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Episode 122: Aren't humans omnivores Stanford Experiment, Placebo effect, Stockholm
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we've got a couple of questions here tonight and some really fascinating psychological I guess tricks or experiments the placebo effect the Stansberry experiment and stockholm center of all of which are great questions and before we get to those we've got a question from one of our listeners about the evolutionary psychology of the human diet so dr. Lisle from what we've gathered appears that you're a vegan so how does this square with the evolutionary psychology and us being omnivores this particular listener says I'm very into weightlifting and have big huge muscles for fancy females to stare at what's the optimal diet regimen to achieve maximum brain and cognitive health to achieve my professional goals have a strong sexy body for life and help me attract fancy females I just love this guy this is great the let's say well what you would want to do of course would be to have a very healthy diet and that would be inconsistent with you know a diet that's going to minimize processed foods thank you and it's also going to be a diet that you're going to want to be pretty low in fat content because a you know fat is generally is somewhat unattractive in other words if we get too much of it on us and so he obviously is wanting to be lean and with big fancy muscles for fancy women Tara got me too buddy I I'm with you there now the so what sounds to me like there's a question that is sitting under this question that he maybe doesn't quite ask directly but he's trying to ask is what's the deal is a vegan diet a problem a handicap is it the best thing why would somebody like me be a vegan etc the I would say this about vegan diet the vegan diet isn't the apex of anything other than it's the the apex of I think an ethical argument about the how we were where we sit in that ecology on earth so that it's got an ethical apex there that that some people are going to feel like they're on top of the hierarchy there and I think they've got a certainly got a point at least in the dietary dimension now as as howard lyman the mad cowboy said you know I I don't want anything to have to die for me to live and so that was that was sort of his point now I didn't I didn't personally arrive at a vegan diet behind the ethical argument at all but most of us that have have hung around that scene for a period of time it starts to seep in on you and eventually you'll you'll watch some documentary by John Robbins and eventually you will see enough things that disturb you and then pretty soon you are you are looking at animal food being served and you are seeing the animal behind it which is not something that most people do they just they just don't see it and so that's kind of how that works you know it's kind of it's kind of interesting that we change the name of things so it's not a pig it's pork you know I mean it's not a cow it's beef the yes chickens haven't been protected is euphemism if you're eating chicken you're eating a chicken but you don't think of yourself is actually eating a bird and it just it isn't a bird doesn't look like a bird it's just slice of flesh that has high calorie density and your your natural psychology likes it so I am a vegan yes mostly I'd say I'm not not 100% vegan over a lifetime or even over any given year I'm not 100 percent vegan but I'm close and the reasons are mostly health and aided and abetted by a dose of of what you call it animal rights compassion the it's however I don't believe that there is is strong evidence that a vegan diet is superior to a very good diet that's dominated by unprocessed plant food and has some amount of animal food in it I think the differences between those two diets are going to be relatively small let's suppose that a person eats 20 percent of their calories from healthy animal food and the 80 percent of their diet from a very healthy plant food I think that that's probably a very healthy diet for humans and probably is is close to optimal the question would be whether or not 100 percent vegan diet of healthy vegan diet would be superior and the answer is probably it probably is but it's real subtle and it's probably not going to really show up until we get down to a very low amount of organ reserve capacity in your old age so the differences in two identical twins one of which has eaten a very healthy diet that's included 20% meat and one of them that is eaten a very healthy diet that's 100% vegan the the vegan probably has more of their reserve capacity still functioning on their 80th birthday by a little bit so the difference might be might be the kidney function that in the vegan might be at 40% of what it was when in his youth and the other one might be at 35% and you know that that could play out that could actually make a difference somewhere down the line now it's not going to have huge difference it's not going to have huge life outcomes but it could in an individual case be significant why do I believe that this is why do I believe that this is true well first of all we can see this in the cardiovascular reversal work done by us will stand on Ornish so Ornish used a diet that was not entirely the it was 97 percent vegan and Esselstyn used a hundred percent vegan diet and he got results that was superior Dornish and I don't think it was because of that difference in the diet I think he had better compliance than Ornish in but no one for example has been able to demonstrate a reversal of a thorough Genesis with say a diet that's 20 percent animal food and 80 percent unprocessed planted so the day when somebody does demonstrate that that will be an interesting scientific observation if that takes place but it has not taken place and I don't believe that anybody has an animal study with with an equivalent species that will develop our Genesis with a meat centered diet that will