> LEVITT: Yeah, he said it was real, too. But a lot of times what I’ve found is that that when I try to do experiments as an economist that work great for psychologists, I cannot get them to work. And I really have come to believe that it’s because the people in the study are so keen on doing what the researcher wants them to do, and they think that the psychologist wants them to behave in one way, and they think the economist wants them to behave in a different way, and so it’s hard to reproduce some of those psychological findings. I’d love to do the prison study, and I’d love to do it in a way that was unbiased. And I just, it’s one thing, I would bet a lot of money that things wouldn’t turn out the way that they did in that old Zimbardo study.
> DUBNER: Well, you know, let me read you, here’s what a couple of the volunteers who played guards back then 40-some years ago. Here’s what they said recently. One said that he was playing a role from the outset trying to create drama to quote, “give the researchers something to work with.” And another guard said, “I didn’t think it was ever meant to go the full two weeks. I think Zimbardo wanted to create a dramatic crescendo and then end it as quickly as possible. I felt that throughout the experiment, he knew what he wanted and tried to shape the experiment by how it was constructed and how it played out to fit the conclusion that he had already worked out. He wanted to be able to say that college students, people from middle-class backgrounds, that people will turn on each other just because they are given a role and given power.”
> LEVITT: So people won’t believe me, I have never heard those quotes, I didn’t know anyone else thought that way, what I said before was just my intuition that that was not human behavior what got revealed in those studies.
To give credit where it's due, Levitt basically made a whole career out of showing the replication problems of psychology experiments.