Human Science: Experimentation. The Stanford Prison Experiment

A Human Science, we have seen in class, is a strange hybrid beast. Social scientists are imbued with the Scientific Method and its elements of observation, hypothesis, experimentation, the collection of data, analysis of the data, and the formulation of a conclusion regarding the initial hypothesis. With this Method they attempt to study the behavior of human beings, but problems in application can quickly surface. How does one accurately measure human behavior? How can one predict an outcome without influencing it? How can one isolate exactly what causes complex human behavior? Are there ethical considerations that inhibit experimentation?

The problems are thorny. We see them in a famous (or infamous) experiment conducted at Stanford in 1971. Professor Philip Zimbardo created a prison simulation with undergraduate students, male, white middle-class students. He wished to determine whether a brutal and hostile environment determines behavior, or whether an individual's own personal characteristics determine it. Were prisons conditioning people to behave sadistically, or was this sadism an innate characteristic? Is it nature or is it nurture?

In class we watched a BBC documentary on the experiment (the link is also on Edline) and are familiar with its details. After six days Zimbardo shut down the experiment. Please respond to one of the statements below:

• The Stanford Prison Experiment was a daring and creative simulation that revealed that human behavior is substantially determined by environment. If one places several well-adjusted subjects into a degrading authoritarian environment, they quickly lose their sense of personal identity and become utterly submissive. The Scientific Method was well applied for the most part and, whatever the faults in application, these did not compromise the findings. Environment powerfully shapes behavior.  In retrospect we undertand more about the ethics of experimentation and, through subsequent reflection, can apply better guidelines to prevent duress in experiments. We saw the very same phenomenom with the Abu Ghraib prison scandal that erupted in 2004. If the military had been aware of the 1971 experiment, that scandal could have been prevented.


• The Stanford Prison Experiment was a poorly conceived work of improvised theater with unprofessional actors. The guards were told at the beginning to abuse the students psychologically, and true prison conditions were not replicated. One student guard admits to acting out a sadistic role seen in Cool Hand Luke. If students and the professor himself were merely playing roles learned from Hollywood movies, there was no true scientific study, it was improvised theater. Moreover, there was no neutral observer, no independent variable, nothing was measured, the results were impressionistic. The conclusions articulated in the documentary seem to manifest Confirmation Bias.  Does one really need to determine that studious well-behaved unconfrontational middle class young men will be submissive in prison? Can one generalize about human beings from such a small group? The naiveté of the study was extraordinary. 

New Year, New Challenges

In May, having received your high school diploma, you will stand on the lawn and toss your tasseled blue or white academic caps spinning into the air and you will rejoice that one long stretch of schooling has finished. Rowdy cheers, tears, laughter, hugs.

But there is still a lot of work for the next nine months.

In TOK this means finishing the curriculum (Social Sciences, History, Ethics), writing the TOK Essay (topics already posted on Edline), and giving the TOK Presentation. All of this we will introduce and begin to address in our first class. It also means giving as much as we can of ourselves in class discussions, listening actively, responding appropriately, weighing what we hear and say.

Before we begin, let's look again at the Mission Statement of the International Baccalaureate Organization:

The International Baccalaureate aims to develop inquiring, knowledgeable, and caring young people who help to create a better and more peaceful world through intercultural understanding and respect.
To this end the organization works with schools, governments, and international organizations to develop challenging programmes of international education and rigorous assessment.
These programmes encourage students across the world to become active, compassionate, and lifelong learners who understand that other people, with all their differences, can also be right.

Let's take a look at the last paragraph. What does this paragraph mean to you? Please write a brief reflection of about 200 words.

Art: What has been the most powerful experience for me?

Art as a way of knowing is an enormous topic. Living in a city like Rome that teems with masterpieces can give another dimension to our classroom discussion. Whether we wish to look at a Neolithic fertility goddess, an Egyptian obelisk from the time of Ramses the Great, an Assyrian battle relief, a Hellenistic bronze of a beaten boxer, an Etruscan terracotta statue of a deity, a Roman imperial portrait, the Colosseum, the Pantheon, a medieval church and its mosaics, a graceful Renaissance masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, or Michelangelo, a haunting biblical scene by Caravaggio, an elegant and dynamic sculpture by Bernini, the cooler Neoclassical beauty of a Canova statue, the patriotic scenes of the painters of the Risorgimento, the abstractions of the Futurists or Rationalists, the thought-provoking contemporary architectural works of Zaha Hadid, Richard Meier, Renzo Piano, or Massimiliano Fuksas---Rome has these and much, much more. It's a tough act to beat.

And if we think of the poets and other writers who have lived or sojourned here, the list continues. Picking up the list from after 1800, we can mention Leopardi, Keats, Byron, Shelley, James Joyce, Hans Christian Andersen, Alberto Moravia, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Dacia Maraini, and the list can go on and on.

And if we think of film, the list continues: Rossellini, De Sica, Visconti, Passolini, Fellini, Sergio Leone, Elio Petri...

