462. The truth about the Stanford Prison Experiment

The Stanford Prison Experiment is one of the most famous studies in psychology, but also one of the most controversial. In this bonus episode, we look at what actually happened in the basement of Stanford University in 1971. We explore: The landscape of psychological research at the time of the study How participants were selected and assigned roles The theatrical procedure of the study The unexpected outcomes and why it was stopped early Ethical lessons around consent and researcher responsibility Why the study is so influential to our understanding of institutions, power and authority The Debunking Psychology series: HERE https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3v4MCVBZ2itiJweLFzKVmO?si=6b229ce61ffa468c Watch on Netflix: HERE https://netflix.com/thepsychologyofyour20s Follow Jemma on Instagram: @jemmasbeg https://www.instagram.com/jemmasbeg/?hl=en# Follow the podcast on Instagram: @thatpsychologypodcast https://www.instagram.com/thatpsychologypodcast/?hl=en# Subscribe on Substack: @thepsychologyofyour20s https://substack.com/@thepsychologyofyour20s For business: [email protected] mailto:[email protected] Our favourite sources: http://pdf.prisonexp.org/ijcp1973.pdf https://scholarship.richmond.edu/heroism-science/vol10/iss1/5/ https://gen.medium.com/the-lifespan-of-a-lie-d869212b1f62 The Psychology of your 20s is not a substitute for professional mental health help. If you are struggling, distressed or require personalised advice, please reach out to your doctor or a licensed psychologist. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 3:37Jemma Sbeg?

  Hello, everybody. I'm Jemma Sbeg, and welcome back to the Psychology of Your 20s, the podcast where we talk through the biggest changes, moments, and transitions of our 20s, and what they mean for our psychology.

• 3:56Jemma Sbeg?

  Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. It's so great to have you here, back for another mini-bonus episode of the show, which is part of our debunking psychology series. If you are new to this series, twice a month, we take a common psychological theory, an idea, a term, a concept that has been, I would say, a little bit misconstrued by the internet or by online chatter. And we basically go about setting the record straight. These are concepts and ideas that might not be able to, you know, be part of a one-hour-long episode, but are still really, really crucial and really, really important,

• 4:39Jemma Sbeg?

  I at least think, to know and to know the details of correctly. So far, we have done myths about the brain. We've done the theories in life of Sigmund Freud. What else? Stockholm Syndrome, personality tests, narcissism. And today, we are going to do the Stanford Prison Experiment. This is our first time during the series, zeroing in on one specific study. And I think we chose a really, really good one. There have been countless movies, countless TV shows, countless documentaries about this experiment. It is in practically every single psychology textbook under the sun. But what actually happened?

• 5:20Jemma Sbeg?

  How many of us truly know the details of this study? How it came to be, how it came to end, and the legacy? You may have also heard in the news that Netflix is planning on doing a new version of the experiment as a reality TV show. And I thought, you know what? If they're thinking of doing that, it might be time to go back and examine why that's probably not a good idea. No hate to Netflix, of course. You can't bite the hand that feeds you and all that. But I just felt like a psychological history lesson seemed rather timely. So without further ado, let's get into the Stanford Prison Experiment in all of its glory.

• 6:08Jemma Sbeg?

  So to start at the very, very beginning, after World War II, there was this weird period of time where psychologists just seemed to have a lot of permission to just do the most outrageous experiments. If it meant that we could understand better how Nazism happened, how this level of authoritarianism and violence and genocide occurred. People really wanted to know, we wanted answers about evil. We wanted to know how evil happened and how ordinary people ended up doing things that we always thought they wouldn't do.

• 6:50Jemma Sbeg?

  Essentially, people wanted to know, is this capacity to do awful things in all of us? Or were these just really awful people? So the Stanford Prison Experiment was one kind of such study that was trying to figure that out. And it was led by a man named Philip Zimbardo. He was a social psychologist at Stanford. And he was really focused, in a broader sense, on ideas of persuasion, de-individuation, the psychology of the mob mentality, the psychology of evil. Basically, he just wanted to understand, as everybody did at that time, how do good people do bad things? Or were they even good people to begin with? So this particular study took place in August 1971.

