Kurt Nelson 0:00 Quick question for you, Tim. What do you remember about the Stanford Prison Experiment? Tim Houlihan 0:06 Lot, I think. I mean, it's a classic study. Everyone learns it in Psych 101, right? You know, I don't know. Before he died, we talked to Phil Zimbardo about it. That was like episode 247, I think. That was August 2021. So, yes, Kurt Nelson 0:20 spot on. So, so what do you specifically remember about the experiment? Tim Houlihan 0:26 Oh well, so the general story of the Stanford Prison Experiment was pretty simple. Like Zimbardo puts a bunch of college kids in a fake prison, and then within days the guards get nasty and the prisoners break down, and they have to shut down the whole experiment. Kurt Nelson 0:41 Okay, I agree 100% I think that's it. What was the key takeaway that you took from that, though? Tim Houlihan 0:50 Well, I think the lesson that everybody pretty much took from the Stanford Prison Experiments was was pretty straightforward. If you put a good person, a nice person, in a job where they are inclined to be mean, their role will override that person's general personality traits, Kurt Nelson 1:08 right? And that's pretty much the story that I think everybody remembers or takes away from the Stanford Prison. It's the role, right? Tim Houlihan 1:16 Yeah, Kurt Nelson 1:17 that's how the story gets summarized into Every psych 101 textbook in the world, Tim Houlihan 1:24 yeah, Kurt Nelson 1:24 and in the minds of the people who were only 25 years out from Nazis Germany's fall back then, yeah, that made a lot of sense because it helped explain why so many everyday German civilians could be turned into horrible Nazis. It it wasn't about them. It was their role. But Tim, according to a French researcher who spent years in the actual Stanford Prison Experiment archives, that's not exactly what happened, Tim Houlihan 1:55 right? And we'll get to why that's the case in just a minute. But we're here to tell you that the interpretation problem isn't just with the Stanford Prison Experiment. There's another piece of research, a study that we've hailed in the past that we had the wrong impression about also, and that's Muzaffar Sharif's Robbers Cave experiment. Now, Kurt and I took a deep dive on this one in episode 435 on political polarization back in 2024. Kurt Nelson 2:24 Yeah. Okay, Grooves, we're doing something a little different today. We always focus on the applications of behavioral science, but in this episode, we're going to focus on behavioral science from the perspective of new information, new insights, and as a public service announcement, we feel it's important to share insights that are very simply more correct about the research that we were thought we were already familiar with, and that you think you're probably already familiar with. Tim Houlihan 2:57 So, in science speak, we're going to update the priors, basically. Right? Yeah. Kurt Nelson 3:02 So in this episode, we'll share conversations recorded with a couple of different researchers that have updated our priors about two very important experiments, classic experiments in the social psychology world, as Tim mentioned, the Roberts Cave experiment, as well as the Stanford Prison Experiment, these are two of the most famous psychological studies in the 20th century, and we think that you deserve to get a different perspective, maybe a more accurate view of them. Tim Houlihan 3:36 Yeah. So the first half of our episode is going to feature a conversation with Thibaut Latexier, a historian and researcher from France. Now he's one of a handful of researchers to dive in deep into Zimbardo's archives at Stanford, and because of that, he came to understand the prison experiment in a new light. Latexier opened our eyes to some behind-the-scenes stuff that isn't just trivial; it impacts the way we process the experiment. And because of Latexier's and other people's work, Kurt and I will share a behind-the-scenes view of what really happened during the Stanford Prison Experiment. Kurt Nelson 4:15 Yeah. Then, in the second half of this episode, we'll share our conversation with Gina Perry, a fellow in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne, she's a science historian with a background in psychology, and somewhat unexpectedly, she discovered some chinks in the armor of a classic experiment in social psychology. Tim Houlihan 4:37 Right. So Dr. Perry found herself deep in a rabbit hole when reviewing Mazafer Sharif's archives on the robbers' cave experiment, she discovered some important insights about what really happened, and she's here to share them with us. Kurt Nelson 4:53 And independent of each other, they found things that didn't jive with the way that these two experiments get. Talked about, get