Perhaps psychology experts could chime in here: I've always been a little skeptical of the Stanford Prison Experiment's findings. It was such a complex experiment whose results might have been drastically affected by each participant knowing that they are the objects of study, the experimenter playing the "warden", people playing along with the game, etc.

I guess I suspect some of the conclusions may be true, but I've never really bought that the experiment itself provided good evidence for them.