http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ambassadors/Courses/PSY471History_of_Psychology(Davis)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/cinema/features/experiment.shtml
Background
The genesis of the programme was the 1971 Stanford prison experiment [insert link] carried out by Philip Zimbardo at Stanford University[insert link], 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 *power* roles. That study was brought to a premature end as a result of the extreme brutality displayed by guards towards prisoners *as well as severe mental symptoms experienced by prisoners*. This itself was related to the Milgram experiment [insert link] at Yale University [insert link] in 1963.
The BBC Experiment was led by psychologists Professor Alex Haslam (University of Exeter) [insert link] and Professor Steve Reicher (University of St Andrews) [insert link] 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.