--:-- [Upbeat music fades out]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome to Today Explained, I'm Sean Rameswaram.
--:-- Noel King: And I'm Noel King.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We love hearing from our listeners here at Today Explained. Sometimes they send us stuff like this.
--:-- [Sound effects: A phone ringing]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Hi, I'm Logan, here with my wife Diana in Portland, Maine, and we're big Today Explained listeners.
--:-- Diana: And today's a very exciting day because I got you a Quip toothbrush as a wedding anniversary gift, and I got it from getquip.com slash explained.
--:-- Logan: And tonight we're going to open up the box, and I'm going to try it out.
--:-- Brian Resnick: I'm Brian Resnick, science reporter here at Vox. I feel like I heard a bunch about the Stanford Prison Experiment in college, and then I pretty much forgot about it. And then suddenly this summer, it's been everywhere.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What is this thing, Brian? What's going on?
--:-- Brian Resnick: The Stanford Prison Experiment is a part of this group of studies that are trying to explain evil. It's 1971, and we're at Stanford University, And Philip Zimbardo is a researcher there.
--:-- Brian Resnick: He's wondering, what is it that brings out bad behavior in people? And the working hypothesis going into the Stanford prison study is that it's circumstance, that some of us are put into positions of power and some of us are put in positions of weakness.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And in those circumstances, a natural thing happens where the people in power abuse the people who are in less power. So this Stanford prison experiment kind of really went for this.
--:-- Brian Resnick: They constructed a mock prison in the basement of Stanford's psychology building, and they recruited this group of young men. They got paid around $15 a day, and the participants were randomly sorted into different groups.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Half of them became the guards of this prison responsible for keeping the prisoners in line, and half of them were prisoners.
--:-- Brian Resnick: So it started off with the prisoners getting arrested, like a mock arrest. It was a real cop car. It was a real policeman.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And there were real neighbors in the street who didn't know that I was, that this was an experiment. They were brought to this prison, which had no windows.
--:-- Brian Resnick: They had no way to keep time throughout the day. It's just like a room with a door with bars on it.
--:-- Brian Resnick: You could tell it wasn't a real jail. The power differences were set up from the beginning.
--:-- Brian Resnick: So the prisoners were stripped. They were deloused. They had to wear stockings on their head to simulate their heads being shaven.
--:-- Brian Resnick: This is one of the prisoners' uniform, Prisoner 819. You can see it's really a dress.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Here are the chains that the guards made the prisoners wear to remind them of their status.
--:-- Brian Resnick: The guards, on the other hand, were given these mirrored sunglasses. Military kind of uniforms the guards wore.
--:-- Brian Resnick: They're billy club, symbols of power and authority. So this experiment starts, and the key of this experiment was supposedly that no one was explicitly told what to do in this situation.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And the first day, nothing much happened. The guards and prisoners got along. It was pretty peaceful.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And then the second day, like, chaos. What's this experiment? What's up is in bottle? What's in circulation?
--:-- Brian Resnick: The prisoners rebelled. They took off their numbers. They wanted out. They were really rebelling against the guards.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And then the guards, from that moment on, really stepped up in their cruelty and their meanness and their severity.
--:-- Brian Resnick: So there are reports from this experiment that some of the guards strip the prisoners naked. They make them do push-ups.
--:-- Brian Resnick: They simulated acts of sodomy on them. Like, it got really intense.
--:-- Brian Resnick: One of the prisoners reportedly had this mental breakdown. He began to play the role of the crazy person, but soon the role became too real.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Yeah, the exact quote is like, Jesus Christ, I'm burning up inside. Don't you know? I can't say that. I'm fucked up. I don't know how to explain it. I'm all fucked up inside. I'm out! I'm out now!
--:-- Brian Resnick: What happened was that these prisoners, they became more dehumanized. They became more agitated.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And then the guards, on the other hand, like became more sadistic. You know, they lived up to the situation.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Prisoner 819 did a bad thing. Prisoner 819 did a bad thing. Prisoner 819 did a bad thing.
--:-- Brian Resnick: How long did this study last? Well, we were going to run it for two weeks, but we had to end it after only six days.
--:-- Brian Resnick: So what happens after that? So what happened is that this became like a blockbuster moment in psychology.
