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Welcome to rationally speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

I'm your host, Julia Galef, and my guest today is Thiebo L'Texier.

He is an associate researcher at the University of Nice in France, studying the history of ideas.

And our topic today is something you've probably heard about. If you've taken an intro to psychology class in the last few decades, or just

read any media in the last few decades, it's a very famous experiment called the Stanford

Prison Experiment. And the basic story of the Stanford Prison Experiment goes like this.

Stanford Professor Philip Zimbardo in 1971 recruited students for this simulation of a prison experience.

So he randomly assigned half of them to be guards and half of them to be prisoners and ran the

simulated prison in the basement of the psychology department.

Very sketchy.

And very quickly, the students assigned to be guards became abusive and cruel, humiliating the prisoners.

The prisoners became depressed and demoralized, and the experiment had to be cut short after

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