New information released on Stanford’s website has cast major doubt on the experiment’s authenticity, and on its wide-ranging implications about human psychology and behaviour.

The most damning piece of new evidence is a recording of one of Zimbardo’s researchers explicitly coaching a “guard” to be more brutal to the prisoners, experts say. That runs counter to the long-standing narrative that the guards simply started behaving badly on their own.

“It completely blows them out of the water,” psychologist Alex Haslam of Queensland University, told Global News.

Haslam re-staged the experiment in 2002 for a BBC documentary special, but the guards in his experiment “showed no inclination whatsoever to be brutal,” he said.

Haslam and his research partner, Stephen Reicher, suspected there must have been researcher interference in the original experiment, but they didn’t have any proof of that until the Stanford tape was released last month.

https://globalnews.ca/news/4273976/stanford-prison-experiment-lies-acting-good-evil/