remembered, and and what Thibo and Gina discovered is that the real story for each of these experiments is not the one that has been kind of told to the public or has been talked about in your intro to psych courses for years. So the real story behind the Stanford Prison Experiment and Robbers Cave Experiment was actually sitting in boxes waiting to be revealed, and we're here to do that today on Behavioral Grooves. Tim Houlihan 5:39 Welcome to a special edition of Behavioral Grooves about how a couple of classic Psych 101 studies aren't everything that they appear to be. I'm Kurt Nelson, and I'm Tim Houlihan. So here's the plan for this episode: We're going to give you the sharpest, most surprising pieces of each conversation. Latexier on on Zimbardo and the Stanford Prison Experiment first, and then Gina Perry on Sharif and the Robbers Cave experiment, and then Kurt and I are going to sit back with what that means. We're going to actually just try to treat it honestly and understand why this really isn't a story about just two bad experimenters or bad researchers. Kurt Nelson 6:17 Not entirely. It's a story about what happens when the researchers decide on the outcomes they want before they've run the study, and the sort of conclusions that then get drawn from that, and what that means? Tim Houlihan 6:34 Yeah. So sit back, pour yourself something with a little bit of bite to it, because this one might sting, and let's hear about what actually happened in that dormitory basement at Stanford in 1971. Kurt Nelson 6:47 Okay, let's get started. Part one: the Stanford Prison Experiment. Tim Houlihan 6:54 We should start by stating this up front. Thibaut Latexier didn't set out to debunk anything. He's a French historian of science with no psychology background, and he went to Stanford to make a documentary about the Stanford Prison Experiment. Kurt Nelson 7:10 He was interested, from a filmmaker's point of view, to learn more about the five or six hours of video recordings that had been made during those famous few days in August of 1971, and he originally thought that he might be able to use them to construct a documentary on the experiment itself. Tim Houlihan 7:31 Here's Thibaut Latexier. Thibault Le Texier 7:33 First, I had read all that I could find about the Stanford Prison Experiment, so I was very knowledgeable about the official version, the official narrative that Phil Zimbardo had been broadcasting and writing about for years, and so in the archive, I started to find things that were not in the official version. For instance, there were reports of student experiment which took place three months prior to the Stanford Prison Experiment, and I had never heard about this experiment, so I was very curious why Felisimardo never noticed that some of his students had done a prison experiment that looked like very similar just three months prior to his own experiment. Tim Houlihan 8:17 And almost immediately, digging through the archive, he found something that never made it into any textbook. Thibault Le Texier 8:24 And then, when I digged into this student experiment, I noticed that many elements that were that I thought were genuine to the Stanford Prison Experiment, that were spontaneous, that were invented on the spot during the Stanford Prison Experiment, I noticed that these these same events took place three months prior to the Stanford Prison Experiment, so they had been borrowed or copied from this student experiment. And well, in science, of course, you can replicate experiments, but in this case, you have to say what you took from the prior experiments, what you chose to change, and what's the difference between your experiment and the prior experiments, and in this case, feels in Barlow completely or obfuscated this prior experiment. Just pretend that it never existed. So for me, that was a first red flag: the prisoners were arrested on the campus. They were stripped naked. They had to wear a chain at the ankle. There were a set of rules, like what they could do or could not do in the prison basement, and basically all these elements were the same in the Stanford Prison Experiments. Tim Houlihan 9:43 Here's the first fly in the ointment. This was not the first time these processes had been used in an experiment. They exactly matched a student experiment run just three months before Zimbardo's by one of Zimbardo's own graduate students, Dave. David Jaffe. Thibault Le Texier 10:01 David Jaffe was a graduate student in one of Phil's courses, and Phil Zimbardo had given his students assignment to study old people' homes, or homeless people, or prison environments. And David Jaffe chose to work on the prison environment. He didn't know how to motivate the little group of students gathered