--:-- Brian Resnick: The first reports of this experiment were published in New York Times Magazine. It was like a big moment in psychology.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And like I said, coming out of the context of where does evil come from? This is one generation after World War II.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And getting a kind of satisfying answer in that, well, evil comes from circumstance. And this was the conclusion of this study that has been talked about for years, that if you put people in power and you strip other people of it, you get these inequalities and you get evil.
--:-- Brian Resnick: This happens naturally. It's just a cruel component of humanity that we fall into these roles.
--:-- Brian Resnick: This conclusion has been really influential. It has worked its way into congressional testimony.
--:-- Brian Resnick: It has been used to explain abuses in places like Abu Ghraib in Iraq.
--:-- Brian Resnick: There's been documentaries, books, and this is like in every introductory psychology textbook.
--:-- Brian Resnick: If you take it, Psych 101 College, you're going to learn about the Stanford Prison Experiment.
--:-- Brian Resnick: So you're saying it became pretty much the best known study in psychology.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Yeah, it's the most famous study in psychology. It transcends psychology. It becomes something you know just from being a human.
--:-- Brian Resnick: But the story Philip Zimbardo has been telling about this experiment for decades isn't the whole truth.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Remember when I said that the key to this experiment was that no one was given instructions of what to do?
--:-- Brian Resnick: This was the natural thing that happens to humans when some people are put in power and some people are put in not?
--:-- Brian Resnick: Well, some tapes from the behind the scenes of the experiment really, really, really undercut that critical element.
--:-- Brian Resnick: In the recording, you can hear the warden, who is a research assistant, somebody working with Dr. Zimbardo, really chastising one of the guards for not being assertive enough.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And if you listen to this tape, you know, it's not just like a one-off comment, like, oh, yeah, you really weren't participating.
--:-- Brian Resnick: It was, I believe the quote from the warden was, The guards have to know that every guard is going to be what we call a tough guard.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And the warden really pressed this.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And then he went on to say, like... It's really important for the workings of the experiment.
--:-- Brian Resnick: I'm sorry. Because whether or not we can make this thing seem like a prison, which is the aim of the thing, depends largely on the guard's behavior.
--:-- Brian Resnick: So, you know, if one guard was coerced into being meaner, more aggressive, was this line that this whole experiment was naturalistic?
--:-- Brian Resnick: You know, is this something that we should believe? Or is it something more like the experimenters created this social pressure on the guards to push them to be meaner, to be more cruel.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And then there's some other inconsistencies too.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Like there was this great expose Ben Bloom wrote about.
--:-- Brian Resnick: He talked to one of the guards and the guard said, I took the whole thing as an improv activity.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Like he was like acting the whole time.
--:-- Brian Resnick: He also talked to the prisoner that had that mental breakdown that I told you about, like I had fire in my head.
--:-- Brian Resnick: That prisoner has said that he was faking it, that he wanted to study for the GRE and he was like kind of sick of the experiment.
--:-- Brian Resnick: and just wanted to get out.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Overall, the main conclusion that we can take from these revelations is that it's not like these events didn't happen.
--:-- Brian Resnick: It's not like there wasn't a little prison uprising. It's not like these guards didn't show acts of cruelty.
--:-- Brian Resnick: It's that this assumption that they did it because of a naturalistic human tendency that when there's an imbalance of power, you become cruel.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Like that conclusion, you cannot draw that conclusion from this study.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How has Zimbardo reacted to all this? Has he admitted that he was just telling a great story?
--:-- Brian Resnick: I doubt it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So I called him up.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Brian, Brian. I really pressed him on like whether it's OK as a researcher for people to reevaluate your work.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And, you know, he said, yes, of course it is.
--:-- Brian Resnick: But then he kept calling them attacks.
--:-- Brian Resnick: I think the ones against me, certainly by Ben Bloom, are malice.
--:-- Brian Resnick: I mean, you don't say a study is a lie. That's an attack on me personally. That's on my honesty.
--:-- Brian Resnick: That's on my authenticity, and on the validity of the study.
--:-- Brian Resnick: I'm telling you, every fucking thing that Ben Bloom said is a lie. It's false.
--:-- Brian Resnick: So this one audio clip of the guard being coached, he said it was just one time, just one guard.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And Jaffe picks on this guy because he is doing nothing.
--:-- Brian Resnick: He's sitting on the sideline, you know, doing nothing, watching.
