Briefly Noted

In yesterday's post we wrote of a reader's suggestion that we look to social psychology for answers to the behavioral puzzle of the Claremont 400--people who are individually intelligent, but who as a group sometimes make foolish, irrational mistakes in judgment.

Coincidentally, Saturday's Claremont Courier noted that Stanford professor emeritus of psychology Philip Zimbardo will be speaking at 5:30 pm tonight at Garrison Theater at Scripps College.

Zimbardo is famous for his Stanford Prison Experiment in which 21 male subjects were divided randomly into two groups, guards and prisoners. A mock jail was set up and the participants quickly fell into their respective roles, with some guards becoming increasingly sadistic as it progressed.

This experiment was supposed to run two weeks but was terminated after only six days. One of the conclusions people have read into the experiment is that the guard behavior wasn't dependent on the guards' and priosoners' personalities but rather was an outgrowth of the situation the subjects were placed in.

Humans, according to this line of thinking, may be hard wired to behave certain ways under certain social and environmental conditions. The comparison between the Claremont 400 and a high school clique may not be that far off after all.

On the other hand, the Stanford Prison Experiment evidently has a fair number of critics, and the conclusions are still debated.

Philip Zimbardo's lecture is free. We also note that Professor Zimbardo has a new book out called The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil.