One of my favorite bits of pop culture that started as a real part of academia is the Stanford marshmallow experiment, which was a series of psychological experiments that measured delayed gratification in young children conducted by psychologist Walter Mischel in the 1960s and 70s.
Unlike the Stanford prison experiment, the marshmallow experiment was cute and fun and involved very few institutional abuses of power, unless you count harsh lessons in pretzel/Oreo/marshmallow appropriation an abuse of power. The simple version of it (the real version was more complex and involved children actively choosing to either delay or indulge in gratification by indicating to the monitor what they wanted to do) is that you stick a young kid, usually between 3 and 6 years old, in a room with some kind of treat.