The New Stanford Prison Experiment review – surely no one believes this insulting TV show is real?

This rehash of the notorious study in which volunteers role-play as prisoners and guards pretends to be science. It isn’t – it’s patronising reality television Television has rerun the Stanford prison experiment before, most notably in 2002 when the BBC aired The Experiment, which advertised itself as a more rigorous version of the stunt where volunteers role-play as prison guards and prisoners.

The creator of the original 1971 experiment, Philip Zimbardo, would probably have criticised the new versions to preserve his own status, but the main point he made was valid. These people all know they’re on TV, he said. They’re playing to the cameras. Whether the participants in a behavioural study forget they’re part of a study is an eternal debate point. One of the strengths of the other notorious American people-are-awful research project, the…