>>5001259
Anyone in the field would be skeptical of a newspaper article from the NYPost saying the expt was bogus. But the article from Medium from which it was drawn (see my other post) was unusually good for a non-journal article, so I said the conclusion that the expt was either bogus or (more likely) deeply flawed was likely justified.
This doesn't mean that all the claims made are false, however. It means they have yet to be tested–and probably never will be tested because experiments like this can't be done anymore. And shouldn't have been done when they were.
Of course, MKU has done this and much worse. To know how people behave in real life prison and interrogation conditions (e.g., Soviet Russia), there are many accounts. They are anecdotal but there are so many general similarities in the way people tend to behave that a person can learn a lot from these accounts.
From my viewpoint, in human affairs, there is nature and nurture but there is also choice. Most social scientists are pretty deterministic; they don't factor in choice. And that's a big omission.