I want to know about prisons and so rather than locking up on you guys in my basement, I just read about prisons.

Welcome to You Wrong About, the show where we teach you how to ruin all of your teachers poorly thought out arguments.

Ooh, that's very broad and very good. Thank you. Well, I think it applies specifically well to easily debunkable sociological phenomena of mid-century America.

The term that I keep coming across in the literature is self-debunking.

Ooh. I am Michael Hobbs. I'm a reporter for The Huffington Post.

I'm Sarah Marshall. I'm working on a book about the Satanic Panic.

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Yeah. And today we are talking about the Stanford Prison Experiment.

I'm so excited. You have no idea. Oh, my God. Me too.

This is the lowest hanging fruit. I know that we have plucked in a while. Like it was because hanging there.

This is perfect. It's like it's this thing that people cite all the time when they want to make a fast all case for why humans are terrible and you just give up on caring about humans or expecting pro-social behavior.

And it just seems like the kind of thing that is so easily debunked.

It's self-raising debunking. I was going to do a whole thing where I was going to spend like 20 or 30 minutes walking you through the study step by step.

And really like convincing you that the study was real. And then I was going to have like boom a twist.

Yeah, you look fucking with me. Don't you? I know I do.

But then I realized you cannot describe this study without getting into the ways in which it is bullshit.

But this is also a weird debunking because like what actually happened in the Stanford Prison Experiment is actually mostly true.

We're going to get into the various like documents that were faked and stuff that didn't hold up over time. But in general everything you've heard about what actually happened in a Stanford basement in August of 1971, that occurred.

Where the debunking comes in is how to interpret what occurred.

Right. This is like tiny hard again, Nancy Kerrigan. It's like everything you saw. It's like we're not adding anything new to that.

It's like come take my hand. Let's look at it again.

Sarah, tell me what you know about the Stanford Prison Experiment. What happened?

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