around him, and another graduate student suggested him to do a mock prison experiment. So, during the course of a weekend, during two days, they they plan this student this experiment in the dormitory where Jaffe was residing, and so they had planned. They had a little narrative, Kurt Nelson 10:47 same rules, same schedule, same punishments, but this didn't match the official narrative of the Stanford experiment. Zimbardo barely credited Jaffe in the publications, and he always maintained the guards had invented their own rules on the spot. Now Thibaut discovered that the rules of the Stanford experiment had already been written three months earlier by Jaffe for his experiment. Tim Houlihan 11:13 That's fishy on its own, but it gets bigger. Latexier found that Zimbardo was working out the end of the story before he even started the experiment, in Latexier's mind and a conclusion that other forensic researchers have done as well, was that Zimbardo was done before he even started. Thibault Le Texier 11:33 He could see that he could get striking results, so he set up a similar environment and he thought, okay, we're just going to make it longer because two days is too short. And but I want to replicate this experiment. I want to find the same results. I don't, I don't have any hypothesis. I know the results I want to get, so I will design the experiment to get the results I have in mind. So he had written the conclusions before even starting the experiments. Kurt Nelson 12:05 And here's the piece that really reframes the whole thing: the guards weren't left alone to become anything; they were actively coached on how to behave by the warden, and the warden was guess who, David Jaffe, the author of that original experiment. Thibault Le Texier 12:26 And this warden was giving explicit orders to the gods. The the gods who were a bit too lenient, who are not very involved in the experiment, it would set take them apart and tell them, you know, you have to get into the action. You have to be a mean guard because if you're too nice, then the experiment will fail, and so we won't be able to go to the press and say that we have to reform prisons, that prisons are bad. So, even if you don't like what you're doing, you have to be a mean guard to make the the experiment a success. Tim Houlihan 13:00 Latexier calls it a triple pressure. The first was that you're a paid employee as a participant. The second was that you were working under a famous professor, and the third was that you were told this is for a good cause. Prison reform, any direction coming from the boss in this scenario is going to be followed, it simply wasn't a situation where the students would naturally reveal their true nature, not when there was a manager giving you a performance review, so to speak. Kurt Nelson 13:30 And there's the selection bias piece too. In 2007 replication, in a 2007 replication of the Stanford Prison Experiment by Carnahan and McFarland, they ran Zimbardo's original recruitment ad word for word in their local press. Now, what they found was that the people who responded were not exactly the normal folks that Zimbardo claims they found. Thibault Le Texier 13:56 Looking for volunteers for psychological study of prison life that may last two weeks, you will have a certain type of people responding to the ad. People are attracted to violence or extreme experiences, or and people who would be willing to live in an intense situation. Tim Houlihan 14:19 So the ordinary students, Zimbardo said, he had maybe not so ordinary, and maybe a bit too self-selected, and that leads us to Abu Ghraib. Kurt Nelson 14:30 Yeah, in 2003, during the Iraq War, American soldiers were caught on camera abusing Iraqi prisoners. Zimbardo jumped in the media to reinforce his message of how roles dictate behaviors. His claim was that the U.S. soldiers were just like the guards in his prison experiment. They were good people, but being guards in the prison made them act badly. This was the moment the Stanford Prison Experiment went from a semi-forgotten 1971 study to. A household name once again, Thibault Le Texier 15:02 and Zimbardo was testified during the the trial of one of the guards. He was an expert witness for this guard during the Abu Ghraib trials, and he really used this trial to publicize to promote his own experiment, saying that Abu Ghraib was like a case study of situational forces imposing the the guards to act in a harsh way, and even distorted the facts to say that he witnessed sexual games during the Stanford Prison Experiment, which didn't happen, and to try to match with the Abu Ghraib scandal. So, in a way, the Abu Ghraib scandal really helped Philip Zimbardo to give a new life to this Stanford Prison Experiment. Tim Houlihan 15:57 