I mention schools because something bothers me the most there, but I could mention newspapers or talk shows or Wikipedia — in any of these fora, once a lie lasts long enough, even if it’s been thoroughly debunked repeatedly for decades or centuries it’s still something other than a lie. It’s still the thing you teach, with an addendum or a footnote pointing out how it conflicts with reality.
First you state that nuking Japan ended WWII; then you add that it didn’t end the war and wasn’t needed to end the war. First you state that the attack on the USS Maine started the Spanish American war; then you add that there was no attack. First you report how the Gulf of Tonkin Incident started the Vietnam War; then you add that there was no incident. And so on. You can say the War on Iraq was started with lies, but only because everyone said so very loudly at the time; if they’d only said it after some years or decades had gone by, then you couldn’t.
This is on my mind because of the Stanford Prison “Experiment.” This was hyped and hyped from 1971 through the present. But that hype required not looking too closely and not worrying that the thing could not be reproduced, that various actual experiments both before and after the Stanford performance art — including efforts to reproduce just what Stanford claimed to have been — all had very different results. In most science, if something cannot be reproduced it should not become accepted fact. But most science isn’t on television or in the movies.
If you looked closely, Stanford “experimenter” Philip Zimbardo recounted in his own book how he had trained the “prison guards” prior to the “experiment” — addressing them as “we” and the future “prisoners” as “they” — instructing them to give the prisoners numbers, never to use their names, to try to instill in the prisoners a sense of powerlessness and frustration and fear, and to take away their individuality.
Then somebody went and looked — it had taken almost a half a century — at Zimbardo’s records and debunked the whole thing in 2019, finding that the professor had told the guards what to do and how to do it and why to do it — all prior to the supposed experiment. The guards had been badgered (and well-paid) to get them to be tougher and meaner than they were readily willing to be.
Originally Zimbardo had planned to report on the reactions of the poor prisoners to his sadistically coached guards. The notions that the guards’ sadism was the result of the “experiment” and that Zimbardo had been surprised by it were manufactured after the fact.
Then in 2025, National Geographic got lots of the participants in the charade to admit what it had been on video, edited into a high-quality and engaging film that the most illiterate of people and the most literate could be imagined enjoying — freely available on the internet.
I shouldn’t say that there was no experiment. There was an experiment. It just hasn’t ended, and the test subject is society. The test was and is this: if you coerce and cajole and otherwise manipulate people into behaving horribly, and then you tell the world it was not only easy but that you did next to nothing, that all you did was put ordinary people into a certain situation, will society believe it? The result is a resounding yes. Society will trumpet it from the rooftops while ignoring almost completely every actual experiment finding conflicting results.
This meta-experiment is reproducible and has been frequently reproduced in great variation with a generally consistent pattern of results.
Every U.S. child is made to read Lord of the Flies, a story made up by a disturbed Nazi afficionado that depicts the opposite of various real-world cases in which kids have treated each other with great kindness. Society has declared the story realistic.
Stanley Milgram taught us, as every good school teacher knows, not that you can pressure people to do evil — something every human being always knew — but that, again, it takes next to no pressure. In his experiments, in reality, only 56% of people believed the shocks were real, the majority of those quit and refused to administer the shocks, and those who did believe they were shocking people and continued to do so did so to help science and to hopefully cure diseases —only those lines of persuasion worked on them, whereas simply ordering people to administer the shocks resulted in universal disobedience. So the famous experiment revealed that there was a segment of the population being tested that could be manipulated into doing evil if you convinced them it was for a greater good, but that without that convincing people would refuse to comply even if they didn’t spot the ruse. But the experiment on society that has been conducted by repeating over and over that all you need is an authority figure and almost anybody will instantly be willing to cause others to suffer or even kill them — that experiment has had the usual result.
There have been many such experiments: telling us that 38 people watched Kitty Genovese be attacked and stood by and did nothing to help her, for example. Society believed it and in a certain sense always will, it seems — will always present it as a serious story, parenthetically noting the troublesome facts of the matter.
News reports run a similar experiment on us whenever there’s a major disaster. The wild spree of murders and rapes and free-for-all violent chaos in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina didn’t actually happen in reality, but we think that it did or that it sort-of did or that it easily might have. In reality, the general pattern is for people to become their best selves during crises, for news reports to invent murder and mayhem, and for armed troops to go in and create a second disaster. It matters whether we learn to spot this sequence of events very quickly. It matters both for what happens next and for whether a made-up story becomes lasting wisdom.
David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is executive director of World BEYOND War and campaign coordinator of RootsAction.org. Swanson’s books include War Is Still A Lie. He blogs at DavidSwanson.org and hosts Talk World Radio.