The Unsupervised Children Experiement

Stanford prison comes back again,

Leave students unsupervised and tell them to pretend to be jailers and prisoners and they imitate what they saw on tv

Including the prisoner the other prisoners picked out just to try and bully to death bad prisoner

Unsupervised humans often become horrible


I woul takmore out of the systems of government they decided to emulate once they realized the adults were not comming back than trying to derive any meanings on gender here way too small sample size.


Take awyth adults aka the government and humans will becom horrible tashing the plcebbeatingup other people and starting gangs

We need women to keep us in check but these hoes ain't loyal

I want to see a larger sample, from different nationalities & cultures.

Here in America, among the middle class to poor, I don't find this surprising. Upper class kids likely get more cultivation & grooming.

Interesting result, but might be confounded by cultural mores. Bullying is much more an American thing than a European one, is my expectation. Maybe I'm wrong, though. I grew up in a culture where fighting & bullying was part of the dealio.

This looks like one of those almost meaningless pop-pseudoscience programs and, given the apparent age range, the results are entirely predictable. Might be slightly interesting if they had similar 'experiments' with different age groups.

No solid conclusions can really be drawn given how few children were involved and the fact it is one lone experiment. Science is rigorous, and repeat experiments would be needed on a much larger scale for comparison. It can only suggest things, but even then, those suggestions can't be taken that seriously, not on a scientific basis.

It is interesting though, I guess. It may have nothing to do with girls vs boys at all imo, given that groups of kids usually follow the dominant person in the group regardless of sex, so if the dominant person in the male group was a neat freak and the dominant person in the girls group was messy, that could've easily skewed the results differently. If one group was single-gendered and the other mixed, that could've given more conclusive results. Age matters, too. There's just too many variables that could've swayed the results and not enough stable factors that could lead to any definitive conclusion about the data.

I can't find where they tell us the ages of these kids. They appear to be 9 to 11...

I watched the two experiments on youtube a few years ago.

The girls had much more cooperation and organization than the boys. They immediately assigned roles for cooking and other chores - an equal society(?). Their meals were healthy and they would make desserts like cake. They were more emotional with shared feelings and crying if a girl felt left out or bullied. Even their play was more social and done after chores were finished.

Most boys wanted to only play. They established a hierarchy with the more aggressive boys as leaders. The quieter ones did most of the cooking and cleaning and stayed among themselves. Most meals were cereal and junk food. They only decided to cook after feeling sick from eating garbage for days. Very little cooperation and organizing. An issue was that cooking and cleaning were considered beneath them so they were hesitant to do it.

The gender differences are real and stark. I would like to see the experiment with different cultures to see if that's the cause. Or is it biological?

Personality differences need to be addressed. I read about another experiment with college students forming a society. Very aggressive authoritarian personalities were rare, but usually belonged to the males. They became the leaders. Women tended to be more hesitant about claiming leadership roles. Most people were followers.

Girls may have cooperated much more because of a lack of aggressive authoritarian personalities desiring leadership which allowed an egalitarian house where everyone can have an equal role. Less aggression = less bullying too.

What would happen if the house was half boys and girls?

youtube videos were entertaining and educational.

boys:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7F6w2naog5s

girls:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJ1nPP9TaQY