were so artificial as to naturally encourage the study’s participants to role-play in the way they thought was expected by them. Meanwhile, several levelled serious criticism at Zimbardo’s own role in the study, accusing him of sinking to an almost similarly depraved state as the “guards” by allowing such emotionally-damaging experiences to continue in the name of a scientific study.

What many might not appreciate, however, is that few can be harder on the renowned Stanford University social psychologist than he is himself, consistently recognizing his own profoundly unethical behaviour, together with the vital role his then-girlfriend, Christina Maslach, played in convincing him to shut the study down 8 days earlier than planned.

“She began to tear up. I asked her what the matter was and she got really upset. She said, ‘I can’t look at that!’ I started telling her about the dynamics of human nature and all that, and she just ran out.

“At that point, I was stressed to my limit. I was not sleeping regularly. We ran out in front of Jordan Hall—it’s now 10:30 at night—and I was yelling at her, saying, ‘Don’t you understand that there are dynamics here that have never been seen or studied before? Most experiments only last one hour, but these people are living and becoming prisoners and guards!’

“She just said, ‘It’s terrible what you’re doing to these boys. They’re not prisoners or guards. They’re boys in your experiment. They are being mistreated. It’s terrible what’s happening’.

“I kept trying to re-frame it in terms of the dynamics of the situation, but she just said, ‘I don’t understand how you could see what I just saw and not react the way that I am reacting. I know you’—she had been a TA of mine—‘You love students. You’re a loving teacher. But this situation has changed you. You’re not the person that I thought you were.’

“And then she told me, ‘If this is the real you, I don’t want to have a relationship with you’. That was the clincher. That was like a slap in the face.

“It was now eleven o’clock at night. I said, ‘You’re right. I will end this study tomorrow. Let’s go to dinner and think about how I’m going to shut this down.’

There’s no point, then, in trying to convince Phil Zimbardo that he was involved in an unethical study, or that he became far too personally involved and lost his scientific objectivity. He knows that better than anyone.

“I still feel guilty about it. I allowed evil to exist. In the breakdown of every one of those kids, I am as responsible as any of the guards, because I saw what was happening and didn’t stop it.”

But beyond the guilt and finger-pointing lie some terrifying yet crucial lessons. What, exactly, was going on? How could a group of largely pacifistic students quickly slip into the role of barbarous guards, mercilessly forcing their fellow students to perform shockingly degrading acts for their amusement? None of that seems possible to be waved away by appealing to simple notions of role-playing or a lack of scientific objectivity. These were real people who rapidly began wantonly degrading and humiliating their peers just for the hell of it. And the more they did it, the more entrenched they became in their role.

What is happening, it seems, is that people’s behaviour is being strongly influenced by “situational effects”. We’re still ultimately responsible for our own actions, of course, but it’s essential to recognize the enormously influential role played by the situational power structure around us and the systems that produces it.

So goes Phil’s formal, academic, view of the underlying forces of social psychology. But suddenly, well over 30 years after the Stanford Prison Experiment, the textbooks came alive with a vengeance as the world is forced to grapple with horrific images of American servicemen and women abusing and humiliating Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

“Abu Ghraib was a replay of the Stanford prison study on steroids—exponentially worse. Things went on 12 hours every night for three months, and the few pictures that were shown publicly—a dozen pictures or so—were nowhere near the worst. I actually have access to a thousand of these images, which are truly horrendous: every different kind of degradation you can imagine, performed by American men and women, military police soldiers, on Iraqi prisoners in their charge, night after night for three months.

“How could that happen for three months? When you see the pictures, you assume it must have taken place on just one night. So right away, that means that somebody was not minding the store, that there was a systemic flaw.

“The abuses only took place during the night shift. Not one abuse occurred during the day shift. That’s a situational variable.

“One of the motivations for evil is boredom. The worst abuses in the Stanford prison study were at night. The guards would come in, and they had eight hours to kill. The prisoners were sleeping, they had nothing to do, so they would wake them up and play with them.

“At Abu Ghraib, Chip Fredrick and the other guards worked 12-hour shifts, from 4 pm to 4 am. Then, at 4 am at the end of the shift, he went to sleep in a prison cell in a different part of the prison, because the prison was always under bombardment. He never left the prison, so he was situationally-bound.”

You might think that, given the stakes involved and the likelihood of such horrific circumstances repeating themselves in the ongoing “war on terror” with an unequivocally catastrophic effect on everything from international opinion to troop morale, American authorities would pay more attention to the role of powerful situational forces.

But sadly, you’d be wrong.

“General Myers actually said, ‘There is no evidence that it’s anything but those individuals. Our army, our training is above that. There is no other evidence of such a thing happening anywhere else.’

“It turns out that was a...

Table of contents

• Textual Note
• Preface
• Being Social
• Mindsets
• The Mind-Body Problem
• The Science of Emotions
• Critical Situations