reverse with vegan with the vegan counterpart diet that has has shown that this will work with the substantial amount of meat of the diet I don't know if that's true and I can't say but what we can say right now is the only thing that we know that works is essentially a vegan diet now given the fact that cardiovascular disease is the number one cause of death and disability in the Western world it's rather important to be paying attention to factors that are that are important important outcome predictors for health and with respect to this particular pathology and it turns out that a vegan diet is not a vegan diet per se I'm going to make a distinction now between a vegan diet and a healthy vegan diet the vegan diet full of olive oil you know I don't know processed crap soy ice cream you know I don't know what whatever it is fried fried carrots I don't know what they might eat point is is that that's not a healthy diet and I really I just miss I'm just what they would try so is I guess that's my weakness yeah oh yes tamp tempura you know to been bunch of breaded Griese crap in a Japanese restaurant and we're going to eat I don't know carrots so the point is is that that diet i wouldn't expect to be probably in any way markedly superior to a conventional diet the so what gets us some traction is when we get towards whole natural foods and we reduce or eliminate the animal food at the same time we're trying to get unprocessed plant food and those two things together I think start synergistically taking an awful lot of pressure off the body and start getting people healthy so I think that so I know this is a long answer to his question the there's a there's a subtle question I think that's sitting under there which is that well first of all he says how does evolutionary psychology square with the notion of us you know how do i square this with the notion that humans are an omnivore humans definitely are an omnivore there's no doubt about it this is my vegan fan friends shudder when they hear me talk this way and they they want to hasten to assure me that you know there's all kinds of reasons why we shouldn't be thinking this way that's true the threads of the matter is you are most definitely designed as amount of war however this does not mean that you need to be eating animal food it just means that you can okay it means that animal food is a it's an option for our species that we can use it and we can use it quite effectively now the way I like to look at this is I look to look at this with the notion of let's suppose you had a car that could burn both gasoline and diesel and let's suppose that if you just put just gasoline in it and you never put diesel in it that it could go a hundred thousand miles but if you put eighty percent gasoline and 20 percent diesel in it you would only go ninety thousand miles okay and if you put fifty fifty in it it would only go eighty thousand miles as let's suppose that in principle the diesel was a little dirtier which the truth is I think it's a little cleaner but we're going to forget about that we're just going to try to keep this in perspective so you've got a car that essentially has the the capacity to use both fuels but as you use more diesel fuel you would dole to rate the engine a little bit and you eventually wind up with problems that in the old age of the of the car it eventually starts breaking down more now imagine that you that you lived in a land where you could only travel one way on the road that your life was such that when she started to to go west there was you had to go you couldn't turn around and come back the other way you could only move forward and so let's suppose that in this land you depend your life depended upon this car and this car right and you would only intermittently run into filling stations and so you might be almost out of gas and then you get a gas station and then you might go two more miles and you get another gas station and then you might go 50 miles and you get a diesel station and then you got 150 miles and then you get a gas station so you never know when you're going to hit another gas station and it could either be gas or it could be diesel now it's going to turn out that the correct decision-making strategy for an individual in that land is to whatever station they run into you fill up so even if you just filled up three minutes ago if you run into another station fill it up again because you don't know when you're ever going to find another filling station so under that strategy the right strategy is always fill the car up and do not care about what fuel it is because the worst thing that could happen to you is you are out in the middle of the Prairie and you are out of fuel and you could have filled it up with diesel but you chose not to because some little birdie whispered in your ear and told you that the diesel could cost you your life at the age of 94 thousand miles and you want to be as pure as possible by only putting in gasoline and you decided that you know what I had a full tank of gas and then I only went 20 miles and then I could have filled it up with diesel but I didn't want to adulterate it and I felt overconfident but I was going to have plenty of fuel and now I'm out of fuel mistake okay so our ancestors acted like a hybrid machine that they would eat animal foods when they could get it and it turns out it's actually richer than the plant food calorically than the plant word that they would habitual eat so they were very drawn to it and as a result the correct decision from the standpoint of their biology was to not get stranded in starving to death at 35,000 miles ie 35 years of edge when you could have had animal food that you were to simon-pure to do it well I would be a mistake so our the reason why human beings are absolutely omnivores that they have been a huge wandering range through the widest ranging land animal on earth they have incessant curiosity which takes them far away and and from their home bases