--:-- Brian Resnick: He's got to earn his keep as a guard.
--:-- Brian Resnick: But even that is, you know, kind of evidence against his conclusion that, you know, this was naturalistic.
--:-- Brian Resnick: If you have to berate one guard for not doing things, the message can be spread across to the other guards that it's important to the experiment that you behave in the way the experimenter wants you to.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Okay, let's say regardless of whether guards are coached or not, regardless of whether people...
--:-- Brian Resnick: Okay, you keep saying...
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Ryan, I'm going to stop you.
--:-- Brian Resnick: No, no, no. You're not going to finish.
--:-- Brian Resnick: When you say guards, it implies all guards.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And it was one guard.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And I'm telling you, if you say that again, I don't want to talk to you ever again because you're being thick-headed about this.
--:-- Brian Resnick: He was really resistant to the academic criticism.
--:-- Brian Resnick: I asked him, so what's the scientific value of the Stanford Prison Experiment?
--:-- Brian Resnick: It's a very powerful demonstration of a psychological phenomenon that has had relevance not only for Abu Ghraib, but for many other situations.
--:-- Brian Resnick: If you want to say, is it a scientifically valid conclusion?
--:-- Brian Resnick: I'd say it doesn't have to be scientifically valid.
--:-- Brian Resnick: It means it's a conclusion drawn from this powerful, unique demonstration.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And that strikes me as, you know, it can be argued like as a scientist, I think you need to be open to the reinterpretation of your conclusions.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And it's hard, you know, because we put ourselves into our work and it's hard to separate yourself from your work sometimes.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And that's important because psychology is going through like a little painful period of introspection right now where a lot of these classic studies are being reinterpreted.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And how people react to those reinterpretations is really important.
--:-- Brian Resnick: There are two ways to respond.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And one is to move forward and to incorporate new evidence and to be collaborative.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And the other way is to be, well, a little more stubborn.
--:-- Brian Resnick: I will stand by that conclusion for the rest of my life, no matter what anyone says, regardless of what any critics say.
--:-- Brian Resnick: That conclusion is a generic conclusion about this whole body of research that human behavior is more under the influence of social situational environmental variables than we have thought of before than we have considered before
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Before Logan opened up the toothbrush his wife Diana had bought for him from getquipped.com slash explained as an anniversary gift, he asked her, Why a toothbrush?
--:-- Logan: As a dude who really, really hates brushing his teeth, potentially the space-age nature and very cool-sounding features of the Quip toothbrush might actually get you more excited about brushing your teeth for two minutes and therefore more kissable.
--:-- Diana: Adorable, right?
--:-- Logan: Oh, wow. Oh, my God!
--:-- Logan: So it comes in this crazy silver bag. Looks like astronaut ice cream.
--:-- Logan: It does. It looks like astronaut food.
--:-- Logan: On the back is a quip and a little hello there welcome to quip any questions
--:-- Logan: Oh wow our dog Marlo's coming down she's interested wants to check out what's going on here
--:-- Logan: It is the toothbrush comes in this uh interesting uh container here it's it's clear it looks almost like it's a snow globe uh-huh what do you think of this uh yeah
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So is the Stanford Prison Experiment the only study that's been thrown into question lately, or is it part of a series?
--:-- Brian Resnick: So you might have heard of something called the replication crisis.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Nope. No. Where have you been?
--:-- Brian Resnick: This is like big news and social science.
--:-- Brian Resnick: There's this other thing going on.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Read Vox. We write about this a lot.
--:-- Brian Resnick: For the past few years, psychologists and social scientists have realized that a lot of their standard practices in collecting data and running experiments are actually recipes to yield false positives.
--:-- Brian Resnick: So there's a lot of different stories in this replication crisis.
--:-- Brian Resnick: But basically, there's a movement now to go back to these classic studies and to find out, like, OK, are they true or not?
--:-- Brian Resnick: Do their conclusions still hold up?
--:-- Brian Resnick: And in science, replication is a cornerstone.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Like if you do an experiment right here between the two of us and we find like I'm drinking a cup of coffee now and you're not.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And, you know, I got water. You got water.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And the experiment finds that like my heart rate is going to be elevated because I have a cup of coffee.
--:-- Brian Resnick: That should be replicable that like every time I drink a cup of coffee or you drink a cup of coffee, like your heart rate should elevate.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And the control person, you know, their heart rate shouldn't be elevated.
