What causes seemingly good, ordinary people to go bad? In 1971, psychology professor Philip Zimbardo took a crack at that question with his infamous Stanford Prison Experiment, enlisting two dozen student volunteers as prisoners and guards in a simulated jail to examine the dark side of power.
Four and a half decades after the study spun out of control, director Kyle Patrick Alvarez's "The Stanford Prison Experiment," a narrative film created with Zimbardo's input, is bringing the story to the big screen with little poetic license taken — or required.
"Nothing in the movie is exaggerated," Zimbardo said in a recent phone interview.