and they are nomads and if you are going to have that kind of psychology you are going to it's going to be who of you to have a very wide palette where you include the most amount of food that you could include it turns out that human beings have the widest palate they eat the most diverse amount of foodstuffs of any animal that we have record of the all animals eat subsets of their habitat and so you you for example could not survive on in the same habitat eating what a chimpanzee eats you can I'd eat what a chimpanzee eats you are built differently than a chimpanzee substantially differently even though you sure over 98% of your genetic code with them you cannot survive on what they eat okay you're a human you have uniquely human abilities to use human foodstuffs and of those foodstuffs however it is a seating lis wide that would make sense given the fact of the tremendous roving ridges that human beings have been able to to survive in all over the earth chimpanzee has a far narrower palate and it will and the chimp chimp is no such strong wanderlust that human beings have so the so anyway bottom line is is that it is likely to be the case that a whole natural foods vegan diet is probably the optimal diet for humans almost all humans there may be some exceptions where some individuals have specific needs and they are for whatever unusual pathological conditions they may be better off with the inclusion of various animal sources but in general if we were to take a stab at it I would say the evidence would indicate that a unprocessed vegan diet is probably the the top of the food chain that's possible for humans it's probably not much different than an 80 or 90 or 75 percent unprocessed plant food diet which would and then including the rest as wild game the probably not a lot of difference but it's probably there and I'd be willing to bet at this point that it's there so for these reasons I am essentially a vegan and if I had someone that was had serious liver disease or or they had any kind of cancer where they had kidney disease or they had autoimmune disease or they had any number of serious pathologies I would tell them of course an omnivorous diet in general is pretty good for human if it's a bunch of healthy food but I believe it is probably substantially inferior to a whole natural vegan diet if you're really sick so the so that that's where I come down on on the information at this point and incidentally I will also say that having worked at with True North health center for the last three decades and with the mcdougal program and other programs there really isn't anybody out there in the paleo world that has any kind of a clinic that can hold a candle to the results that we see at these places not even close so that's that's where I come down now Oh incidentally there you go today incidentally it turns out that true north being true north the health center where they specialize in water fasting and they do some juice diets and they use whole natural foods and they have phenomenal success at getting sick people well because they're full all the time Nathan gursha Feld Nate G here is opening his place again I've talked about this before but you're going to hear more about this in the future because I won't shut up about it Nate G is opening a place in in the Los Angeles area which is going to be just fantastic he's opening it in July it's a boutique boutique Plan B strategy for if you can't get into true north actually one day will be plan a and if you're an introvert it is plan a because it's quieter with fewer people and it's all nice and civilized whereas true north always people around you have to talk to which is just terrible so anyways so folks look at fasting estate calm that's where it is and I will be making many visits down there during this program times two to meet the folks at cetera now now back to this issue of the the diet and dancing hustles and fancy women which is what I'm really excited about now the the underlying there's an underlying assumption here a little bit and that is is an omnivorous diet with the inclusion of animal food it's going to make my muscles bigger mm-hmm very interesting question and if they do is that compromising my health in any specific way is there in some kind of lack of performance somewhere else is there a cost benefit here the I believe there is a little trade off but I don't think it's a big trade off so the first of all there's nothing there's there's no big strong correlation coefficient between the inclusion of animal food in the diet and size of muscles on the human that correlation coefficient is very small the the if when you look throughout nature you're going to see many of your absolutely biggest strongest animals or vegans so or they're near vegans so gorillas is typically 10 times stronger than a man and it's basically a vegan a chimpanzee that is about the size of human is is several times stronger than a human and it's a vegan you might say well no it eats some termites and every once in a while they'll eat a monkey that's true whenever now-now mail don't cannibalize their own that's also true but the truth of the matter is if you actually track chimpanzee diets chimpanzees are I think about 97% vegetarian the gorillas are probably very similar you're going to see Brahmin Bulls vegan Clyde's voices vegan African elephants vegan rhinoceros vegan big and dig and dig and all you're all you're going to see is vegan - these big strong animals so the notion that we would need to be eating animal tissue in order to develop muscles already biologically like makes no sense the the question is you know what seems like you see big strong men eating meat so isn't that what you're saying well that's just an example of that's what's known as a representativeness heuristic so this is a a reasoning device that is characteristic of the human mind and it's useful in some contexts this was formally investigated by the the the wonderful cognitive psychology team