Author: Brian Carnell

The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.

Selwyn Duke, Stopping truth at the border, May 6, 2009.

This is an interesting quote for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that online it is frequently misattributed to George Orwell.

There is something oddly delicious about people posting a comment about the importance of truth seeking, while not taking the time to determine whether or not the quote is in fact from Orwell.

Who has time for preventing society from drifting from the truth when there are JPEGs to copy and paste?

The other irony is that I have largely encountered this quote lately as a response to Donald Trump’s constant barrage of lies. But the person who originally wrote that sentence is a far right columnist who takes pontificates about, among other things, alleged plots by the “Deep State” to kill the president.

If you read the column that the quote originally appeared in, it is, in fact, a defense of Michael Savage whose truth telling includes claiming that the “liberal media” is actively hiding the fact that immigrants are spreading diseases in the US. In reality, there is no evidence for this claim.

Liberals falsely attributing to Orwell a quote originally deployed in defense of Michael Savage may be the most 2019 thing yet.

Whoever did this is a genius.

I can’t recommend enough the Rationally Speaking podcast episode with Thibault Le Texier on his journal article, Debunking The Stanford Prison Experiment.

The topic, of course, is Philip Zimbardo’s famous experiment which purportedly demonstrated average individuals taking on extremely authoritarian roles simply by being assigned as guards in the experiment.

Le Texier describes how he set out to make a film about the experiment after learning that some parts of it were filmed. That project fell apart, but Le Texier came to believe that the entire “experiment” was a fraud.

The Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) is one of psychology’s most famous studies. It has been criticized on many grounds, and yet a majority of textbook authors have ignored these criticisms in their discussions of the SPE, thereby misleading both students and the general public about the study’s questionable scientific validity. Data collected from a thorough investigation of the SPE archives and interviews with 15 of the participants in the experiment further question the study’s scientific merit. These data are not only supportive of previous criticisms of the SPE, such as the presence of demand characteristics, but provide new criticisms of the SPE based on heretofore unknown information. These new criticisms include the biased and incomplete collection of data, the extent to which the SPE drew on a prison experiment devised and conducted by students in one of Zimbardo’s classes 3 months earlier, the fact that the guards received precise instructions regarding the treatment of the prisoners, the fact that the guards were not told they were subjects, and the fact that participants were almost never completely immersed by the situation. Possible explanations of the inaccurate textbook portrayal and general misperception of the SPE’s scientific validity over the past 5 decades, in spite of its flaws and shortcomings, are discussed.