Most of you are probably familiar with the Stanford prison experiment. And you're probably familiar with the results of the experiment, the egregious human rights violations, the inhumanity of the whole thing, yada yada yada.

If you're not, allow me to briefly sum up: behavioral psychologists from Stanford University in California put out an ad in the classifieds to find a bunch of volunteers for their study in which they wanted to try and replicate the conditions of a prison in order to study the effects of perceived power and the extent to which people would obey authority. 24 men were selected from the volunteers and they were assigned as either an inmate or a guard by a coin toss.

Cut to the actual experiment, it was canceled after 6 days because the men in guard positions almost immediately enacted authoritarian codes of conduct on the prisoners, and almost none of the 24 men left the experiment without some form of psychological trauma. The researchers wrapped it up and made their conclusions: power corrupts.

I'm here to tell you that all of that is bullshit.

The Stanford prison experiment is widely hailed as a defining study of the human psyche that opened our eyes to the way humans think and behave. It's taught about in high school and in university sociology classes. There's only one small problem: It was wholly and purely unscientific in its methodology and its execution. Fact is that this study is so shoddy that the fact that anyone ever called it conclusive is beyond ridiculous.

The study was of 24 men. That's hardly a decent sample size. Any statistician would balk at a sample size of 24. It also had only one type of person: middle class white men from Palo Alto, California in 1971. That's hardly going to cover anything beyond the men in the study, is it? I highly doubt those results would be the same if the study was done with women, minorities, people from different cultures, or even just varied economic classes. The study was also never replicated. In the scientific world, unrepeatable studies are held as inconclusive.

Then there's the matter of how the study's volunteers were obtained. The ad for volunteers stated that they would be participating in a study of prison life. Prisons and police jobs tend to attract a certain kind of person to apply for them. Like any job, certain minds are drawn to it. People who are highly empathetic will probably want to be nurses or teachers or EMTs and the like. People who are highly inquisitive will probably want to be scientists or innovators, etc. But what about prison guards? What kind of person wants to be a prison guard, and would be interested in playing a role as one? Someone who craves control. Someone who likes the idea of having power over other people. I hate to break it to you, but for every cop who says they join the force to protect the people, there's probably a dozen who join because they like tackling people and putting them in cuffs before throwing them in a car, or because wearing a gun makes them feel important. That's more than likely the exact type of people who responded to this ad.

Moral of the story is that you can't always base your ideas on only one aspect of the data. A true scientist will consider all the angles, not just the first one that looks obvious. Economics, social position, perceived roles, gender identity, cultural practices, religious background, politics, and physiology are all going to have some effect on behavior. Everything is not so black and white as it seems when it's presented to you on a page written by someone without all the answers.