Zimbardo published his version of the Stanford Prison experiment in his book called *The Lucifer Effect* which wasn't published in 1971. That book actually came out in 2007, 36 years after the Stanford Prison Experiment was completed. This was a surprise, but what wasn't a surprise, given the timing, was that half of the book was about Abu Ghraib. Kurt Nelson 16:21 So there were some troubles with the way that Zimbardo ran the experiment and the way he talked about its conclusions. So what does Thebo think about the way the experiment should be discussed? Knowing now what we know, what are the conclusions that ought to be drawn from what happened at Stanford back in the basement in 1971. Thibault Le Texier 16:44 Well, first the experiment is very popular because it's very simple experiment to explain. You don't need to have specific notions about psychology. It's a very very simple setting. You take a handful of participants. Half of them are guards. Half of them are prisoners. You put them in a fake prison, and you just look what happens. And it's a kind of has Phil Zimbardo says it himself: Greek mythology experiment where you have the good and the evil fighting each other, and you have to you you you you wonder who is going to win this battle, Tim Houlihan 17:26 and that leads us to ask what should be taught in Psych 101 classes. Thibault Le Texier 17:30 For me now, the only way we can talk about the Stanford Present Experiment in Psychology class is as cautionary tale of what not to do when you do a psychology experiment, it's a methodology issue. What can you do wrong when you run an experiment? In the way you select the participants, in the way you present hypotheses, in the way you ignore certain factors or data, in the way you forget to record the whole experiment in the way you force your conclusion into the experiment. For me, that's the only way. There's nothing we can really draw from the experiment because it happened only once. Kurt Nelson 18:14 It's not a lesson about human nature. It's a lesson about methodology and about the researchers who fixed his conclusion before he collected a single data point, and by the way, Tibow wasn't the only researcher with concerns. Now, Jay Van Bavel, a noted psychologist at New York University, recently mentioned this experiment in his Substack, "The Power of Us. Now, Jay noted that the experiment wasn't a clear example of guards becoming abusive because of their roles. In fact, Jay said it wasn't about roles at all. The lesson Jay wants us to take away from the study is that cruelty is less often shaped by roles and are more often shaped by leadership, and in particular, leadership's expectations and their underlying belief systems. It's also about the social pressure that gets put on people based on that, and the idea that some harmful actions can actually serve a greater good. Tim Houlihan 19:18 Part two: the robber's cave experiment. Kurt Nelson 19:22 Now we turn to the robber's cave story. If you're a regular listener, you might remember that Tim and I talked about this back in September of 2024. It was included in a discussion that we had about political polarization, and we cited the study as a reason for hope. At the time, we thought that the robber's cave study demonstrated that when humans work together, we can even overcome polarizing behaviors. Tim Houlihan 19:48 Yeah, the the robbers cave study has a great history of being popular in psychology classes because, like the Stanford Prison Experiment, it's a tidy story. It's easy to understand, and it. Confirms a lot of what we already believe about being human. Kurt Nelson 20:03 Yeah. So just to remind you, the Robert's cave experiment was conducted back in 1954 at a boys' camp in Oklahoma. It's a pretty simple setup. Again, two grooves of boys arrive at the camp. Conflict starts. Conflict escalates. Then the boys discover that they have shared objectives and the two groups reconcile. Now it supports the idea that humans can bridge divides if they have a shared goal. Tim Houlihan 20:29 Yeah, and our expert to walk through the Muzaffar Sharif's robbers' cave study is Gina Perry. She discovered in Sharif's archives that the tidiness of the robbers' cave experiment was manufactured. It wasn't Sharif's first attempt to show how groups form, how groups compete, and how groups reconcile. Sharif had conducted a previous experiment to test his ideas, and he buried the evidence when he realized it didn't suit his narrative. Here's Gina Perry. Gina Perry 21:00 But I did find an article by a Canadian scholar called Fran Cherry, and she talked about how Sharif had conducted a study before the Robbers Cave experiment that she referred to, I think, as the Middle Grove experiment that was in 1953, and