of Kahneman Tversky in the 1970s and 80s as they as they were able to identify some interesting core key characteristics of human and how it is that they reason and one of those reasons is sort of resemblance criteria between what it is that we're looking at so an example is when you when you get a cold you can get chilled and you feel cold and so it's reasonable that we call it a cold and it's also reasonable that human beings would think that you might catch a cold from getting cold so it turns out that you can in contessa mele influence your likelihood of getting a cold by getting becoming very cold but it's really not the main factor the main factor is whether you're exposed to a virus so you can you're more likely to get a cold in the tropics 105 degree heat if you shake hands with somebody that's got a cold then you are in 20-below and Fargo you know if you are damn near freezing to death but you haven't bumped in anybody with a cold so but people are going to run that correlation coefficient because it resembles the cold that you feel we call it a cold because you're cold and that we thin tame think maybe you get a cold from getting outside because if you get cold outside maybe then you get cold and somehow you get a cold that's an example of the representativeness heuristic now the another example of representativeness heuristic is if you want big strong muscles then eat some animal with big it eat the muscles of an animal if you want to have the heart of your enemy in battle the you has a great heart then eat his heart okay so they're going to eat a hundred-dollar bill the other day it didn't work so well for my digestive tract so this is you know this this is reasoning heuristics are very interesting and they wound up with of all things Daniel Kahneman winning a Nobel Prize for it being the only psychologist in history to ever win such prize the be that there's no there's very little relationship between eating animals and putting muscles on a human this point is about to be brought home heavily in this culture by a film coming out this fall called the game changers we're a bunch of vegan athletes are about to show the world that that there's no such thing as needing to eat meat in order to be incredibly big and strong and athletic so as any gorilla could have told you had anybody asked them now the question is are you likely to have a little bit bigger muscles if you eat some animal food in other words is animal food at all is it even slightly anabolic and the answer is yeah it is slightly anabolic so let's suppose that you are chiseled handsome six foot one inch 200-pound freaking weightlifting rock star but you're a vegan now let's suppose we start eating a bunch of animal food in addition but we make sure it's lean so it's higher protein or actually same amount of protein because you can use as much protein as you want if you're vegan but question is whether or not you know what's happening to that protein and it's really about how anabolic that that chemistry is now it's going to turn out that it will be slightly more anabolic so instead of being two hundred pounds you might be 204 it's something but I don't think I don't think you're going to notice that much difference so if you might be a hut you know 160 pounds maybe be 160 three pounds hundred sixty-four pounds it's not going to be the difference between you being 160 pounds and being 175 pounds there's no way it's not that anabolic so the difference is going to be slight and obviously with the animal food in general it's a higher fat content so you're going to have a little trouble being keeping lean a relative to a diet that's a little more stripped down so is there a little bit yeah there's a little bit is there much no there's not much so like I said watch out for the game changers I can't believe they didn't put me in the film haha they have their chance no you're going to see some outstanding athletes I've met a bunch of these guys there I don't know who all is in the film but it's fabulous Rip Esselstyn is a friend of mine I mean I think it's ironic they call the guy rip I mean that he's named ripped for God's sakes the UH yeah guys a world-class triathlete and he is ripped okay James lightning Wilks was a US UFC champion I met a really really nice guy can't believe what these guys do and what he's done to his body in the UFC but guy was just you know is an Amazon and you're going to see a whole bunch of these guys so it answer the question you know what do you need to eat for for maximum performance all over the place well I believe that a vegan diet of natural foods vegan diet not a junk food vegan diet natural foods to being a diet I believe is the healthiest diet for humans I believe there's not a lot of difference between that between and otherwise help very healthy omnivorous diet which is dominated by the same kind of food and I believe that if you include animal food in your diet it will be slightly anabolic and you will be likely to be under the same muscle stress that you're putting on if you're putting pressure on the muscles to grow that you will you will be slightly heavier and you know a little bit slightly bigger and stronger but not much so I think that's the that is a very long answer to a good question all right [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] alright alright your echoes are just phenomenal just phenomenal I didn't even think about it how that there I didn't even realize that there's a name for it when people make the you know I get cold so I get a cold I muscle so I get muscles it's just right so yeah all right all right and thank you again for the UH for the wonderful endorsement if people want to pass like birthday man bastard thank you it's a fasting that his doctor called again it's a fasting escape calm and we're in northern Orange County in Southern California bad tastic great alright okay so we're going to turn the ship a little bit and I was I was I read an article this was a couple of