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The Unraveling of the Stanford Prison Experiment
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The Pope Who Put a Corpse on Trial
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The Great Train Robbery
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Grab your coffee and let’s dive in.

It is one of the most famous experiments in the history of psychology. In August 1971, a Stanford professor named Philip Zimbardo recruited 24 young men, randomly split them into prisoners and guards, and locked them inside a fake prison in the basement of the university's psychology building. Planned for two weeks, it was shut down after six days. The guards, ordinary college students, began humiliating the prisoners, and one prisoner appeared to suffer a breakdown, screaming to be let out. Zimbardo's conclusion became gospel. Evil, he argued, comes from the situation rather than the person, so decent people will do terrible things inside a system that encourages them. It seemed to explain everything from Nazi camp guards to Abu Ghraib.

The trouble is that much of the story now looks badly misleading. The French academic Thibault Le Texier combed through Zimbardo's own tapes and notes, then published his findings in a 2018 book and a 2019 article in the journal American Psychologist. The guards had not drifted into cruelty on their own. They had been coached. Before the study began, they were told to make the prisoners feel fear, boredom and powerlessness, and 11 of the 17 prison rules were copied from an earlier student exercise rather than invented by the guards. In one recording, the "warden," an undergraduate named David Jaffe, can be heard pressing a reluctant guard to get more involved, telling him that every guard needed to be what the team called a "tough guard." They were playing the parts they had been given.

The famous breakdown did not hold up either. The prisoner whose screaming became the study's most dramatic moment, Douglas Korpi, later said he had faked it. On a tape recorded the day the experiment ended, he explained that he had been refused permission to leave, so he decided to "act mad" as the easiest way out. Critics also pointed out that the study had no control group and that Zimbardo ran the prison himself as its "superintendent," which made him a participant as much as a scientist. Zimbardo, who died in October 2024, defended the work to the end, calling the criticism unfair and insisting that what happened in the basement was real. The study survived in textbooks for decades anyway, because it was dramatic, quotable and easy to teach. And the story is still running. Last week, Netflix released The New Stanford Prison Experiment, a six-episode series that put 30 volunteers inside a real Georgia jail, this time with psychologists on call around the clock and a safe word.

In January 897, the Catholic Church held what may be the strangest trial in history. The defendant was a pope named Formosus, and he sat through the whole hearing in full papal robes. There was just one problem. Formosus had been dead for about nine months. His successor-but-one, Pope Stephen VI, had ordered the corpse dug up from its tomb, carried into the Basilica of St. John Lateran in Rome, dressed again in its vestments and propped on a throne to face the charges. The spectacle became known as the Cadaver Synod, or in Latin the Synodus Horrenda. A deacon was appointed to stand beside the body and answer on its behalf. Stephen played prosecutor, hurling accusations at a defendant who could not answer back.

The scene makes more sense once you know that the papacy in the late ninth century had become a prize fought over by rival aristocratic factions, and popes rose and fell with whoever controlled the city. Formosus had made dangerous enemies by crowning rival claimants to the imperial title, first Lambert of Spoleto and then the German king Arnulf, crowned in 896. When the Spoleto faction regained the upper hand, Stephen, who was allied with them, saw a chance to wipe out his predecessor's legacy. The corpse was charged with perjury, with seizing the papacy illegally, and with illegally leaving his post as bishop of Porto to become bishop of Rome. The dead man lost. The synod declared his whole papacy void, cancelling all of his ordinations. That included, rather awkwardly, the one that had made Stephen a bishop in the first place.

The corpse was stripped of its vestments, and the three fingers of its right hand that a pope uses to give blessings were cut off. The remains were buried in a graveyard for foreigners, then dug up yet again and thrown into the River Tiber. According to the traditional accounts, fishermen or a monk pulled the body from the water, and rumors soon spread through Rome that it was performing miracles. Public opinion turned sharply against Stephen, and within months he was deposed, thrown into prison and strangled in his cell in the summer of 897. Before the year was out, Pope Theodore II annulled the synod and had Formosus reburied in St. Peter's Basilica. In 898, Pope John IX went further and banned putting corpses on trial altogether. A few years later Pope Sergius III revived the guilty verdict, and a later story claims he had the body beheaded, though historians treat that as legend. Either way, the third burial finally stuck.