she in her article she talked about how it was just a footnote really in Sharif's writings that he never referred to it at any length, and yet when I'd been in the archives, there was almost more material in the archives devoted to this 1953 study, it just sheer number of boxes and photographs and films and observational reports that I thought, what's the story? Why would it end up as a footnote? All I knew was that it was a failed experiment, and I'm putting failed in inverters commas because I'm thinking, well, what does a failed experiment about war and peace look like? How could it fail? Kurt Nelson 22:12 She was even more surprised that the archives were rich with resources and that Sharif had secured significant funding for the Middle Groves experiment in 1953, he had generous resources enough to pay staff and to cover the expenses of documentation through photographs and movies and written observations. It appeared he staked quite a bit on the success of the Middle Grove experiment. Now Gina was curious about it, and but because Sharif and his researchers were no longer around, she decided to interview some of the boys who had taken part in it, and she was surprised to find that the kids who participated in the study, who are all older men today, were caught off guard. Her first interview was with a judge in upstate New York, Gina Perry 23:02 he said he remembered as a spooky summer camp, but he hadn't ever been told that it was an experiment. So that was a bit of a bombshell for me because it turned the story around from my point of view because he was so full of questions for me, who was behind it? Why did my parents let me go? What were they studying? What did they find out about me? How might it have shaped me? So there were all these sorts of questions that came up, obviously, with all of the boys that I met in one form or another were asking similar questions, and I felt then that it was the the focus of the story shifted for me to being one where I could write a story that would explain to them how they came to be involved in a three-week psychological experiment in New York, Tim Houlihan 24:04 it turned out that the reason the participants never knew was because, technically speaking, the experiment was never finished. You see, in Sharif's mind, he had a very clear three-stage blueprint: groups form, groups compete and turn hostile, groups reconcile, and in the 1953 Middle Groves experiment, Sharif had no trouble forming groups and getting them to compete, but he had a hard time getting the hostility and conflict to emerge naturally. Gina Perry 24:35 He found that while the boys did form their groups initially, they also really were a bit distressed because they'd arrived at camp together and stayed together for two days, and then they were separated into two groups. So they felt torn. They had their best friends were in the other group because Sharif had deliberately separated them. So they felt torn about that. But when it came for time for these supposedly fierce competitions, they would definitely compete. They would do tug of war. You know, they'd be sweating and groaning in the sort of dust in games of tug of war, or they'd be playing fierce games of baseball. But when the when the game was over, they all shook hands and were encouraging of one another, you know, in a kind of sportsmanly way, I suppose. So Sharif found this very frustrating. The Kurt Nelson 25:33 kids kept being decent to each other, so the research staff started manufacturing conflict that Sheree felt was necessary in order to achieve the results that he was looking for. Gina Perry 25:48 So the staff got increasingly active in manipulating the groups into thinking that the other group had attacked them. So, for example, the staff, while the kids were at dinner at night, would go to one of the group's huts and mess it up, throw things out, burn clothing, you know, do all this sort of stuff. And then, when the groups came back from dinner, the staff would encourage one group of boys to blame the other for this drama. I mean, it sounds trivial, I know, but it's very important to them at the time, particularly kids who had an expectation of summer camp being somewhere that you went for fun. This was a very different summer camp, Tim Houlihan 26:33 but it didn't stop there. In a film noir kind of way of bending the narrative, the boys started to figure things out, Gina Perry 26:41 the two groups head to head confronted one another, and the one group accused the other of doing it. And they said, "We didn't do it. You have to trust us, don't you remember? We were friends. And so the children turned on the experimenters. Kurt Nelson 26:59 It didn't work the way that Sharif wanted. This wasn't in his blueprint. Once