But if we ask what work of art has been most important to you, how would you respond? Would it be a work from the past? Would it be a work of literature, a dance performance, a song, a film, a cartoon, a painting, a sculpture, a building? What makes it so powerful to you? Is it the emotion? Is it an insight into the human condition? Was it something else?

Please answer these last questions in an entry below of about 400 words. This is due at the beginning of class on May 20.

Math / Presentations

It has been a while since we have posted! In the intervening weeks--which encompassed the ten day hiatus of Easter vacation--we have done the Mathematics unit and again begun to work on presentations. In the Mathematics unit we examined the axiom-theorem structure which the Greeks invented and how logic operates in this system. We also made connections between math and the arts. For example, we looked at fractals and watched a brief video of Benoit Mandelbrot, their creator/discoverer. Students in groups also presented different math/art topics including the Golden Section, the art of M.C. Escher, Linear Perspective, and the relationship of math to music that in the West began with Pythagoras.
We looked at how math can be creative. Finally we spoke of how Kurt Goedel (a friend of Einstein) proved that not all mathematical truth can be proven, that is, that there are true theorems that cannot be proven from the given axioms, a curious situation for a discipline that is so rigorous and precise.
With all this done, it is time to turn our attention to presentations. Could someone from each group record the real-life situation and the knowledge issue that have been selected. What problems have you encountered? Sign with the initials of the people in the group.

Article and a Knowledge Issue

The crucial and most difficult part of TOK, arguably, is making the leap to seeing Knowledge Issues in daily life. As a part of the course work, this skill becomes very important for internal and external assessment. Like any skill, it becomes easier with habitual practice.

This week each student brought in an article and briefly discussed a knowledge issue present in the article. I was continually impressed by the creativity of the selections, and how personal each choice was. Could each of you summarize your article in one or two sentences (not a paragraph!) and record in the form of an open question the knowledge issue you have found.

Due: 25 March

Variety in Presentations!

The TOK Presentation is a not an easy task, it cannot be thrown together after reading something hurriedly. It must be personal, well-researched and well-structured, addressing a real-life situation and focussing on the inherent knowledge issues.

The Guide to the course says that "presentations may take many forms, such as lectures, skits, simulations, games, dramatized readings, interviews or debates. Students may use supporting materials such as videos, MS Powerpoint presentations, overhead projections, posters, questionnaires, recordings of songs or interviews, costumes or props. Under no circumstances, however, should the presentation be simply an essay read aloud to the class" (page 47).

Keeping this in mind, be creative! Take a look at this film on teen dating made by a group of TOK students in California. It is a real-life situation and the students are focussing on Knowledge Issues. Write a reaction (250 words) to the short video below by Monday, March 21.

More on Knowledge Issues / The TOK Presentation

For the TOK Presentation and Essay students must clearly and directly address specific knowledge issues. What does this mean?

In the first semester we explored the inner part of the TOK diagram, that is, the Knower(s) and the Ways of Knowing (language, sense perception, emotion, and reason). We observed that human beings have many ways of knowing and understanding, and that each way has distinct advantages and disadvantages, possibilities and limitations. When we seek to understand through written or spoken language, this imposes possibilities and limitations. Our senses permit us to receive information, but this too can be delimited or expanded depending on different conditions. Emotion can color our sense perception and reasoning. Reason itself can be logical or illogical, deductive or inductive, and it can be mislead through the logical fallacies. All of these Ways of Knowing interact.

For the TOK course a knowledge issue will be formulated in relationship to these issues as well as to issues of belief, certainty, culture, evidence, experience, explanation, interpretation, justification, truth and values. It also can be focused on one of the Areas of Knowledge (Natural Sciences, Human Sciences, Mathematics, The Arts, and Ethics).

The IB does not prescribe but recommends that knowledge issues are:

• "Formulated as open questions that allow more than one possible answer
  
• Explicitly about knowledge itself and not subject-specific claims
  
• Expressed in the language of TOK
  
• Precise in terms of the relationships between these concepts."

The challenge of TOK is to assimilate a new way of understanding how we know. The presentation must deal with a real-life situation and then discover in this a clear and explicit knowledge issue. For example, Al Gore has been campaigning for the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions in order to reduce the greenhouse effect. In the documentary An Inconvenient Truth we see him presenting his argument to myriad audiences around the world. That is a real-life situation. But if we simply debate on carbon dioxide emissions, this would not be sufficient. For TOK it is not enough to debate the persuasiveness of the argument. The knowledge issue must be expressed at a higher level of abstraction. The knowledge issue, expressed as a question, becomes: What makes a scientific explanation persuasive?

The challenge is to express the knowledge issue at this level of abstraction and then to keep the examination of the knowledge issue in focus and grounded in real examples. One must demonstrate an informed and critical understanding of the knowledge issue. Keep in mind, as we continue in preparing the first presentation, the four areas in which you will be assessed (I have given you these criteria in class):

• Identification of Knowledge Issues
• Treatment of Knowledge Issues
• Knower's Perspective
• Connections

The first semester, we can see now, is fundamentally important in highlighting the issues in knowing. As we go ahead with focusing on the specific Areas of Knowledge, we must also begin to apply these concepts and questions to life. This is what makes the TOK perennially fascinating and relevant.