weeks ago and it had to do with the Stanford Prison Experiment anybody who's been to as for some people in college this is kind of the introductory experiment they show or they teach you in psychology classes and it's essentially an experimenter rated to students from and one one section students was the guards the others were the prisoners and over the course the experiment the experimenters showed that the guards started to be kissed ik and evil and the prisoners went went crazy essentially and we're begging to come out well turns out a reporter by the name of Ben blue put up an article and he interviewed these prisoners that you know thirty years later thirty forty years later and it turns out that they were all acting trying to just get out of the experiment because they had finals to study work and this was an incredible piece it's a very long piece so I'll spare you the details but I will put it up on the beat your genes website under the description episode but he interviewed a couple of the prisoners a couple of the guards and eventually the we'll experimenter I think he was a Zimbardo and it turns out that yes this is now known as a sham psychology experiment so I thought we would discuss a little bit dr. Lyle tell us your thoughts about it oh well let me think about this this is one of those times when I have to be careful about my got to be careful to beat my genes I probably won't my genes are probably gonna beat me here oh well such as well I do it to make it feel a little more comfortable there's a textbook author Greg Feist and he's actually quoted in the article of he's considering taking a firmer stand in the next edition of psychology perspective symptoms which is the textbook for psychology classes say that it is a lie that the experiment is actually a lie and hopefully it will happen that he's going to update the book on it ah oh well then okay oh wait let's love to get heard add or drop to this okay so the the backdrop this is the ambition of a very smart competent very competent social psychologist by the name of Phil Zimbardo and Zimbardo is with was I don't know who's probably coming of age as a young psychologist in the in the 1960s and he I don't know who his advisor was and where he went to school but it was probably somewhere very big and fancy and he probably did you know great work as a grad student and otherwise he wouldn't have landed at Stanford he undoubtedly felt Zimbardo we're going to do a little mind-reading here he's probably still alive and people know him and love him so let's just let's set the stage by making sure that we understand that this guy's no intellectual slouch Mart guy and I I read some of his research as a young psychologist in in personality he did some very interesting things I think I think some of them you know I think like a lot of people's research it had some had some validity to it and and then he and some of this little shaky is one of the few people I ever saw that actually went to the trouble as I recall of doing a complicated study with what's called a multi method multi trade metrics which is a gold standard for doing personality research and that we understand theoretically how it would be done but like nobody ever gets off there and to do it in size I if I'm remembering correctly which I'm pretty sure I am I believe that Phil Zimbardo actually pulled off a multi method multi trade matrix study and I think I read that you know thirty years ago and I remember thinking wow this dude's the real deal okay so it's kind of like finding out to somebody you know not only played in the NBA but got a ring you know it's like whoa you know I never heard of you before but you're frikkin you even if you were on the bench during the playoffs and your team won the whole thing you're the real deal so Zimbardo is the real deal in terms of his knowledge and abilities in psychology however that doesn't mean that in academia is and everywhere there aren't people that are a little overly ambitious and a little too hungry to get more credit than they deserve and Zimbardo I believe if I'm going to as a clinical psychologist and someone interested in history of the field so I look back over that my shoulder at the decades past the man that was extraordinary in studying this line of thinking about man's inhumanity to man was Stanley Milgram and Milgram really did do an incredibly brilliant study that I I just don't think has ever been eclipsed in terms of its sheer the sheer fascination with looking peering into human nature and seeing something that we didn't know was there and the Milgram studies if anybody's interested go online to Wikipedia read about it the Milgram studies are essentially if you've ever had psych 101 they're the studies where people were were essentially told that they were helping deti learning process and that in doing so they were randomly assigned to be the teacher and this other guy named James Madonna was designed to be the learner yeah Madonna had heart condition and he was friendly and they just met him in the waiting room and he got he was the Porsche lock that was assigned to get electric shocks and the real subject who was going to be being told to administer the shocks really did believe they were shocking Madonna to death and they really did it in other words Madonna was a superb actor and he wasn't being shocked at all but the point is is that they didn't know this and so an extraordinary 65 percent or so but might have been 62 and a half I can't remember in the original study people shocked him to death thought basically that they'd killed him now this is incredible and you know I've analyzed this study myself all kinds of social psychologists taking a shot of it my analysis is you know slightly different in hybrid of some other people's thinking my my belief is that this trips a stone-age circuit that tells you that you better do what alpha says because it's in your genetic best interest to do so and this is Milgram called it obedience