The official website for the BBC Prison Study, that accompanies the groundbreaking 2002 BBC Prison Study broadcast, went online in September 2008. The Prison Study put volunteers in a prison-style setting and then filmed them. The purpose of the experiment, conducted by British researchers, was to see how relationships evolved in places such as prisons, as well as in other institutions where...

Before the Institutional Review Boards imposed the most basic ethical constraints on psychologists, there was the Stanford Prison Experiment, one of the most famous - and controversial - social psychology experiments in history. In this experiment, Philip Zimbardo, a young professor at Stanford University, randomly selected students to be either "guards" or "prisoners." What unfolded shocked the...