Not to mention the article says it "was also instrumental in changing how people are treated during psychological research" -- Uhh, yeah, because the lack of ethical safeguards in the study became a major issue and we realized we needed to correct that. You don't get credit for ethics reforms by being the unethical person.

He responded to many of the accusations here:

https://www.prisonexp.org/response

SPE was fraud, he told the guards to act like "tough guards" and then said publicly “the guards were given no specific instruction or training on how to be guards," which is what made it probably the most famous psychology study of all time.

https://gen.medium.com/the-lifespan-of-a-lie-d869212b1f62

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/6/14/17464516/st...

Archive link for Ben Blum’s article: https://archive.ph/kn1Eb

The two scientists who conducted “The BBC Prison Study” in the early 2000s wrote about the revelations in the Zimbardo archive material here: https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/time-change-story

Thibault Le Texier, whose book History of a Lie brought this information to light, wrote a summary paper in the American Psychologist: https://letexier.org/IMG/pdf/LeTexier_Debunking-the-SPE_Amer...

As if real prison guards in oppressive regimes spend a lot of time in ethics classes.

The idea behind SPE was not to ask if something could happen or how it should happen, but to ask how something did happen. It achieved the results it was intended to achieve, as did the similarly-"discredited" work by Milgram.

The conclusion in both cases was inescapable: if you order someone to commit an atrocity and they refuse, all you have to do is to ask the next person in line. You won't have to go very far or wait very long.