The zoo master

Big Brother, Survivor, and now Jailbreak. Viewers can’t get enough “reality TV”. And the programme makers have plenty of licence to film the participants in extreme social situations. Academics would love to do “reality experiments” because there’s no other way of learning about some human behaviours. But thirty years ago some of those experiments proved a little too real and ended up effectively banned by ethics committees. So you’d expect Philip Zimbardo, psychology professor at Stanford University and a pioneer of such experiments, to envy TV. No need. Zimbardo is now running his own reality experiments in a forthcoming…