the boys figured out the adults were behind the sabotage, the study collapsed into what Perry calls a mutiny. Tim Houlihan 27:12 And here's the surprising twist: the real hostility in the 1953 study wasn't between the two groups of boys; it was between the staff, Gina Perry 27:21 so the staff divided about whether or not they should be intervening as much as they were, and there were arguments. and Sharif ended up in a fist fight with one of his fellow researchers. So, the 1953 study was a really lovely study of the children, not outwitting the adults, but really coming together and not allowing themselves to be manipulated, while the staff team was riven with conflict and violence. Kurt Nelson 27:56 By the time Sharif got to Robert's Cave in 1954, he'd learned an important lesson, and it wasn't a scientific one. He discovered that innocent kids would naturally bond together, and that bond would prevent them from escalating the conflict. To get the result he wanted, he would have to engineer the circumstances very carefully. Now, in his mind, the Middle Grove experiment never really ended, so he planned to use money left over from that one to cover the cost of the Robbers Cave version. But he was nearly out of funds, and he had to run Robbers Cave on a skeleton crew. There was no room for another failure. Tim Houlihan 28:38 To that end, he brought the two groups of boys into the robbers' cave camp in separate busses and brought them in at different times. They arrived as unique groups, and Sharif made sure that they bonded as unique groups too. And any kids who were homesick, he sent straight home, so there would be no resistance on either team. Kurt Nelson 28:59 Like the experiment at Middle Grove, he created competitions between the groups, and the boys performed exactly as he'd hoped. They celebrated when their team won, and then he replicated the staff's interventions by stealing one group's jackknives during dinner and blaming the other group. Gina Perry 29:17 And the other group were absolutely livid and retaliated, encouraged by the staff. Tim Houlihan 29:22 Unlike Middle Grove in 1953, the robber's cave was working out splendidly for Sharif. All he had to do next was bring the boys back together. Gina Perry 29:32 So he created a broken water pipe, and then the idea was to get the children to locate the source of the problem with the water. It was summer in Oklahoma. It was being really hot and dry, and those kids didn't have much in their water canteens, so they were very motivated to find the source of the leak, and that that meant moving rocks from a rock fall up on the hill behind the camp in the sun and. The only way they could do it was to form a human chain, which meant that the two groups had to work together and cooperate. Means like the end of a great movie, isn't it? Anyway, so he engineered this this resolution, and and so it is a much more hopeful experiment, but really just as problematic in terms of what went on behind the scenes. Tim Houlihan 30:27 Even the famous ending, when the two groups came together to fix a broken water pipe, was staged by the research team. Perry also found that there were some very real world issues going on behind the science. Gina Perry 30:40 Sharif was under incredible pressure. It was in you know McCarthy era in America. He'd been investigated by the FBI. He was unwelcome in Turkey because of his support for communism. He was hiding that support for communism in America. He was in a very tenuous position. Tim Houlihan 31:01 The failed study from Middle Groves was troublesome, but a failed second study could lead to something terrible for Sharif, possibly extradition back to Turkey. It was risky for him personally, and Gina's broader point lands the same place Tibo's does. Gina Perry 31:18 Sharif's accounts of their experiment were quite different from the conduct, but I think the other factor about that is that their accounts get repeated in textbooks and journal articles, and they they've just passed down through the decades. Kurt Nelson 31:35 With the benefit of hindsight, we see the similarity between Sharif and Zimbardo. They they didn't really want science to just go off and do its thing. You know, science is about having a hypothesis and running an experiment to see if that hypothesis is correct. Now, both researchers seems like were more interested in promoting the outcomes that they had imagined, even before the studies were concluded, Tim Houlihan 32:03 yeah. Ironically, the Middle Groves experiment was good science; it just didn't bear out the results that Sharif wanted. Gina Perry 32:11 What experiments are never published because they failed, and yet, you know, Sharif's most interesting study was what he deemed a failure. Tim Houlihan 