to Authority but he didn't he didn't really have any evolutionary understanding of why I I think the notion of cost-benefit analysis on genes survival behind picking up cues as to who alpha is and in an emergency you vote for alpha and you do what alpha says I think that that's really the issue I also believe that it created a very interesting emergency that in emergencies it can be very hard for the organism to actually figure out what the highest priority is and if it's queued in just the right way you can make big mistakes and so this is what I call breaches and integrity so the organism is designed by nature to integrate its behavior with the highest possible values that's how it's designed however there going to be cases when it's actually confusing as to what the highest possible value is and the Milgram study brilliantly fiddled with this circuitry and you were able to see extraordinary breaches of integrity where where people did the wrong thing and they actually have 49% of their brain knew it was the wrong thing and people were in under extraordinary stress and they did not relish this at all they hated it but they did it because I believe the survival mechanism was being tripped and they just did it so the Milgram study stands alone as an absolutely ingenious study in experimental social psychology and and the problem is is that Zimbardo the young ambitious Phil Zimbardo is staring down the throat of the shadow Stanley Milgram who is five years ahead of him probably five or six years of senior and Zimbardo I don't think could tolerate being eclipsed his whole life and so I think he couldn't resist so this prison study was very Milgram like it was clearly a in my judgment a kissing meant to be a cousin kissing cousin and that people would believe it because of what people had seen in the Milgram study and as a result of this he does this study it's bogus as we're now finding out I always smelled a rat behind this by the way so this is this is not Milgram Milgram was extraordinarily believable and for those of us that ever saw the video tapes of the Milgram study there's no way this was bogus so so you you can Milgram himself went to great lengths to to describe the process to debrief people etc this would never get through an ethics committee today it's way too stressful for the people the but the bottom line is is that you can you can just see how this could happen Zimbardo was not content to let this lie he then had to say that Milgram is saying listen within us there is the possibility of doing very negative things because if we get social pressure from an authority we'll just follow orders okay no joke that's called the me line Oscar that's called you know dot C Germany etc so the so Milgram really put the Holocaust in an entirely different light and showing that if it's rotten at the top the whole damn barrel can act rotten as hell but that doesn't mean that the people are as rotten as the people are at the top there they're essentially following a program of social pressure that is characteristic of the species to be highly susceptible to Zimbardo says no no no it turns out it's much worse than that it turns out that within you know within men there's a desire to be brutal and awful too you know just all we have to do is divide them into two groups randomly and put one of them in charge and then they just go to shit oh well that's like way more you see how much darker of you that is of human nature and it actually doesn't square with what you see out of nature at all but it just enough because of the because of the Milgram study and the shocking nature of the Milgram study the world of experimental social psychology in psychology more broadly was going to welcome something that looked like this in other words we can't turn our back on the possibility that we miss something even darker than the Milgram study uncovered and so through this process Phil Zimbardo becomes you know world-famous and and don't think that he didn't love it the I I can remember looking up probably five or 10 years ago I looked up a a like top-10 studies in psychology because I wanted to give a little lecture on the top ten studies in history psychology and there was the Zimbardo steady sitting it like number two or three or five I can't remember what it was and I don't think Milgram was even on the list if it was I think Zimbardo was at five and Milgram was at ten or whatever and I thought oh my god the son of the bitch beat Milgram like literally through time through the decades through personal PR campaign he literally eclipsed in people's minds the Milgram study what an incredible example of style over substance okay so so now we see the truth the Stanford study was bogus just like I always thought it was incidentally I this was sealed in my mind you know would be sealed in my mind in by the early 2000s when I personally went to work in the prisons so I don't know that Phil Zimbardo ever went into a prison but if he did he would find out that the guards are not taking prisoners out behind the shed and beating the daylights out of them now do they do that on occasion of course they do because occasionally there's a prisoner that really gets into it with a guard and won't back down etc etc and there is there there is what's called known as the green wall where if there's if there's some really bad blood between between a given guard and given prisoner of course that can happen does it happen as a run-of-the-mill did the guards mistreat the prisoners as a run-of-the-mill no they don't they don't do it okay is the because you know they're holding in check their desire to lord over the prisoners there you know etc into this rate them no it's not the guards are normal decent hard-working law-abiding rule rule following type of humans they're bored okay they're not angry and dishes and trying to lord anything over anybody they want the guys to get in line get their sandwich and get out don't steal anything like and don't mouth off