--:-- Brian Resnick: OK. You have to repeat an observation multiple times to believe it.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Got it.
--:-- Brian Resnick: A common problem in the past has been that studies have been done on 50 college students like Harvard.
--:-- Brian Resnick: You know, that's not very representative.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And also that small sample size, it turns out, like, is actually a really good recipe to land on a false positive.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Can you give me an example?
--:-- Brian Resnick: Have you heard of ego depletion?
--:-- Brian Resnick: Tell me more.
--:-- Brian Resnick: In psychology, we use a term to describe how people don't always think through their decision making.
--:-- Brian Resnick: In a rational and linear way when placed under situations of stress.
--:-- Brian Resnick: We call it ego or cognitive depletion.
--:-- Brian Resnick: So ego depletion is this idea that willpower is finite.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Like President Obama famously didn't choose his own suits because he was worried that he would deplete his willpower store for the day to make decisions.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Who chose his suits?
--:-- Brian Resnick: I think he just had a few suits and didn't make it complicated.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Got it.
--:-- Brian Resnick: So this is like one of those classic psychological studies.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Studies that really have invaded pop culture and all that, our pop understanding of psychology.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And it turns out once you bring very many labs to do a test on ego depletion, they find out they can't find it.
--:-- Brian Resnick: When you have really big numbers of participants, when you have these tests being done at multiple sites around the world, that if you find ego depletion in one study, you should find it in another and another and another.
--:-- Brian Resnick: If this is like a true thing about human psychology.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And it turns out that's not looking great.
--:-- Brian Resnick: So that's one idea.
--:-- Brian Resnick: So we've got the Stanford Prison Experiment and ego depletion.
--:-- Brian Resnick: What else is being called into question lately?
--:-- Brian Resnick: Any other big ones?
--:-- Brian Resnick: Something called the marshmallow test.
--:-- Brian Resnick: It's basically this test of delaying gratification.
--:-- Brian Resnick: You put a marshmallow out in front of a little kid.
--:-- Brian Resnick: You say like if you can wait 15 minutes, you'll get two.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And if the kid takes the marshmallow early, It's a sign that they're not so good at sitting still.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And what we found in many studies is that kids who are able to self-regulate to delay gratification by the time they're four or five or six years old have a much better chance of doing well at school.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Have a much better chance of thriving as adolescents and moving on in life.
--:-- Brian Resnick: But recently there was a reevaluation of that and a much larger sample, a much more diverse data set that they can control better for things like family background and cognitive ability.
--:-- Brian Resnick: You find out that like once you start controlling for things that this effect kind of disappears.
--:-- Brian Resnick: The idea has been the story of the marshmallow test has been like if you could just teach kids patients, they will become better adults.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And these new results suggest like, no, you actually probably need to act further upstream.
--:-- Brian Resnick: So if you've been seeing just like an avalanche of stories on like, okay, ego depletion, the marshmallow effect, or something called the facial feedback hypothesis was just like if you put a pencil in your mouth, it activates your smile muscles and you become happier.
--:-- Brian Resnick: That doesn't look like it's real either.
--:-- Brian Resnick: So a lot of these stories in this replication crisis, and very similar to the prison experiment in that when you look more closely at data, when you bring more rigorous methods to these questions, the story that we tell from the conclusion starts to look different.
--:-- Brian Resnick: But to be clear here a lot of these experiments you talking about the ego depletion the marshmallow it sort of shoddy science whereas the Stanford prison experiment seems a lot more like it was deception
--:-- Brian Resnick: Yes the Stanford Prison Experiment is an example of what happens when you withhold information
--:-- Brian Resnick: But in some of these other examples like something similar is happening too.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Like if you only publish results where like, oh, we found this statistically significant result and then you forget about all those times where it didn't happen, that is deception.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And that used to be standard practice in a lot of social science where you could just ignore results that didn't work or there's a lot of incentives in academia to just publish, publish, publish.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And that's how you get jobs.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And that's how you get tenure.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And that's how you get grant money.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And, you know, I think a lot of scientists realized they might have thought of it was like a lesser evil just to quietly push away things that didn't work and don't report them.
--:-- Brian Resnick: But now there's a big movement.
