The Goethals and Allison reading introduced a lot of new theories/ideas while also bringing other ideas together. I thought the most interesting new concept was the “basic law of rumors.” Rumors are something we are all acquainted with, but this is the first time I’ve seen it written into an equation. I think this makes complete sense, especially when put into the context of modern-day America. We seem to have a problem with rumors aka “fake news.” I think a large part of this issue come from the first piece of the equation: importance. Everyone has different things that are important to them, so everyone is more likely to believe a rumor that aligns with something they find important. Similarly, people are drawn to news outlets that reenforce their own beliefs and what they find to be important. This perpetuates the issue because no one is challenging the information that they see and hear, or potential rumors they encounter, because it aligns with their own “importance scale” and makes them more likely to believe it.

I also thought that the implicit leadership theories (ILTs). The first part of leadership schema (beliefs about traits of a leader) reminded me a lot of the reading on SSSs and what physical traits we associate with leadership. The second part (beliefs about what leaders do) reminded me of the reading we read for Monday about what makes a good decision maker and what doesn’t, especially how we gravitate towards the opposite of those good decision maker traits because doing things like being decisive and never admitting wrongdoing supposedly convey strength. This leads back again to the first reading about how our un-evolved brains value strength. One thing I feel like the past two readings as well as this one have failed to do it explain what we can do as a society to work against them perceptions in our brain. If we know this information, how can we spread it to the rest of our communities to make everyone more analytical when assessing good leadership?

Finally, the Stanford Prison Experiment. I’ve read about and studied this before in other classes, and what I find so continually interesting is the role of power in the way that we act. It almost reminds me of some game theory concepts like the Prisoner’s Dilemma. In that situation, in order to maintain power/control, you are encouraged to be selfish even though collaboration would bring you the best outcome. In the Stanford Prison experiment, the guards become more violent and cruel towards to prisoners’, most likely because they feel a need to keep control and go to more extreme measures than necessary to absolutely ensure it. Even though this was an experiment, there are real-life instances of these kind of things happening such as in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2003. In this instance, American soldiers and intelligence officers went to terrible extremes in torturing prisoners, even after some were determined to have no connections to terrorist groups; most people attribute the abuse to “power trips” or incessant needs for control.

In Mystery and Meaning: Ambiguity and the Perception of Leaders, Heroes and Villains by Goethals and Allison, I was stuck by the cues society uses to evaluate or judge leaders. This reading articulates that there are four cues: language, voice, appearance, and movement. This was very telling because many of us try to determine a person’s inner character by their visual appearance. Their mention of the 1960 U.S. Presidential debate with John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon exemplifies this. We looked at and studied this debate in Dr. Hoyt’s LDST 101 section. At the time, I was very intrigued by people’s judgement of each candidate through either the radio or the TV. If one was listening on the radio, one would think that Nixon won. However, if one was watching it live then it appeared that Kennedy won. Goethals and Allison explain that Kennedy’s success in the TV medium form of the debate was not due to his young or charming looks. Rather, they argued it was “the dynamism and fluidity with which he moved” (Goethals & Allison pg.23). The radio could not show the weird or uncomfortable movements Nixon was making on screen. Following the debate, President Kennedy is now viewed historically as a charismatic leader because the general public saw that his movement and demeanor could be attributed to a positive ‘leader schema’.

This attachment we have to a charismatic or strong leader has had powerful effects in our national or local elections. During the bitter 2016 National Presidential Election, Americans were facing two polarizing candidates, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. While Trump made many brutish and unforgiving remarks during his campaign, many Republican Americans were captivated by his rhetoric and language. Donald Trump was willing to say many things a U.S. Presidential candidate would not have said. People were impressed by his undeterred resolve to lead Washington without the cumbersome bureaucratic structure. Although many Americans were shocked about Trump’s Presidential victory, he was able to garner votes because of the public’s belief of his charismatic qualities. Although this election has passed, the American people must be more conscious if they are voting for a politician’s plans or his outer cues. By using leadership studies, we know that leadership comes in many different forms and traits. Although we may want a charismatic leader, we really need someone who is strongly goal-oriented and is willing to achieve goals ethically. Hopefully, the American people can better scrutinize the leadership qualities and cues of the 2020 candidates for this upcoming election.

