This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Two of the most famous experiments in psychology, the Stanford prison experiment and Stanley Milgram's obedience studies, have been called a sham, a lie and a fraud. Retraction Watch, a site that tracks withdrawn research papers, has hosted an argument for retracting the Stanford paper.
Psychologists have even been told that almost everything they thought they knew about Milgram is wrong. Yet interest has not faded. This month, Netflix released six episodes of The New Stanford Prison Experiment, putting the 1971 study back in the spotlight.
Why do these much-criticized experiments keep drawing us back? Part of the answer is how strong the original findings sounded. They came from what is often called the golden age of American social psychology, roughly the 1950s to the early 1970s.
Researchers in this period ran dramatic experiments on how groups and authority shape what ordinary people do. In the 1950s, the psychologist Solomon Asch asked students to match the length of a line to one of three others. When a room of actors all gave the same wrong answer, many of the real participants went along with them—at least some of the time.
In the early 1960s at Yale University, Milgram told volunteers they were helping with a study of memory and learning. They were asked to give electric shocks—rising to a level labeled dangerous—to a man in another room whenever he got a question wrong. The shocks were fake and the man was an actor, but the participants did not know that.
In the experiment's initial version, 65% of them went all the way to the top of the scale when a man in a lab coat told them to continue. In the late 1960s, the psychologists John Darley and Bibb Latané studied why people so often fail to help in an emergency. In one experiment, volunteers heard over an intercom what sounded like another participant having a seizure.
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