--:-- Brian Resnick: It's called Open Science as really trying to bring a lot more transparency and to make sure science has a stronger footing going forward.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Why is all this happening right now? Why is it that science is being re-evaluated right now, or psychology is being re-evaluated right now?
--:-- Brian Resnick: In 2015, the journal Science published this huge research effort.
--:-- Brian Resnick: 270 scientists around the world tried to replicate 100 psychological experiments that were published in top journals, and only 40% of the studies held up.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And how are scientists reacting to this upheaval?
--:-- Brian Resnick: Some better than others.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Like in my interview with Zimbardo, he called all these replication attempts attacks.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Sounds like he's had some ego depletion.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Yes, yes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then there are others who basically publish like, this is the experimental plan I'm doing.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And they're making their other data open for people to evaluate.
--:-- Brian Resnick: They're posting early versions of their articles so the public can weigh in on them before they get into the academic journals.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So there's a lot of scientists that are really excited to be a part of like this revival of psychology, to put it on a shore fitting.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Is psychology particularly at risk here because you're studying human behavior, human conditions, as opposed to like rocks, magma?
--:-- Brian Resnick: You know, the problem with psychology is you're trying to understand the human mind from inside the human mind.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And there's just like so many traps that get laid by that.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Psychology is messy, but it's an important science.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Hey, man, I didn't say it was.
--:-- Brian Resnick: No, no, no. I really – and it tends to be like a good gateway into science because as people, we're really interested in ourselves.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And psychology is the science of ourselves.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And I think to commend psychology and social science more broadly, they are out front on these issues.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So replication is not only a problem in social science.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And I think they've been particularly transparent about their efforts at reform.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What about you? As a journalist of science, has this affected the way you think about scientific studies that you write about every week?
--:-- Brian Resnick: Absolutely.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We think about that a lot here at the science team at Vox.
--:-- Brian Resnick: The newest study is not necessarily the truest.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I think what I've grown a lot more comfortable with is just when scientists don't know the answer to the question, like that's fascinating.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Like it's fascinating like that we're still investigating like the origins of human evil.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I did a silly story a few years ago on like whether rats have feelings.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And scientists have been trying to figure out if like rats have like empathetic emotions for decades.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And like we're getting there.
--:-- Brian Resnick: But when you see like a breaking study in the news that, you know, like. Scientists now saying that.
--:-- Brian Resnick: That's a good local newscaster impression.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Like if you're eating grapes are going to lower your chances of diabetes, you know.
--:-- Brian Resnick: One study is never going to tell you a whole story.
--:-- Brian Resnick: In science, like the answer of I don't know is more common than a lot of science journalists like to admit.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And that's cool.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Brian Resnick, thank you so much.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Thank you.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Brian, Brian.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Resnick is a science reporter at Vox.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Sean Rameswaram from this is Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Irene Oguchi is the executive producer of the show.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Bridget McCarthy is the editor.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Noam Hassanfeld produces the show, and Luke Vanderplug produces too.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Afim Shapiro is the engineer, and the replicated Brake Master Cylinder makes music for us.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Catherine Wheeler and Bree Seeley are the summertime interns Paige Flager pitched in this week, and Julie Bogan Rocks social media for us.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can follow along on Twitter at today underscore explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today Explained is produced in association with Stitcher, and we're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
--:-- Logan: So I'm brushing right now. It's going pretty well.
--:-- Logan: After using the brush his wife Diana bought for him at getquipped.com slash explained as an anniversary gift, Logan heads downstairs to talk about the experience.
--:-- Logan: Yeah, I thought the pulses were pretty cool.
--:-- Logan: They go on every 30 seconds so you know when to change quadrants in your mouth.
--:-- Logan: And yeah, overall, my mouth feels clean.
--:-- Logan: It feels great.
--:-- Logan: I feel like I just, you know, had a bunch of chewing gum.
--:-- Logan: Give me a kiss.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Logan and Diana lived happily ever after in Portland, Maine, with their dog Marlo, their Quip toothbrush, and their son Jonah who didn't make it into the ads.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They listened to Today Explained every day, Monday through Friday.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They had already rated it on Apple Podcasts.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They also got their news from the Political Gab Fest, hosted by Emily Bazelon from the New York Times Magazine, David Plotz of Atlas Obscura, and John Dickerson of CBS This Morning and The Atlantic.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Funny, real, super smart people who practically invented the political podcast check it out wherever you find your podcasts thanks.
