The experiment

[kado']

The Experiment - Cercasi cavie umane

2001 ‧ Film drammatico/Thriller ‧ 2 ore

 

INFORMAZIONI

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7/10FilmTv3,1/5MyMovies2/4LongTake

The Experiment - Cercasi cavie umane è un film del 2001 diretto da Oliver Hirschbiegel, tratto dal romanzo Black Box di Mario Giordano, basato a sua volta sugli eventi pertinenti l'esperimento carcerario ... Wikipedia

 

Adattamenti: The Experiment (2010)

[Crisalide]

Io voto 4 cuoricini, l'idea c'era ed anche il film si faceva guardare, perde punti con le scene a caso (chi c'era sa di cosa parlo) e per l'esagerazione di altre.

 

 

[Ospite Mefy]

Film interessante nella prima metà (un po' troppo caricato nella seconda metà, secondo me). Però ha il pregio di portare a interessarsi all'effettivo esperimento che ha nei suoi criticismi molti spunti interessanti.

[Preso dalla pagina Wiki sull'esperimento stanford. In inglese, che in italiano questa parte non c'è.]

Spoiler

Some of the guards' behaviour led to dangerous and psychologically damaging situations. One third of the guards were judged to have exhibited "genuine sadistic tendencies", while many prisoners were emotionally traumatized; five of them had to be removed from the experiment early. After Maslach confronted Zimbardo and forced him to realize that he had been passively allowing unethical acts to be performed under his supervision, Zimbardo concluded that both prisoners and guards had become grossly absorbed in their roles and realized that he had likewise become as grossly absorbed in his own, and he terminated the experiment.^[20] Ethical concerns surrounding the experiment often draw comparisons to a similar experiment, conducted ten years earlier in 1961 at Yale University by Stanley Milgram.^[17]

Because of the nature and questionable ethics of the experiment, Zimbardo found it impossible to keep traditional scientific controls in place. He was unable to remain a neutral observer, since he influenced the direction of the experiment as the prison's superintendent. Conclusions and observations drawn by the experimenters were largely subjective and anecdotal, and the experiment is practically impossible for other researchers to accurately reproduce. Erich Fromm claimed to see generalizations in the experiment's results and argued that the personality of an individual does affect behavior when imprisoned. This ran counter to the study's conclusion that the prison situation itself controls the individual's behavior. Fromm also argued that the amount of sadism in the "normal" subjects could not be determined with the methods employed to screen them.^{[citation needed]}

"John Wayne" (the real-life Dave Eshelman), one of the guards in the experiment, said the study placed undue emphasis on the cruelty of the guards, and that he caused the escalation of events between guards and prisoners after he began to emulate a character from the 1967 film Cool Hand Luke. He further intensified his actions because he was nicknamed "John Wayne" by the other participants, even though he was trying to mimic actor Strother Martin, who had played the role of the sadistic prison Captain in the movie.^[21]

What came over me was not an accident. It was planned. I set out with a definite plan in mind, to try to force the action, force something to happen, so that the researchers would have something to work with. After all, what could they possibly learn from guys sitting around like it was a country club? So I consciously created this persona. I was in all kinds of drama productions in high school and college. It was something I was very familiar with: to take on another personality before you step out on the stage. I was kind of running my own experiment in there, by saying, "How far can I push these things and how much abuse will these people take before they say, 'knock it off?'" But the other guards didn't stop me. They seemed to join in. They were taking my lead. Not a single guard said, "I don't think we should do this." ―David Eshelman^[22]

Also, researchers from Western Kentucky University argued that selection bias may have played a role in the results. The researchers recruited students for a study using an advertisement similar to the one used in the Stanford Prison Experiment, with some ads saying "a psychological study" (the control group), and some with the words "prison life" as originally worded in Dr. Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment. It was found that students who responded to the classified advertisement for the "prison study" were higher in traits such as social dominance, aggression, authoritarianism, etc. and were lower in traits related to empathy and altruism when statistically compared to the control group participants.^[23]

The study has been criticized for demand characteristics by psychologist Peter Gray. He argues that participants in psychological experiments are more likely to do what they believe the researchers want them to do. The guards were essentially told to be cruel. However, it could be argued that it was precisely this willingness to comply with the experiment's questionable practices that showed how little was needed for the students to engage in such practices.^[24]

Skeptical author Brian Dunning states:

Most of the Stanford guards did not exhibit any cruel or unusual behavior, often being friendly and doing favors for the prisoners...The statistical validity of the sample of participants, 24 male Stanford students of about the same age, has been called into question as being too small and restrictive to be generally applicable to the population at large...(and the fact that) Zimbardo has dedicated much of his career to the promotion of the idea that bad environments drive bad behavior.^[25]

Guards and prisoners were playing the role of their authority, which is subjective.^[18] They may have not acted the same in real life situations. In particular, the environment and authority roles they found themselves in changed their actions.

Critics contend that not only was the sample size too minimal for extrapolation, but also having all of the experimental subjects be US male students gravely undercut the experiment's validity. In other words, it's entirely conceivable that replicating the experiment using a diverse group of people (with different objectives and views in life)^[18] would have produced radically distinct results; that is, had the test subjects come from divergent socio-economic and psychological groups, different experimental results may well have resulted.

 

In breve (riassumendo rozzamente) l'esperimento porta a chiedersi quanto i comportamenti "cattivi" siano frutto della personalità e/o quanto della situazione.

 

Sempre sulla falsa riga della domanda di cui sopra è interessante andare a vedere "L'onda" film anch'esso ispirato a un esperimento sociale (in una scuola).

 

 

In entrambi i casi penso sia interessante notare quanto le parole usate (i prigionieri dell'esperimento Stanford venivano chiamati per numero, e non per nome) e le "direttive" o comunque le aspettative di comportamento influenzino le persone a considerare accettabile qualcosa che dall'esterno sembra non accettabile.

[Ospite Mefy]

http://mynameisdriftwood.tumblr.com/post/168065866279/butts-bouncing-on-the-beltway-redmagus77

[Ospite Mefy]

Articolo in cui si parla del esperimento e pare che non fosse tanto scientifico

[Crisalide]

Una performance artistica xD, che definizione originale.