32:27 Okay, Kurt, let's let's groove on this. Let's let's provide some observations. What any first thoughts? Any initial thoughts? Kurt Nelson 32:38 So I think the big story. There's two big things from my mind from from this, and thank you. You are the one who ended up doing most of these interviews with with Gina. You did the interviews, not not that you did most of them. I I wasn't able to to join in, but there's a couple things that are going on. One is that the narrative that we kind of have come to believe that's been talked about either in the psych 101 stories or just the the natural kind of conversations that people have around them are off. That they're not exactly what the science, if there is the science in there, points to, and then two, it's that this this wasn't good science. This was pseudoscience. Now there are real results and different things that happened, but it didn't. It's kind of like manipulating the science in order to get the results that you want, and that is not what good science Tim Houlihan 33:46 is. Yeah, yeah, I want to double down on that. That real science, good science, checks its assumptions, it publishes its failures, and it doesn't need a villain or a hero to make the data interesting. Kurt Nelson 34:00 Oh, sure, it does. That's what that's what gets published. That's what gets you know reported. You're absolutely right. I mean, this is the piece that you know. There's the data replication issues that we're having. There's a whole bunch of things around you know manipulation of data in current research and different things that have been publicized a lot. Thibault Le Texier 34:20 Yeah, the Kurt Nelson 34:21 big thing here is that real science is often boring. It is often. This was told to me when I was doing my dissertation. It's like you don't have to write the next big book. You are part of this overarching literature, and you're adding a sentence, Tim Houlihan 34:41 right? Kurt Nelson 34:41 You know, and that sentence is important. And whether that sentence says my hypothesis was correct or my hypothesis was wrong, it helps lead to better understanding of humans and our behavior and various different things. And so. That's the part of this, and so I mean, if we go back and we look, you know, I think there's a lot of good that came out of both of these in one aspect of it. I mean, I think Zimbardo was trying to do some really good stuff, and the the work that he did later on, I think really is beneficial, right? There's there's the, you know, he talked about the Lucifer effect, but he also talks about the angel effect. I think is that you know this idea that you can, you know, train people to be good. I think the the lessons though come more from people behave in manners not because of their roles, but because of the expectations of their leaders. Even if those expectations are unsaid, but they're understood. It's you know Jay Van Bavel's talk on this. I think was really really fantastic. Yeah, Tim Houlihan 36:02 yeah, absolutely. I I couldn't Thibault Le Texier 36:05 agree Tim Houlihan 36:05 more with you there, Kurt. And I just want to reiterate Thibault Le Texier 36:09 that Tim Houlihan 36:09 I don't think that Phil Zimbardo or Muzaffar Sharif were bad people, and they it overall they weren't bad researchers, but they were clearly motivated to get some specific messages out, and they let the story get in the way of good science. I think they they didn't do rigorous and scholarly work in in these two situations, and what they created was great stories. And interestingly enough, this is this is a bit random, but later, so Mazafar Sharif published Robber's Cave in 1954. Late in that year, William Golding published Lord of the Flies, right? And so we've got this, like the whole world was just so ready for this idea that if you put good people in a bad situation-they're just going to behave badly. Kurt Nelson 37:03 Well, you got to put this in context of when this was happening. This was little less than 10 years after World War II had concluded. Tim Houlihan 37:14 Yes, and Kurt Nelson 37:14 people are trying to wrap their minds around how do you get a whole society, a whole population of people, to either put you know have a blind eye to the negative things that were going like horrible, horrible things were going, or actively participate in it, and and it was like, are these is everybody evil, and that just didn't sit well. And yet, you know, there's there's the situation, the context matters, and all of that, which is true. Yeah, but again, it's it's part of the overall psyche. Going back to what I talked about earlier about the what leaders, and this is maybe it's not even leaders. It's like the general ethos around what you want to see, and people respond