I was really captivated by the Stanford Prison Experiment. I had heard about it in my previous classes (mainly the ethical issues with the experiment) but did not know many details. I think that the idea of the experiment was a good one; how does prison really change people? However, along with this comes the ethical issue of subjecting people to these experiments. But if this experiment was meant to simulate an actual prison, why can’t we argue then that prisons as a whole are unethical? This experiment revealed inmate perspectives that we have all heard about at some point in the past; physical abuse, psychological problems, identity crisis, malnutrition, etc… Therefore, after reading more about this experiment, I really started to question the ethics of the prison system as a whole. Furthermore, this experiment further revealed why many ex convicts still struggle with mental health issues and can even end up back in prison; this idea in tandem with structural discrimination can be really revealing for why prison is a cyclical process for many.

Another point that I found very interesting was their emphasis on emasculating the prisoners. Yet to me it seems as though they also made the guards seem more masculine with their dark sunglasses covering their face and equipped with whistles and clubs. This hierarchical structure must definitely lead to identity crisises.  In my Justice class first semester, we read a book on toxic masculinity and I could see some of these themes present during this experiment. I wonder how the prisoners would respond to a question about this; did you feel like less of a ‘man’ when you were in prison? How so? Why do you think this is the case? This toxic masculinity also makes me wonder how women and LGBTQ prisoners would handle this experiment. Would there be more instances of sexual, mental, physical abuse (although there were examples with the Stanford experiment, I am wondering if there would be more in this example)? How would their mental health differ as a result?

I first learned about the Stanford Prison Experiment in a criminal justice class during my senior year of high school. One of the main things I took away from that experiment is the idea of groupthink, and how we prefer to stick to the perceived status quo. In addition, the process of human conditioning is something I find very interesting, and this experiment is a prime example of that. Through the multiple examples of degradation and humiliation, the participants who were assigned the role of prisoners were reduced to their prison number. The most interesting part was that their number became not only their identity to the guards and researchers, but also to themselves. Their identity had been stripped in the experiment, but that degradation had bled into their internal identities. One of the participants said, “I began to feel that that identity, the person that I was that had decided to go to prison was distant from me – was remote until finally I wasn’t that, I was 416. I was really my number”. Despite knowing that this was just an experiment, the prisoners were pushed to a level of psychological distress that they assumed their role of prisoner and guard. They felt powerless to stand up to the guards, and some of the “nicer” guards felt powerless to stand up to other abusive guards or the researchers in general. This experiment of human condition showed us just how quickly we are able to assume roles of powerful/powerless when assigned by an outside influence. I think it’s scary to see concrete evidence of how susceptible we are able to conform to these types of power roles, and genuinely believe that we don’t have the power to stand up to authority.

In the Goethals and Allison reading, one sentence that stood out to me was, “Resolving mystery through meaning making is, of course, one facet of the more general human tendency to take small bits of information and engage in some kind of cognitive construction that feels as if it makes sense or meaning out of what is known or perceived” (4). This idea of using current information to try and piece together the larger meaning reminded me of our discussion in class yesterday. This may not be the best comparison, but I think it related to ad hoc responsiveness, and how we want “quick fixes” to larger problems. By using what is in front of us and making a larger conclusion from it, we may be missing larger crucial elements to that problem. I think it also relates to charisma, and how we have shifted to an individualistic society that values charisma in a leader. If we take that limited information and make a decision based on only that, we could be missing a lot of important information that makes that leader who they are, if that makes sense…

I read the Stanford Prison Experiment as a cautionary tale more than anything else. Average “boys” when placed into either situations of previously unknown power or lack thereof for no reason other than random assortment, completely fall into their role of either a power-hungry prison guard or a prisoner with few human rights that trusts no one. They perform these roles so well the experiment had to be stopped early. If this is what can happen in a psychology department basement within 5 days using college students with no criminal past or previous exposure to the US correctional system, imagine what a real US prison would be like. Like many actual prison guards, these “guards” had no formal training and simply relied on their own instincts and turned the prisoners against each other to deflect the anger the prisoners felt from their inhumane conditions.

