In 1971, a group of university students walked into a basement at Stanford University. Within days, some of them were emotionally broken, and others had become cruel and authoritarian. They had taken part in the Stanford Prison Experiment, one of the most famous and controversial psychological studies ever conducted.
The experiment aimed to answer the questions like “Are abusive prison guards bad people?” and “Does the situation inside a prison (the uniform, the authority, the system) turn ordinary people into something crueller?”
For decades, the Stanford Prison Experiment was used as evidence that power corrupts, that systems changes behaviour, and that under the right conditions anyone can become cruel.
But in recent years, the story has become far more complicated. Was this really a groundbreaking scientific discovery? Or was it a deeply flawed experiment?
Today, I want to explore the context, what actually happened in that basement, the shocking results, and the serious criticisms.
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