to that. Tim Houlihan 38:12 Yeah, I think Kurt Nelson 38:13 there's a component there, and if you take that into today's world, you can see it happening again, real real time. Tim Houlihan 38:22 I mean, the most recent really big corporate thing that I can think of is Enron. I know that that's 20 years ago, or 30. I don't know how many years ago. 30 years. It's a long time. Yeah. But there wasn't a rule that said you have to do this, right? It was it was the leadership that helped set that ethos at the at the you know from the from the very top down that it was okay to cheat, it was okay to make up the numbers, and and I think that we've seen this in in interviews that we've done with with people you know recently Tim Hardin, Tom Hardin's good. When we talked to him about what it was like being a whistleblower, right? You know, and finding that like it's easy to just make that one first little thing, that first little ethical move was kind of challenging. But then what she kind of got into was like, I can do this. But it's Kurt Nelson 39:19 also that part. It's the well. This is expected of me, even though it's not stated, or everybody else is doing. It's the social pressure that you talk about. I-I go back. We talked about this before we got on air, but you know, a few good men, right? If you think about that movie and like what was going on at the base in Cuba again. It's a fictional story, but you take that to heart. Like it was never stated out loud, but it was understood. It was like code red was this thing, and there were expectations around that. And I think that's a really. Important piece. It's the it's the underlying it's the dog whistle piece. And so, as much as people talk about a slippery slope, and I'm often very reluctant to say, oh, you know, that's just it's it's like hyperboil. You know, when you get like that, is oh, this will lead to this. We'll get to this. There's some truth to that. And if you look at today's political polarized environment, it makes me worried. Yeah, because what are the dog whistles that are going on out there that get people to follow and to believe and to you know have a blind eye to some things that are really kind of horrible, Tim Houlihan 40:47 especially when our natural connective tissue, our DNA, as Bill von Hippel would would remind us, is to be connected, is to is to be together is to collaborate, not to be at each other's throats. And and I just I just want to end on on Jay Van Bavel's comment again that this idea that the study these studies are are less shaped by roles but more about leadership. And you've emphasized this beautifully, Kurt. But the expectations and underlying belief systems that the leadership lays down are critical. So in your companies, in your households, everything, those expectations and underlying belief systems are critical to how we behave. Kurt Nelson 41:36 Yeah, I was going to go on and on and on, but that's better than anything I could ever say, so I'll leave it at that, mr. Houlihan. Okay, if if if this episode was one that you found interested or shifted something inside of you, thinking about things maybe a little bit differently, we'd love it if you subscribe to our Substack, to our YouTube page, or come join us in our Behavioral Grooves community page on Facebook. We love hearing what lands for you or what maybe doesn't. Maybe you totally disagree and go. I love those experiments. They're great, and you are taking down my heroes, which is part of what I felt actually on this. So Tim Houlihan 42:24 I know this. This this was a hard journey for you, especially. Okay, but not but. And if you've got 30 seconds, just please take a minute to leave us a quick review on Apple or Spotify, or or give us a like, or on YouTube, or again subscribe to YouTube. That'd be fantastic. It genuinely helps other grooves find us. It helps other people find us. And since we're not in it for the money, we're in it for the fame, basically. Kurt Nelson 42:54 I'd like to be in it for the money. I mean, I'd like to have at least cover our costs if we could. That would be nice, you know. We we do have a Patreon group too. I mean, you can you can you can subscribe to Patreon and and donate for us and help cover some of the costs that we have on these things. But yeah, anyway, sorry, we digress. This week, please, if you can take one piece from this conversation, one insight that you can put to use in your own life. Please do so. Maybe it's the next time a study or a headline, or even a story that you tell yourself, where it sounds just a little too wrapped up, a little too clean, a little too tidy. Ask yourself what got left out of it, and we hope that you use that insight this week to go and find your groove. Transcribed by https://otter.ai