this week's lessons are all about social psychology and feature: a bunch of studies I happen to already know have been discredited!

e.g.: Kitty Genovese/the bystander effect, the Stanford Prison Experiment, that experiment with the kids and the mashmallows

I was concerned about how I was going to deal with writing the discussion board post knowing all these things are false and then I saw the assignment for the paper this week

first of all it emphasizes it's the biggest weekly assignment besides the semester-long paper, and it is - most of the other papers are worth 20 points, but this one is worth 75

and what we're supposed to write about is how all this social psychology stuff relates to the Holocaust, of all things

like for example, how the bystander effect feeds into why people didn't act when they were sending Jews to the concentration camps

thesparklequeen: yeahhh

why...do they want you to use discredited studies?

the textbook is treating them as if they are true and prove things about human nature!

tbf the knowledge of many of them being false is pretty new... e.g. the Stanford Prison Experiment expose was released in 2018

but

I mean cite the hell out of 'these didn't play a role because the studies are already highly discredited, but IF they did, here is how they would'

^this

Literally suggest opening with a 'here is a series of findings showing these studies are all false/etc. none of this is at all relevant to the holocaust. But as the assignment asks for relation, here is how they would relate if the effects were real'

ah, so far I'm approaching it in a "actually more modern studies have shown this and this is what fed the behaviors that were seen in this period of history" kind of way

That is also a good approach.

because I'm just kind of... not willing to go along with 'proving' something in my paper that's just false

oh, I like that approach as well!

some of the things do apply, for example being brainwashed. but people weren't brainwashed by the Nazis, antisemitism in Europe was a fully entrenched attitude in the early 1900s, well predating the Nazis taking power

by like.. a millennium

yeah speaking as a psychologist and someone who teaches psychology at the college level, a lot of these textbooks are guilty of treating these studies, especially in social psychology, as gospel without mentioning the criticisms or how scientifically flawed they are, and it's a big problem. you shouldn't treat any study as gospel, much less these

there's a reason we say "evidence from research suggests" not "research proves", even from well-designed studies, because even those too might have flaws, this is why we replicate and do science

the milgram obedience study too, which these books treat as gospel but its results have never been replicated, etc. gotta go for the sensationalizing story instead of the scientific method 🙄

lensflares: thanks for your reply. yeah, Milgram is another study we had in the textbook this week

I was just big fat lineface through the lessons all week

I'm home from a friendsgiving I had this afternoon and just kind of casting about for any excuse not to work

but I have to sob

eurgh I don't want to work

ugh I have until midnight to write this thing and I just

don't wanna