Philip Zimbardo (*1933)

As I mentioned in my previous post Philip Zimbardo went to the same High School as Stanley Milgram. And they were actually good friends. Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Study was conducted 10 years after the Milgram studies so it becomes clear that Milgram had quite an influence on Zimbardo’s work. This is why I wanted to present Zimbardo as well. Nowadays Zimbardo is one of the best known psychologists. The best introduction book for psychology in German is literally known as Zimbardo because  he is one of the main authors of the book. Zimbardo is the son of a Sizilian immigrant family and was raised in New York City. Before I start to write about the prison study, I would like to describe the rest of his research and fields of interest. Zimbardo is the founder of a shyness clinic which is now situated in Palo Alto, California. According to him, shyness can be treaten by social exercise, just like muscles can be trained.

Another interesting fact is the HIP, the Heroic imagination Project. It deals with heroism and how everybody can be a hero and everyday’s life. I think the term heroism is typically American but the idea behind that nevertheless is important. It is all about act in favor of humanity, to encourage prosocial behaviour, to stand up for his ideals. This is necessary for a society trying to live in a democracy in the times of globalisation and climate change and confronting many other challenges.

Stanford Prison Study

Zimbardo’s work shows that he supports humanism. Social fitness can be achieved by everyone as well as he can be capable of heroistic acts, and aggressive prison guards may be just poor victims of a greater force. And so Zimbardo was in the defense for the Abu Ghraib prison guard Ivan Frederick in 2004 who was acused in court martial for abusing prisoners. Combining his knowledge of decades of research together with this special case was the source of his book “The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil“. To criticise Zimbardo you can state that he underestimates the influence of the invididual character. Zimbardo tries to show that we depend more on the situation than on our individuality.

It all started with the Stanford prison study in 1971. He chose 24 male volunteering participants of different social classes, but mostly they were white and middle-class. The selection of 24 out of 75 responding people was done to get the mentally most stable ones. It is criticised that the whole selection process caused a bias in the study. A very fundamental and not avoidable fact is that not everybody would voluntarily participate in such a study. Researchers from the Western Kentucky university showed that people volunteering for a study including the words “prison life” showed significantly more abusive behaviour than people volunteering for a similar study without these words. Hence people actually working as prison guards also have this disposition of abusive behaviour. I think that this makes completely sense because there they have the possibility to legitimise their behaviour.

The location for the study was the psychology department of Stanford university, set up to look like a prison. The participants being the prisoners were arrested at their homes and brought to the mock prison while the participants being the guards were equipped with wooden clubs, sunglasses and uniform. Everything was tried to be simulated as realistic as possible. Throughout the study everything was filmed by cameras.

I don’t want to go into much detail of what happened but after only six days of planned two weeks it had to be cancelled by Zimbardo because it caused many problems among the participants. First the groups prisoners and guards showed strong cohesiveness so that on the second day the prisoners started a riot against the guards. Then the guards developed rather unethical techniques to split the group of prisoners successfully.

After all you could name this study a version of the Milgram studies involving more people and social interaction. However the guards were not given very clear instructions like the teachers received in the Milgram studies. It is often criticised that the guards merely did what was expected from them. There exists the picture that guards are abusive towards prisoners so the participants in the role of the guards played this role. It is very questionable that this study has shown that guards like Ivan Frederick are no guilty for what they have done.

Maybe the combination of predisposition and environment has to be analysed, like it was done with the MAOA gene (predisposition) and  experienced maltreatment during childhood (environment) and its consequences on aggressive behaviour. But there is another question I ask myself when reading about the Stanford prison study. Is the prison, as it exists today, a good method against violence? I have to admit that I don’t know nothin about today’s prisons but just the idea to punish people by putting them into cells seems very old-fashioned to me. Isn’t there another way to deal with this problem?

Stanley Milgram (1933-1984)

Stanley Milgram was a jewish US citizen. His family, of East-european origin and living in New York City, was poor and his father worked in a bakery. Interestingly, Milgram visited the same High School as Philip Zimbardo, another famous social psychologist who conducted the Stanford prison study.

Milgram is most known for the so called Milgram studies, that reveals the universal principle of obedience to authority. In a sense it is connected to the Standford prison study because it shows that normal people are capable of doing cruelties against other people, through the role of their own group (in-group) or an authority.

The Milgram studies may be the most controversial study in psychology history. That’s why I would like to present it in more detail. The initial idea came when former members of  the Nazi regime were taken to court for their murder of millions of victims, like the trial of Eichmann in 1961. The  reason for having done these things often were answers like “I just followed  my orders”. To test this, Milgram developed his well-known experiment.

