The Del Monte Experiment

I once ran away with a girl to California. She attended Stanford and I stayed at her dorm while I looked for a place. When I first got there her roommate took me on a tour of the campus. Upon arriving at the quad she pointed out Jordan Hall.

“That’s where they did the Stanford Prison Experiment,” she said. “A professor took got some students to pretend to be guards and others to be prisoners. They had to shut it down because the guard students started abusing the prisoner students.”

Sounded cool. Mad scientist conducts cruel experiments on young men. The experiments involving real people have always fascinated me. Did you ever that film in school warning about drugs, the one where they use footage of clinical experiments with LSD? Good stuff.

I looked for it, or something like it on YouTube, but all I found was this:



…and this one on the dangers of hotdogs when using drugs…



But I was able to find this other video I remember where they examined the effect of LSD on spiders:



Sorry, I get distracted easily. Where was I? The Stanford Prison Experiment. Flash forward to about three weeks ago when John Steward brought Philip Zimbardo onto the Daily Show. Turns out Zimbardo is the mad scientist! And he just wrote a book called The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. It’s about the SPE and its relation to Abu Ghraib.

So I’ve been reading this book and I’m on the part where he’s detailing some of the abuses by the Stanford student guards. They don’t beat the prisoners or anything, but they exercise dominance over eating, pissing, shitting, talking, sleeping and movement. They leverage the comfort of other prisoners to squash rebellious or disobedient prisoners.

Remember that scene from Full Metal Jacket with the jelly donut?



Flash forward to last night. My kid’s friend and his mom are over for dinner. And the friend is not eating his food. Understandable, since I’m a pretty lousy cook. The highlight of the meal is the tilapia, which he won’t even try. But then he starts asking for stuff like Fruit Roll-ups and gummy vitamins.

The solution is simple bribery/bargaining. Finish A + B and you can have C + D. It’s pretty standard stuff I’m pretty sure every parent has used at least once. The teaching value of this type of arrangement is vague, but I figure it’ll help if the kid ever becomes a labor organizer or something.

But then my child ups the ante, asking for, ironically, a donut. Amazingly, he actually finished all the food on his plate, which he never does. The straight forward solution is pretty obvious. Give subject 1 a donut and inform subject 2 he can get one too only if he eats all the food on his plate. But I try a different, more sinister approach:

The friend can have a donut if he eats all of his corn. But my kid can have a donut if his friend eats half of the corn on his plate. How diabolical is that?

Halfway through the corn, subject 2 loses interest and the two wander off. 20 minutes later they come back for the donuts. I’ve cleaned off the table by then and the opportunity to finish the corn is gone.

I give my kid his donut, of which he asks to share with his friend.

“It’s you donut, you can do whatever you want with it.” Now, in all honesty, I’d rather they both eat only half a donut. In retrospect, if I would have just given each half a donut in the first place, everything probably would have gone okay. But I think as a matter of pride subject 2 couldn’t swallow that the only reason he was getting any donut at all was through the benevolence of subject 1. He was, after all, the one who had to do all the corn eating in this deal.

So he broke down and started crying. It was as all very tragic. Eventually he left with his half-donut still weeping. The part that really made me feel like shit, however, was that I completely forgot to give him his Fruit Roll-Up.