The main conclusion commonly attributed to the Stanford Prison Experiment is that the social roles and the situational forces of a structured prison environment can strongly shape behavior, leading normal, healthy individuals to conform to abusive or submissive roles. In short, the study argued that situational context can exert a powerful influence on how people think, feel, and act, sometimes more than their individual personality traits. This conclusion has been both influential and highly controversial, and subsequent evaluations have raised questions about methodology, ethics, interpretation, and the degree to which the results generalize.