Madness Beckons

Two men were helping a pair of elderly ladies across the street in a snow storm when a truck hit one of them.

Bus driver Jim Moffett, 58, and one of his passengers decided to help two elderly women who had gotten off the bus on a Denver street in a light snowstorm. When a man in a pickup truck passed in the left turn lane and hit Jim Moffett, but not before he managed to push the other three people out of the way.

Mr. Moffett suffered a number of broken bones, a head injury and other serious injuries but Ryan Sullivan, of the State Patrol gave him a ticket for jaywalking, saying that “jaywalking caused the accident.” No you putz! Someone driving in a dangerous manner caused the accident.

The driver of the pickup was ticketed for careless driving causing injury.

I suppose if someone had died the trooper would have slid the ticket into the coffin.

Update: The cops changed their minds and withdrew the $22 jaywalking ticket. —Ain’t it amazing what massive amounts of bad press can do for a police department’s attitude.

The Stanford prison experiment was an effort to discover why there is so much violence in prison.

Dr. Zimbardo and his team set out to test the idea that the inherent personality traits of prisoners and guards were key to understanding abusive prison situations. Participants were recruited and told they would participate in a two-week “prison simulation.” Of the 70 respondents, Zimbardo and his team selected the 24 males whom they deemed to be the most psychologically stable and healthy. These participants were predominantly white and middle-class.

It didn’t take long for things to break down. The “prisoners” began acting like prisoners and the “guards” began acting like prison guards of the sort you would see in the movies. (In fact one guard said he modeled his behavior after the sadistic captain in Cool Hand Luke.) This led to an early stop to the experiment. It lasted only 6 days instead of the planned 2 weeks.

The experiment was widely criticized as being unethical and bordering on unscientific. Current ethical standards of psychology would not permit such a study to be conducted today. The study would violate the American Psychological Associate Ethics Code, the Canadian Code of Conduct for Research Involving Humans, and the Belmont Report. Critics including Erich Fromm challenged how readily the results of the experiment could be generalized. Fromm specifically writes about how the personality of an individual does in fact affect behavior when imprisoned (using historical examples from the Nazi concentration camps). This runs counter to the study’s conclusion that the prison situation itself controls the individual’s behavior. Fromm also argues that the amount of sadism in the “normal” subjects could not be determined with the methods employed to screen them.

The experiment was also criticized on the basis of ecological validity. Many of the conditions imposed in the experiment were arbitrary and may not have correlated with actual prison conditions, including blindfolding incoming “prisoners”, not allowing them to wear underwear, not allowing them to look out of windows and not allowing them to use their names. Zimbardo argued that prison is a confusing and dehumanizing experience and that it was necessary to enact these procedures to put the “prisoners” in the proper frame of mind; however, it is difficult to know how similar the effects were to an actual prison, and the experiment’s methods would be difficult to reproduce exactly so that others could test them.