We discussed the Stanford Prison Experiment in my 102 class in depth, but reading about it a second time still unsettles me. It reminds me that you never truly know what a person is capable of, especially if you know them just on a surface level. Similar to the Milgram experiment, where an alarming number of people shocked the unseen “subject” with a seriously harmful or even deadly amount of volts, an innocent looking stranger on the street could be wiling to do things you don’t want to think about. Of course, the Milgram experiment was looking at obedience to authority instead of simulating a prison environment, but the results of both experiments didn’t exactly put faith in humanity. The SPE is maybe a little more unsettling, because the “victims” were real humans who faced real abuse, not just a voice behind a wall. I don’t think it was ethical to run this experiment, because the subjects were clearly scarred for life, and even the head researcher admitted that he got lost in his role and probably wouldn’t have snapped out of it for a while if a third party hadn’t pointed out how cruel the experiment was becoming.<\/p>\n
I think the Goethals and Allison article was fascinating. I found that it further expanded on the evolutionary preferences for leaders in an LSS that we read about, especially when it comes to political leaders like Kennedy and Reagan. It was also a little alarming, because it reminded me that people make a crazy amount of assumptions about you as a person based on first impressions and rumors that they’re content to never follow up on. How you perceive yourself vs how other perceive you could be completely different and you might never know about it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We discussed the Stanford Prison Experiment in my 102 class in depth, but reading about it a second time still unsettles me. It reminds me that you never truly know what a person is capable of, especially if you know them just on a surface level. Similar to the Milgram experiment, where an alarming number […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4676,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5372","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading-responses"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5372","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4676"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5372"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5372\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}