It's wonderful to see this.
The story of the Stanford Prison Experiment is one such typical thing where a lie (or falsehood or misconstruction) ran around the world before the truth got its pants on.
There's plenty of material, academically or in popular press (plus Gina Perry's excellent take-down books, Behind the Shock Machine and The Lost Boys.), showing how broken and misconstrued these most-famous of psychology's "experiments" are.
It's just not the case that humans in positions of power just turn evil, or that underlings "reporting" to them are willing to electrocute participants just because their boss says so. Prison guards don't automatically turn violent or exploitative just because they sort of can. It's a convenient, comforting idea I think stemming from the horrors of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia ("how could regular people ever do this?!") and these experiments tell us reassuringly that it wasn't a moral failure but something that could happen to anyone, anytime (#891714).
Nope, not so. The experiments themselves were mostly staged, participants pressured into behaving certain things.
I first learned about this in Rutger Bregman's excellent book Humankind, where he systematically takes apart of these mistaken beliefs about what our human species is and isn't. If nothing else, I recommend The Guardian's (yes, I'm sorry but he republished it there!!) extract of his book: "The Real Lord of the Flies."
Now, there's a Nat Geo documentary I'm looking forward to seeing.
THANKS TEAM REASON!