The Stanford Prison Experiment: The History of the Notorious Psychological Experiment on Guards' Treatment of Prisoners

What happens when you put good people in a bad place?

That was the question that an experiment in 1971 set out to answer when Stanford University professor and psychologist Philip Zimbardo used funding provided by the U.S. Office of Naval Research to create a make-believe prison in the basement of a university building. Male students were offered the chance to take part in the two-week experiment (and to make $15 per day). All applicants were carefully screened to ensure that they were healt...