I think that's exactly what experiments have shown the world. There are many follow-up experiments that prove exactly that.
The Stanford Prison Experiment has become one of psychology's most dramatic illustrations of how good people can be transformed into perpetrators of evil, and healthy people can begin to experience pathological reactions - traceable to situational forces.
Those traceable situational forces can be minor and subtle things, and yet.
Thoroughly debunked[1][2][3], no?
[1] https://themindlab.co.uk/academy/epic-fails-what-can-we-lear...
[2] https://www.vox.com/2018/6/13/17449118/stanford-prison-exper...
The conclusion was self-evident before they ran the experiment, so another criticism that could be leveled at the experiment was that it was redundant.
"It's just common sense" is not a solid scientific proof. Testing something that we _think_ we know (but have no proven) is not a bad thing.
Simple “we confirmed water is wet” tests are not very good science. Whereas “what is wetness & why does it happen” is.
Milgram found that 42% of people will administer electric shocks to someone who appears to be screaming in pain, as long as the order is given by an apparent authority figure. What is there to debunk, exactly?
Keep in mind what motivated these experiments: a desire to understand more about how the Nazis were able to accomplish what they did. It's not as if the findings of Milgram and Zimbardo were novel or controversial; they were merely trying to reproduce and understand something that the entire world had just observed.
You'd start by telling yourself that, so it would be easy enough to convince people looking to "debunk" the experiment later.
The new research builds upon findings from a previous study, which analyzed recordings of 91 conversations conducted immediately after the termination of the experiments. The recordings showed that most of the obedient subjects justified continuing the experiment because they believed the learner was not really being harmed.
That’s nonsense. That’s like saying that it’s only natural human behavior to abuse and be abused. If I put myself in the shoes of an underpaid sewage worker, that has a family to maintain, that sees the owner and investors of said private companies getting obscenely rich just by closings contracts under their AC… yeah, I’d slack the s* out of it too.