This film was originally done by BBC and the program was lately transform a mind boggling screenplay that deals with human nature. The film is one intriguing result of a psychological program and thus give us a spine chilling reality. The genesis of the programme was the 1971 Stanford prison experiment carried out by Philip Zimbardo at Stanford University, in which a group of students were recruited to perform the roles of 'prisoner' and 'guard' as a psychological experiment to test how human beings conform to roles. That study was brought to a premature end as a result of the extreme brutality displayed by guards towards prisoners. This itself was related to the Milgram experiment at Yale University in 1963.
The BBC Experiment was led by psychologists Professor Alex Haslam (University of Exeter) and Professor Steve Reicher (University of St Andrews) who planned and designed the psychological experiment with the series' executive producer Nick Mirsky and producer Gaby Koppel of the BBC. At the time, Reicher was editor of the British Journal of Social Psychology and Haslam was editor-elect of the European Journal of Social Psychology.
Confounding initial criticism, findings of the BBC study were reported in scientific papers that were published in leading peer-reviewed journals. These papers addressed the dynamics of tyranny, resistance, stress and leadership. Indeed, it is possible that the study has formed the basis for more academic papers than any other single field experiment in psychology.
These papers challenged the role-based analysis forwarded by Zimbardo and served to elaborate ideas associated with a social identity approach to social, clinical and organizational psychology. One of their central arguments is that individuals only move towards tyranny once they have come to identify with a group and its leadership (in a way that Zimbardo's briefing of his guards encouraged) and once an authoritarian agenda has come to define that group's identity and to be seen as a solution to its problems.
Reflecting its contribution to ongoing debate in this area, in 2007 the BBC Prison study was included in the OCR examination board's Psychology A-level syllabus.
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