Science is supposed to make life better, right? It's supposed to cure disease, improve technology,

and help us understand the world around us. But sometimes science gets a little too confident,

and things get a little weird. I'm talking like, blow up a dead whale, drop cats out of planes,

and poison an entire generation levels of confidence. From psychology experiments that spiraled into

horror shows to miracle substances turned deadly, today we're taking you on a tour through

some of history's wildest moments when science went completely off the rails.

Hey guys, and welcome to the Moms and Mysteries podcast, a true crime podcast featuring myself, Mandy, and my dear friend Melissa.

Hi, Melissa. Hi, Mandy. How are you? I don't know why I was so sing-songy today.

I just edited one of our episodes and it was the same kind of cadence, like a different kind of cadence.

So now I'm just excited to see what comes up every week. This is awesome. Yeah. Yeah. I know. Well, I try to make it a little different. Some people hate that we have the same boring intro week after week. Boy, do they let us know.

Having it till the day we die. It makes it

easy for editing and that's all I can say. Exactly. All right, I am super excited to get into this

episode. This is a little bit different. I would say this falls more into the mysteries category,

but I guess there aren't really even mysteries now because they've pretty much been

solved. But these are some really interesting cases of things that have gone horribly wrong,

some things that absolutely should have been a crime in some way. And as we get into it,

you'll see exactly what I mean. So it's August 1971 in Palo Alto, California. This was really peak time for bell bottoms and anti-war protests, but Dr. Philip Zimbardo, who was a Stanford University psychologist, had something else on his mind. He wanted to understand how ordinary people behave in a prison environment. He really was trying to study how power, control, and authority can shape the human mind,

which I do agree is a fascinating study, but right off the top, you can see how it could be

unethical.

Right.

Absolutely.

So he puts out a newspaper ad that reads, quote, men needed for a psychological study of prison life. And then from more than 70 applicants, he chose 24 of them. They were all college-aged men. And all of them were considered mentally stable, emotionally healthy, and normal. Half of these men were assigned to be guards of this

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