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Comment by whiddershins | Hacker News Reader

I didn’t read the whole article because I stumbled on the Stanford Prison Experiment part.

As far as I can tell this experiment was largely debunked, or at best widely questioned and not reproducible.

It’s one of those stories that lives on because it’s simultaneously so implausible yet seems to say something believable about human nature.

But I suspect it was between 90 and 100% b.s.

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That's totally fine. You're allowed to have your own brown M&Ms. There's a lot of thinkpieces out there, and you need some means of deciding which to read. Citing a debunked experiment w/o disclaimer is a totally reasonable criteria for you to close one of those hundred tabs.

But FWIW, I found the rest of the article pretty good.

Thank you! I wasn't going to read the article for the same reason, but your recommendation changed my mind, and it was actually a good read.

It's definitely diminished by it's non qualified citation of Zimbardo, but there's some insight there regardless.

Ultimately the point Moxie is making is served by the stanford prison drama play just as well as if it had been an actual experiment.

Agree 100%. First of all, this is much more of an “anecdote” or “dinner theater” than an “experiment.“

But even more so, when you take a bunch of people and _tell them to play these roles_, why are surprised when they _play the stereotype of those roles?_

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