and don't do this and don't do that like hey just follow the rules and we're all going to get out of here and I go home and you have to stay here and that's that okay that's what the guards are like the guards that I worked with in general very decent bunch of people you can live next door to me any day of the week and they did not engage in this did they once in a while get into trouble with individuals yes but the vast majority of individuals that I work with in ten years a criminal justice experience at the at the maximum security level prison that I worked in the the vast majority of prisoners never had problems with the guards okay occasionally an individual would have problems with the guards so anyway bottom line is is that this is a bogus concept a very dark sinister beautiful fiction and I am really gratified I didn't think that I would ever see this blow up into Barbara's face but I got to tell you he deserves it and so such as wife Wow and had you not assured me that somebody else was it said I would not have gone out a limb on a limb like this but but this is this is you know truly it's inexcusable and this is this is not what we want science to look like but we know this isn't the only place this happens in science this happens everywhere in science but it doesn't happen as it isn't a standard fare to the point where we can't use science science is ultimately a social process wedded to the possibilities of logic and so of course we're going to get snake oil being sold for various motivations along the way and you know unfortunately also this will taint a terrific scientist who did a lot of things that were legit which I know he did I have no doubt that is his work that was done in other areas was probably very clean diligently done by the grad students and legitimately published but this one the one that made him famous bogus and he shouldn't have done it the interesting thing is is that he bypassed the peer review process and published it straight to the New York Times Magazine I think it was in the New York Times journalism oh that's very interesting yeah I remember I was actually trained by an experimental social psychologists prominent social psychologists and very well-respected man Timothy decamp Wilson at the University of Virginia and Tim Wilson you know was never looking for the sensational he was always he was always trying to figure out the truth and he did his studies with total honesty and he expected everybody else to do the same and I think by and large that's exactly how it's done but the but the but I remember discussions about the prison study and I remember the eye rolls about quote methodological flaws that we could see all over it but they also didn't know you know people have respect for Zimbardo and if a guy is showing you this and telling you that this is what happened it's like even though you may not think it's true you're not going to call them a liar and and particularly with the shadow of Milgram the Milgram study probably gave the field of experimental social psychology more cachet and legitimately so like I don't know of another study in the history of psychology that is as that is problem as important and cast such a giant shadow over the entire field as Milgram and I mean there's been many great studies but I can't think of one that made as big of an impression on me or anybody that I know and so the so for experimental social psychology to then turn its back on a twin study a very similar type of idea by a brilliant young guy like Zimbardo to turn their back on that they wouldn't do it all they would say is hmm who knows methodologically flawed and messy steady to do but who the hell knows that's what everybody was scratching their head quietly I think and I think that a great many scientists in the field are going to be you know as they read this and learn about this they're going to be thinking like aha I'll be darned you know bad on him wish I wouldn't have that loop open in my head all these years he had never quite made sense to me but I didn't know and shame on him it'd have been shame on him and so that's uh that's that's that he ran the CB and this is this is the result yes hi because another experimenters they replicated the study and actually found that the prisoners and the guards did exactly what you've seen in the prison where prisoners banded together and started getting extra privileges from guards just for being nice and then right they tried to publish it in the British Journal of Social Psychology and Zimbardo was was he was privately writing to editors trying to get them to stop publishing the claims Wow there you go very but I put the article up so for people to read the whole thing it's very fascinating yeah yeah it's kind of it's just it's one of these things it's a it's a it's evidence and of our own right of the the limits of of the of the CD and the limits of of human beings so you know I don't believe even that I would ever been tempted I've never been seeking the balcony that hard would we be willing to compromise my own integrity to do so I just wouldn't do it and most people wouldn't so there's no great thing about me most people wouldn't do it but we've seen in our lifetimes a lot of people that would you've met them you've felt it okay and and there's there's people that are that you know want to sell a car and they'll tell you anything and then you find out oh no that isn't the deal okay so this is a you know we're simply watching a streak of disagreeable narcissism in this man that you know is a he's doesn't mean he's a he's a bad human being it means he's a flawed one and and such is life and we we have to we just look at that and realize that's that's you know that's just part of the price of our humanity is that we're going to have some of these things happen and they're going to set us back a little bit in and but eventually good ideas defeat bad ideas sometimes it takes some time
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