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The participants in the Stanford Prison Experiment weren't Stanford students. I'm not sure any of them were. They were selected by Zimbardo from responses to an

• gojomo 14y ago
  You're right that they may not have been exclusively Stanford students. But they were recruited through city and campus newspapers, limited to male college students who were in Palo Alto for the last two weeks of August 1971, and had to report to an on-campus location to sign up. I've seen definitive references that some were Stanford students, and my guess under those conditions would be that most were. But even if most were not: a cohort of 24 male college students (23 white; 1 asian) in 1971 was not representative of society at large. Those in comfortable Palo Alto for the last 2 weeks of summer break, even less representative. And those who arrived on campus in response to a classified ad for paid volunteers "needed for psychological study of prison life", less representative again. (As one of the followup studies footnoted in Wikipedia discovered, the mere presence of the "study of prison life" phrase in the recruitment ad changes what kind of people respond.)