It was in 1961 when Milgram started his experiment. It was told to be a study of memory and the participant was given the role of the teacher while a confederate had the role of the learner. The participant had to teach word pairs and when the learner gave a wrong answer, he was given an electro shock by the teacher. The learner was in a seperate room, they only could hear each other. Every time the learner gave another wrong answer, the teacher had to increase the voltage of the electro shock by 15 volts. The highest shock level possible was 450 volts. The teacher was given the initial 15 volts shock to know what the learner would feel and that it actually works. The learner, of course, didn’t receive any shocks. He just pretended to get a shocks by giving noises and later screaming, even hamming against the wall and finally not giving any response.

When the participant, in the role of the teacher, got nervous and questioned the experiment, the scientist gave him orders to continue, in total four times and every time more urgent. Did the participant tried to cancel the experiment a fifth time, the scientist gave up and let the participant go.

A large amount (65 %) of participants gave shocks to the learner till the highest level of 450 volts. They were no feeling comfortable at all doing so but they trusted the scientist because he told them that it would be alright and they would not be held responsible. The experiment was replicated in other countries in differents environments and didn’t deliver significantly different results.

This would mean that there could have been people like them working for the Nazi regime following orders of their authority just like the participants in this experiment did. Milgram however stated that his experiment was very basic and cannot predict the behavior of other situations with more factors involved. For example, people involved in the crimes of the Nazi regime had much more time to reflect their behaviour and to estimate the situation than in the experiment. Also, shooting people or even giving orders to shoot is different to giving electro shocks.

Nevertheless it shows the the tendency of unquestioned power of authority. We believe in the scientist who conducts the experiment. Authority takes responsibility. Through history we have learned that obedience to authority is something positive, authorities like family, teachers, and later company bosses or governments. Authority was and still is an important component of pedagogy. Maybe a problem is that adults don’t continue to develop the concept of authority as they get older. Participants of the Milgram Studies probably did and most (84 %) were thankful to have had this experience. However the unethical side of the experiment was way too strong so that today it would be forbidden to do such an experiment (see ethical principles of psychologists – APA).

Stanley Milgram also did research on other topics and developed the Small World Phenomenon and the Urband Overload Hypothesis. Big influence on his work had the psychologist Solomon Asch who is known for his conformity experiments like the line judgment task. Milgram died at the age of 51 of a heart attack.

Viktor E. Frankl (1905-1997)

It was back in school when I first read his name. I needed a topic for my “year work”, a work everybody has to do over one year in grade 12. I talked with my Arts teacher telling him that I’d like to write about a psychological topic. He gave me two books of Frankl. It didn’t evoke much interest in me and I gave the books back without reading anything and I decided to do my work about photography.

A year later I went to Israel to study Hebrew. Of course I travelled a lot and one day I visited the Holocaust museum Yad Vashem. After walking through the exhibition I had a look in the library, I was about to travel south on a long bus trip and thought I could need something to read. There I discovered a small book with big letters saying Man’s search for meaning by Viktor Frankl. It instantly caught my interest and I bought it with excitement. Later I realised it was the same author of the two books I rejected the year before. I was fascinated by his was of thinking, how he overcame his time in the concentration camps although he lost his parents and his wife. The second part then describes the idea of logotherapy, which he developed as a result of his earlier life experiences.

Like many other psychologists, Frankl is a jew, the reason for later being deported into concentration camps, and he made early contact with other well known psychologists such as Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler. He was born in Vienna and studied medicine focusing on the topics of depression and suicide. Especially his work in preventing people from commiting suicide had an incredible success and therefore he earned valuable knowledge for his time in the concentration camp where he helped many people to stay strong and survive.

In the concentration camp he became aware of the fact that the people who were physically strong didn’t necessarily survive longer than physically weaker ones. He found out that the essence of life, what all people held alive, was the thought of having a meaning, being of value. So for example thinking of meeting your best friends and your family in one distant day made all the terrible experiences in the concentration camp bareable. The SS could destroy their bodies through hard work and starvation but they couldn’t harm their mind and thus the irresistable belief of having a meaning.

This idea formed the basis for his logotherapy, the will to meaning and is also called the Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy, after Freud’s psychoanalysis will to pleasure and Adler’s individual psychology will to power.

I think the will to meaning is as relevant as it was during WWII and the fact that despite the materialistic wealth many people in the developed countries are less happy than people in developing countries shows that the will to meaning cannot be replaced by big houses and cars, it rather weakens the will to meaning. There’s a funny and very ironical book from Sam Lipsyte called The Subject Steve. Steve is a dying of a rare unknown disease which seems to be boredom. I think that’s exactly what you could call the loss of meaning in life and that’s why it is a topic up to date.

New Series: Biographies

Yesterday I came up with the idea that learning psychology through biographies of famous psychologists must be an entertaining and fun way to learn about psychology so I decided to start to write a series of short biographies. Very often Psychology is a very theoretical field and it can be quite boring to read all these theories without knowing who wrote all these things. So here we go! I will take you on a trip through the minds and works of psychology and I hope we both, you as the reader and I as the author, will learn lots of interesting things in a less theoretical way!

