Science is Not Science

Science is a Religion and it's Fake News

One of the most famous and influential psychology studies of all time was based on lies and fakery, a new exposé reveals.

The Stanford prison experiment purported to show we are all naturally inclined to abuse positions of power - after volunteers randomly assigned to act as prison guards began abusing volunteer inmates in a mock prison.

But now a report from author and scientist Dr Ben Blum claims the research was all a sham. It points to recordings found in archives at Stanford University which show the study's author Professor Philip Zimbardo encouraged guards to treat inmates poorly.

Also, one volunteer prisoner has now admitted to faking a fit of madness that the study reported was driven by the prison's brutal conditions.

The revelations have sent scientists into uproar, with some calling for the experiment and its findings to be wiped from psychology textbooks worldwide.

The study and its authors have been cited for decades as proof that cruelty is driven by circumstance.

'The Stanford Prison Experiment is often used to teach the lesson that our behaviour is profoundly affected by the social roles and situations in which we find ourselves,' Dr Blum wrote in a report posted to Medium.

Dr Blum, who earned his PhD in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, looked into previously unpublished recordings of Professor Zimbardo and interviewed some of the psychologist's participants.

He found that one of the study's most famous moments, in which a 22-year-old inmate broke down in distress at his treatment in the prison, was faked.

Student Douglas Korpi, now 57, admitted he feigned a psychotic breakdown because he wanted to quit the experiment to study for his exams.

'Anybody who is a clinician would know that I was faking,' he told Blum.

'If you listen to the tape, it's not subtle. I'm not that good at acting. I mean, I think I do a fairly good job, but I'm more hysterical than psychotic.'

Kopri added that he largely enjoyed the experiment and did not feel threatened because he know the guards weren't allowed to harm him.

When people have a distrust for government and 'authority' this is why. I'm old enough to have seen EVERYTHING I HAVE EVER BEEN TAUGHT IS A FRAUD (and i'm not even that old).

Everything.

Fluoride is not healthy for you.

Eggs, butter and salt is good for you.

Global Warming isn't happening.

Economic models are falsified and wrong.

Political leaders are corrupt and don't care for their citizens

Psychology and most social 'sciences' are fraud.

Sugar is bad for you.

The list goes on.

The basic point that people fail to distinguish (myself included) is that 'science' in-itself is not the problem. Science is a process of taking data, extrapolating it, testing it and then coming to a conclusion based on the results. What we have today is "Scientism." Specifically people take a conclusion and create 'results' that fix the conclusion. The scientific institutions have been corrupted by narcissists and political individuals who push a certain agenda religiously until it becomes an accepted public fact. When in reality the 'science' doesn't have any shred of empirical evidence and because the average person doesn't have the time to sit down and research all these different complex topics we tend to accept some PHD in a lab coat as being the authority and take them at their word....

I believe it's time that we stop taking people with lab coats so seriously and actually do the research for ourselves. Then we can have an honest debate.

So what are the implications of the Fraud of the Stanford Prison Experiment?

For instance, in a series of June 12 tweets, Jay Van Bavel, an associate professor of psychology and neural science at New York University, wrote, "The bottom line is that conformity isn't natural, blind or inevitable. Zimbardo was not only deeply wrong about this — but his public comments misled millions of people into accepting this false narrative about the Stanford Prison Experiment."

Rather, scientists "have been arguing for years that conformity often emerges when leaders cultivate a sense of shared identity. This is an active, engaged process — very different from automatic and mindless conformity," Van Bavel tweeted.

The hullabaloo over the experiment might have been avoided if the scientific community and media had been more skeptical back in the 1970s, other psychologists said. For instance, the results weren't published in a reputable peer-reviewed psychology journal, but rather the obscure journal Naval Research Reviews. Given that respected, mainstream journals tend to have rigorous publication standards, "apparently, peer review did its job [in this case]," David Amodio, an associate professor of psychology and neural science social at New York Univeristy, wrote on Twitter.

In addition, other researchers failed to replicate Zimbardo's results, Blum reported. But the notion that people's behavior is largely dictated by their environment and social positions has lingered in the scientific and popular domains for years, possibly because that idea removes some of the blame for despicable acts from the people who commit them, he said.

"The appeal of the Stanford Prison Experiment [SPE] seems to go deeper than its scientific validity, perhaps because it tells us a story about ourselves that we desperately want to believe: that we, as individuals, cannot really be held accountable for the sometimes-reprehensible things we do," Blum wrote. [Source]