#2. The Stanford Prison Experiment

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Photo by National Library of Medicine on Unsplash

The Milgram experiment is talked about in each psych class, I think.

And the Stanford Prison Experiment appears in every documentary about evil.

These are the experiments we employ to explain human nature, moral collapse, and the building blocks of genetics. Most of them are messier than that. A few are flatly misleading.

One is a confirmed hoax that existed in the scientific literature for 41 years.

#1. The Milgram Shock Experiment

The original uploader was Poolisfun at Wikipedia. , Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Ordinary people. A man in a lab coat. A stranger supposedly receiving electric shocks in the next room. 65% of those participants went as far as 450 volts , which would have been deadly if it had been real.

The man in the lab coat just kept telling them to continue, and most of them did.

It was employed to describe the Holocaust.…