My first biography will be about the Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, well known as the founder of the logotherapy.

Maybe you’ve noticed that I changed English for German. That’s because I think that it’s a good practice and since most psychology literature is written in English I should really get into this language.

Psychologische Filmanalyse

Filme sind wie andere Kunstformen weitläufig interpretierbar, vielleicht sogar mehr als alle anderen, weil sie so vielschichtig (Musik, Texte und Bilder in Bewegung) und hochkonzentriert (inszeniert zusammengeschnitten) sein kann. Vor langer Zeit entdeckte ich über Youtube Videos von Filmanalysen, wie ich sie in ihrer Tiefe und Konsequenz selten gesehen habe. Das Tolle daran ist: Einen Großteil seiner Analysen kann man als Filme anschauen.

Auf seiner Website gibt er (Rob Ager) auch Tipps für die Auswertung von Filmen, seine 15-jährige Auseinandersetzung mit der Psychologie ist unverkennbar. Alles in allem gibt er sehr aufschlussreiche Gedanken wider, die einen interessierten Filmegucker erfreuen und die Beobachtung schulen.

Link zur Website: http://www.collativelearning.com/

Und zuletzt der erste Teil der Filmbesprechung  des Klassikers “The Big Lebowski”:

Die Macht der unbewussten Beeinflussung

Zwei englische Grafiker aus der Werbebranche sollen ein Poster zu einem Produkt entwerfen und wissen nicht, wie sehr sie dabei manipuliert werden. Da ich gerade einen Text zur Automatizität lese, ist das Thema ganz passend. Es gibt so viele automatisierte Vorgänge, die unbewusst passieren und uns derart beeinflussen.

Was wir alles nicht wahrnehmen…

Da ich nun mein erstes Referat gehalten habe, möchte ich hier das Thema kurz anhand einiger Youtube-Videos zeigen und neugierig machen.

Das Thema ist Inattentional Blindness und bedeutet einfach, dass wir durch das immer stattfindende selektive Schauen viele Details nicht wahrnehmen und daher auch nicht erinnern. Mit dem Begriff Change Blindness wird diese Idee noch erweitert, indem hier ein Wechsel des beobachteten Objekts/Ereignisses stattfindet (z.B. Szenenwechsel bei Film, Augenzwinkern, black-frame, kurzes Verbergen des beobachteten Objekts, etc.) und aus diesem Wechsel heraus das Nichterkennen einer Veränderung resultiert.

Beispiel Inattentional Blindness:

Beispiele Change Blindness:

Das erste Mal in Freiburg

War es vielleicht eine zu vage Entscheidung, sich für ein Studium in Freiburg zu entscheiden, ohne vorher den Ort zu kennen?

Diese Woche war ich nun das erste Mal da – eine kleine Großstadt mit verschlafenem Charakter, in den Tälern des Schwarzwaldes gelegen. Um eines muss ich mich bestimmt nicht Sorgen machen: Um genug Ruhe für mein Studium. Eigentlich war es genau das, was ich wollte. Etwas fernab, ohne viele Ablenkungsmöglichkeiten, wie man sie in Berlin erleben würden.

Nicht, dass ich Großstädte nicht mag, nein, ich liebe sie! Doch für eine begrenzte Zeit, gerade beim Studium, kann die Ruhe gut tun, eine Großstadt ist auf Dauer sehr anstrengend und macht kaputt.

Meine Wohnungssuche in Freiburg war anfangs sehr entmutigend, nichts außer überteuerte WGs mit unglaublicher Konkurrenz. Am letzten Tag konnte ich ein plötzlich frei gewordenes Zimmer im Studentenwohnheim Vauban erhaschen – eine sehr schöne, ruhig gelegene Gegend, die für ihre Plusenergiehäuser bekannt ist. Da zu wohnen freue ich mich schon.

Nun bleiben mir noch zwei Wochen vor dem Umzug, die letzten Tage bei der Familie, und dann wartet das Studileben endgültig auf mich.

Aller Anfang ist schwer…

Gerade eben erst aus Südamerika zurückgekehrt und schon geht es los in das nächste Abenteuer, welches heißt: Psychologiestudium Freiburg! Eine wohl nicht so schlechte Adresse für Studenten, viele möchten am Liebsten dort studieren.

Umso schwieriger gestaltet sich logischerweise die Wohnungssuche in dieser doch eher kleinen Studentenstadt. Spätestens in einem Monat sollte ich nach Freiburg gezogen sein – jetzt muss ich meine Suche verstärken, es ist nicht einfach, aber ich bin zuversichtlich.

Wenn ich schon in Peru aus den unmöglichsten Situationen gekommen bin, warum sollte dies mir nun nicht auch hier gelingen?