I am particularly fascinated by the guards in this experiment and how readily they embraced their role. Goethals and Allison state how “depending on context, mystery can arouse either thoughts of frightening danger and villains, or positive, hopeful expectations and images of wonder, awe and heroic leadership” (3). By giving the guards mirrored sunglasses that prevented the prisoners from seeing their eyes and providing them all with the same uniform – both of which added an air of mystery to the guards’ identity – the experimenters were able to make villains out of randomly assorted college students using the fear-inducing context of a prison. The researchers were so successful in constructing these villains that the guards began to view themselves as actual prison guards, not just students participating in a study. This makes me wonder how much the context of the world around us/what is placed on us by people around us influences our identities, how we present ourselves to the world, and how we see ourselves. It makes me think that our environment has the ability to completely change our behavior and attitudes, which is part of why I believe that by continuing to treat prisoners this way instead of focusing on actual rehabilitation the US justice system is merely perpetuating a vicious cycle of crime and incarceration. 

I thought that the piece by Goethals and Allison, “Mystery and Meaning: Ambiguity and the Perception of Leaders, Heroes and Villains” was so interesting. I had not known how big of a part mystery and the unknown play in our everyday lives and our decision making. I found it fascinating all of the different motivations that humans have for the desired conclusions about mystery. When I read that waitresses and waiters often remember the orders that did not get made or did not get paid the most because it did not have the usual ending and therefore caused tension in their minds because they did not get closure. I can relate to this because in high school I worked as a hostess at a restaurant in my town and I can remember all of the times when huge parties of people would come in without a reservation, or when reservations never showed up. Also, I had talked a lot about the image of a leader and how people are more likely to choose a leader based off of looks and how their voice sounded in my 101 class, and I thought that it was so interesting that Harding was an awful president but he got elected openly because his looks “fit the bill”. One thing that I was surprised to learn concerning looks of a leader, was how similarly people choose mates in such a similar possess as they choose leaders, “we want them to be attractive and attracted to us, just as we want leaders to be great and  to signal that we have value to them” (24). I found this whole article to be so interesting because it pointed out things that I can recognize myself doing in regard to mystery and the unknown that I had never realized before.

I have learned about the Stanford prison experiment in a few of my other classes at Richmond and each time it is brought up, it never gets easier to read about. I think that the way that this experiment was conducted was not ethical at all and caused much more harm to the participants than getting any results. First, one of the biggest problems that I have with this experiment is the fact that the people chosen to be guards were not trained at all, and the people chosen to be prisoners were innocent people. I think that by making a simulation that produced actual psychological impacts on the people in it was not the way to go about seeing what prison life was like. I think that creating the fake prison with the real power dynamic was much more harmful than helpful. I thought that the way that the prisoners were treated and the power that the guards got in their heads were similar to what Goethals and Alison were talking about in that when there is mystery you use looks and stereotypes to judge people. If a prisoner looked a specific way, they were treated much worse, only because of how humans deal with the unknown. I thought that it was very interesting to look at this experiment when thinking about why people are judged based off of how they look and what attributes and characteristics that we assign to people when we assume things about their background and history.

I had never heard of the Stanford Prison Experiment before today’s reading, and after exploring the website and reading all about it, I am in shock of how successful they were at putting together a true prison simulation. The overall goal of this experiment was not to create a “literal prison,” but to create a “functional simulation of a prison.” This led to a few differences in how the prison was run and how the prisoners were treated. For example, in order to produce the real feeling of male prisoners feeling “humiliated” and “emasculated,” the prisoners had to wear dresses as their uniforms, when in reality prisoners typically have some form of a pantsuit. The prisoners were also forced to wear a chain on their foot, which is uncommon in prisons today, in order to “remind prisoners of the oppressiveness of their environment.” Even with these slight changes, I wonder how the results of the experiment may vary from real life prison. I understand why they had to implement new measures such as these, however why were they not simply allowed to wear a pantsuit without a chain on their ankle as normal prisoners are today?

I found it interesting how quickly the experiment turned into a simulation of what seemed to be a more realistic prison after the prisoners held their retaliation after only their first day. This “rebellion” turned the overwatching guards into annoyed, threatening guards rather instantly. The guards were not required to hold anything back in their punishments, even forcing the prisoners to do push-ups, which was found to be a punishment used to torture inmates of Nazi concentration camps. The guards then began asserting privileges to different groups of prisoners at different times. According to the website, this tactic can be used to confuse leadership and turn prisoners against each other over who has the ability to have privileges at what times. I wonder if these tactics are truly used in real prison, as I thought it was typical of guards to harshly punish any prisoner who stepped out of line, not granting any privileges for a very long time.

