The most famous psychology study of all time was a sham. Why can’t we escape the Stanford Prison Experiment?
It was late in the evening of August 16th, 1971, and twenty-two-year-old Douglas Korpi, a slim, short-statured Berkeley graduate with a mop of pale, shaggy hair, was locked in a dark closet in the basement of the Stanford psychology department, naked beneath a thin white smock bearing the number 8612, screaming his head off.
Blog post and interviews that underpins the recent (June 2018) Inside HigherEd story reflecting on the legacy of the Stamford Prison Experiment.
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It was a defining moment in what has become perhaps the best-known psychology study of all time. Whether you learned about Philip Zimbardo’s famous “Stanford Prison Experiment” in an introductory psych class or just absorbed it from the cultural ether, you’ve probably heard the basic story.
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