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Heh, so we're calling psychology a science now?  Mostly kidding, and before I offend Orbit I'll move on.   I read about this earlier this week. Indeed I too learned about this experiment in high school sociology, and was surprised to see such a foundational experiment overturned. Is this peer-review at work? Let me start with a controversial comment. Imagine this wasn't a seminal study in psychology, but in climate science. What if we determined that the anthropogenic contribution to climate change is in fact negligible? Well, that would be a problem given said study would have been responsible for carbon emission standards, international agreements, and a fundamental industrial shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources. There would rightly be clamor over the fact that the earth's (political) axis was shifted on the basis of scientific work whose results were fundamentally overturned by later research.   Now, my point here isn't that climate science is flawed. To be clear, it isn't. The point I hope to make is that while science is naturally self-correcting, it is also meant to converge on the truth. Later theories should refine earlier theories rather than invalidate them. A famous example of this is the General Theory of Relativity, which makes corrections to Newtonian gravity rather than declaring it obsolete. So if the prison experiment were done properly, then later experiments would perhaps show that the results do not hold in certain circumstances or when certain types of people are participants. But here we have gross experimental errors. One participant faked a breakdown to get out of the experiment early. The PI changed his experimental protocol because of a suggestion from his girlfriend. These aren't the sorts of things that are meant to be corrected by peer review. These are things that simply shouldn't happen. It's akin to a climate researcher adding the number 6 to every temperature measurement he records. From what I'm reading here, it's simply science done poorly.   Scientific findings are always subject to dispute and refinement. But if the science is done correctly, successive findings should converge rather than contradict. The widespread non-reproducible nature of findings in the social sciences makes me worry about the veracity of this sort of research. Thank goodness social scientists are at least well-versed in statistics.

Yeah, no kidding. I remember one part where he purports to calculate the probability of Jesus's miracles not being a miracle. What the calculation is doing, if you can even call it that, is that *assuming* all the miracles happened the way they were described in the bible, literally, what the probability that they happened due to random occurrence. It is an extremely stupid thing to speculate as what's being debated is whether the biblical accounts of the miracles happened at all, *not* whether or not it's miraculous if you pre-assume that it happened! Of course this didn't occur or bother to him and he pursued as though he had proven that all the miracles were true. What a sack full of sh*t that whole argument was.

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Grapejuice?

Now that's just plain NASTY! I LIKE it!   Think I'll wait until Mrs. MOHO has a couple glasses of grape juice in her before I pull that one. 

You have to get a license to drive a car; but not to have kids.  That seems a bit fuckity to me.

I love the Church Lady! 

Does Bible School count? (Hey, we had a curfew!)