I am personally very interested in the effects of imprisonment on mental health, the ability to re-acclimate into society, and the general concept of the U.S. prison experiment as a whole. Reading about the Stanford Prison Experiment, I felt very.. distressed. There is the whole problem of ethics, but before I talk about that: From the very beginning, I was troubled because the experiment was aimed to study the “psychological effects of prison life.” But the guards in the experiment were not trained AT ALL, and the subjects were not criminals! I would argue that 1. Untrained guards can in no way create a true-to-life prison environment to study (as we saw by the way the guards acted), and also that the psychological effects on an imprisoned person who had actually broken a law may be different than a person who didn’t. (Which is important because there are many people incarcerated wrongfully, my point is that the psychological effects will probably be different among the two groups even though we have both).

The ethics portion of this experiment was flawed beyond measure. 1. Zimbardo had NO knowledge or studies done on prisons or the prison system. According to the APA Code of Conduct, it is required that researchers conduct studies done within boundaries of competence and training. I mean could you imagine just deciding that you were going to create a fake prison and actually get volunteers and carry it out? 2. Harm… I mean the extreme emotional trauma endured does not meet the requirement of “minimizing harm where it is unavoidable.” Being stripped naked, assigned numbers, solitary confinement, the mistreatment, the effects do not just fade with time. 3. There was no informed consent to research. Participants needed to be informed of their right to decline participation and withdraw from research once it had begun.

The following quote on the last page of the article really hammered in the fact that the participants of this study will never truly “recover” from the experiment: “it was a prison to me; it still is a prison to me. I don’t regard it as an experiment or a simulation because it was a prison run by psychologists instead of run by the state. I began to feel that that identity.”

When I learned that the reading by Goethals & Allison was about “mystery,” my mind immediately went to its implications in terms of attractions, especially what makes men attractive. I thought of a girl going “wowww, he’s just … sooo mysterious! Like … what is he even thinking???”

The reading definitely touched on it, calling mystery “essentially erotic” at times, and I thought it funny how David Gergen, regarding Ronald Reagan, “writes almost as if he is in love [with] Reagan.” That made me giggle. It really does seem that if a man is conventionally attractive and has a degree of stoicism, we instinctively fill them in as “heroes.” We are even fed this in the media, with many male love interests or protagonists holding this schema. It also makes total sense as to why this can further be extended to leaders, since society loves them being attractive males as well.

However, it seems like we have taken steps to reverse these stereotypes? Within romantic/sexual attraction, it is known that attractive men can use their “mysterious” charms to endanger women. Still … I am skeptical that we have made as many steps forward in regards to our leaders. The danger is that political leaders especially hold so much authority, that their villain-like behavior cane be disguised, censored, and so on. A cruel lover tends to be easier to spot and  be held liable than a cruel leader …

When reading the Stanford Prison Experiment the thing that stuck out to me the most was a comment made about a riot at Attica Prison in New York. This riot, which occurred after the experiment was terminated, revolved around the prisoners wanting to be treated like human beings. They had had their humanity stripped from them. Despite having learned about the Stanford Prison Experiment previously and knowing people that have been incarcerated, each time I think of human rights being taken from prisoners, I think of the right to vote being stripped from them. I see the right to vote as a basic right for citizens of the United States. Therefore, in stripping that right from prisoners, the government is stripping them of their personhood. However, the desire to be treated as human beings goes deeper than that. The comment made about the Attica Prison riot made the dehumanization of the prisoners clearer for me. The experiment wasn’t just an experiment and prisons are not locations for rehabilitation. They are, as currently ran, locations that questions the extent to which humanity is guaranteed which, I believe, and think others would agree with me, is not an ethically sound cause.

When you tie in the Stanford Prison Experiment into the reading from Goethals and Allison, you get into the tricky tie between the prison system and stereotypes. As Goethals and Allison discussed, mystery leads to people trying to complete schemas for people in their heads. This leads to people like Warren Harding becoming president because he “looks the part.” However, it also leads to people being placed into schemas for criminals because they also “look the part.” This leads to people belonging to minority groups being incarcerated at higher rates. This becomes especially dangerous when considering how the prison system strips people of their humanity. People of these minority groups that happen to fill these schemas are having their humanity stripped from them no matter their actual level of guilt.