Psychology's founding myths persist: How textbook economies and institutional inertia keep debunked Stanford prison and Milgram obedience studies alive
Original framing: “Stanford prison experiment: Why do controversial psychology studies still have such a hold on us?” — Phys.org
Indigenous knowledge systems reject the premise of isolating individuals from community to test 'human nature' — a fiction that serves colonial science. Māori kaupapa research ethics require whānau consent, communal benefit, and accountability to ancestors, rendering Zimbardo's deception and Milgram's coercion structurally impossible. The very concept of 'obedience to authority' assumes a liberal individualist subject that many Indigenous cosmologies do not recognize; in Anishinaabe governance, authority flows from collective consent, not hierarchical command. These experiments are not universal revelations but WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) cultural artifacts masquerading as human constants.
The Stanford prison and Milgram obedience studies persist not as science but as sacred myths of the Western carceral imagination — they tell the story power wants told: that cruelty is situational, obedience is universal, and resistance is exceptional.
The eight dimensions reveal a single structural logic: a discipline built on WEIRD individualism, funded by military agencies, canonized by textbook monopolies, and insulated from Indigenous, marginalized, and trickster critiques that would expose its foundational fraud. The solution is not better replication but epistemic reparations: replacing the 'great studies' pedagogy with comparative epistemologies that center relational ethics over isolated obedience, and defunding the obedience-industrial complex that profits from teaching compliance as human nature. Until psychology confronts its role in legitimizing state violence — from supermax prisons to enhanced interrogation — these zombie studies will keep rising, because they serve the living dead.