Was the Stanford Prison Experiment fake? Closer to staged than fake — and it was never an experiment.
Give ordinary people uniforms and authority and they turn cruel by themselves.
It was a demonstration, not a controlled experiment, with no control group, twelve guards, and no replication in fifty years. Recordings released from Zimbardo’s own archive show guards were briefed toward harshness, and the most notorious of them later said he had consciously played a character. Le Texier set the coaching and the demand characteristics out in American Psychologist (2019). When Reicher & Haslam ran a controlled version for the BBC (2006), the guards did not spontaneously brutalise anybody.
Check it yourself: doi.org/10.1037/amp0000401
Institutional cruelty runs on identification with a group and on permission from above, not on costumes. If you want to predict it, look at what the leadership sanctions and rewards.
Every law on Useful Mind tells you how strong the evidence behind it is. The ones that failed are kept here rather than quietly deleted, because knowing which advice is wrong saves you as much as knowing which is right.
See the ones that held up