It all begins as a study on the psychology of prison life led by Stanford psychology professor Dr. Philip Zimbardo. 24 volunteers - 12 guards and 12 prisoners - have agreed to spend the next two weeks recreating life in a correctional facility. Normal people can become monsters, given the right situation, that's the standard narrative of the Stanford Prison Experiment, one of the most famous psychological experiments of all time. But what if the cause of its participants' cruel behavior wasn't what we've always been told?
Human society is incredibly complex, and the duelling forces pushing us to conform and also to express our individuality are both necessary. Other people can influence us in good ways and in not-so-good ways. Michael Stevens takes a look into the human urge to conform and just how strong it is against our own beliefs and sense of selves.
Everywhere you go, you generate a cloud of data. You're trailing data, everything that you do is producing data. And then there are computers looking at that data that are learning, and these computers are essentially trying to serve you better. They're trying to personalize things to you. They're trying to adapt the world to you. So on the one hand, this is great, because the world will get adapted to you without you even having to explicitly adapt it. There's also a danger, because the entities in the companies that are in control of those algorithms don't necessarily have the same goals as you, and this is where I think people need to be aware that, what's going on, so they can have more control over it. We came into this new world thinking that we were users of social media and search engines. It didn't occur to us that social media and search engines were actually using us.
We're going to see if forcing your facial expression can change the way you feel. If you remove the ability to make facial expressions with botox, will it affect how the people perceive emotions in them? How do facial expressions affect emotion, and how does emotion affect facial expressions? Michael Stevens finds out when he explores the face.
This episode looks at a group of black survivalists. British Buzzfeed correspondent Bim Adewunmi looks at an unusual group of doomsday preppers who don't fit the normal stereotype for that group. She interviews people of color who train themselves to prepare for disaster.
Around the world, food allergies are surging to near-epidemic levels. Medicine is just beginning to understand why some people react to seemingly harmless foods. Scientists race to understand what's changed in our bodies, while farmers and chefs contend with new challenges.
But what if the cause of its participants' cruel behavior wasn't what we've always been told?