• 7:35Jemma Sbeg?

  And it was funded by the US Office of Naval Research. So, the military. And what they were really interested in was antisocial behavior, particularly in military prisons and in authority structures. According to the Stanford Prison Experiment Archive, the original purpose of the study was to understand how norms, roles, labels, uniforms, social expectations, create a prison environment, even when, even when everything should be going well. Basically, what makes a prison? Is it just four walls? Or is it what is expected of people within it? Like I said, this experiment was very, very of its time.

• 8:20Jemma Sbeg?

  Around the same time, there was another very famous set of studies by Stanley Milgram,

• 8:25Jemma Sbeg?

  where they were like called, I can't remember what they were exactly called, but they were basically studies on obedience. And in these studies, the very ordinary people had very shockingly administered what they believed were dangerous electric shocks to random people because an authority figure had told them to. And the psychology community was like, that can't possibly be right. How could this happen? Let's, we want to test this in some different environments. So Zimbardo, the creator or the founder of the Stanford Prison Experiment, wanted to go above and beyond. And he wanted to really look at what happens when one group is given power and another group is stripped of it.

• 9:09Jemma Sbeg?

  And then both groups are placed into an institution designed around control. So this is how they got participants to take place in this study. Because I think if I saw a newspaper ad that said, "We want to put you in a simulated prison environment for, I don't know how long, two weeks, and see what happens to you." And also, you might be a prisoner, you might be a guard, we can't really tell you at this stage. I would probably be like, I'm, I'm not that desperate for money. I'm, I'm okay. But a lot of people, a lot of men in the kind of Palo Alto community were interested. They advertised in this paper, the two papers, the Stanford Daily and the Palo Alto Times.

• 9:54Jemma Sbeg?

  And they said, all right, we're going to give you fifteen dollars a day, which is about a hundred and twenty dollars a day now, if you come and participate in this study. And they targeted specifically male college students. More than seventy people applied. They then interviewed those seventy people and they excluded people on the basis of medical problems, psychological difficulties, criminal records, all of that stuff. And what was left were twenty four young men, mostly healthy, mostly middle class, all Ivy League college students. And then they randomly assigned them to either be a prisoner or a prison guard. The random assignment in this situation was very, very critical. Zimbardo's argument was that the

• 10:39Jemma Sbeg?

  two groups were not fundamentally different to begin with. These people were all quite similar. These people weren't particularly sadistic. One group wasn't particularly dominant. The other group wasn't particularly submissive. They were randomly assigned. But he believed that when they were put into a specific role, that they would inhabit that role. And when specifically they were put into a position of authority, they would gladly take that authority, regardless of their initial kind of temperament. So this mock prison, where was it built? It wasn't at a prison, it was in the Stanford Psychology Department. And what they did was they closed off the lab rooms. They basically closed off a whole corridor

• 11:22Jemma Sbeg?

  of the building. And they made the rooms on that corridor cells, and then the corridor was the prison yard. And they even had a small closet. They called it the hole. It was solitary confinement. There were no windows, there were no clocks. And the researchers used cameras and they used intercoms to kind of monitor what was happening inside. The other thing they did, which I was like, that seems like, I don't, Zimbardo really, he really wanted to make this seem very real for the participants, was that they literally arrested them. So these people were not, again, they weren't criminals, they were random college students who had agreed and were getting paid to do the study. And they were kind of told, like, you just show up at this time and then we'll, we'll get started.

• 12:06Jemma Sbeg?

  And for the people who he designed prisoners, he kind of tricked them. What he actually did was he sent out a number of, um, police cars. And he kind of got the local, local police force in on the study. And he was like, I want you to arrest these people. And then I want you to read them their rights. I want you to search them. I want you to take the, take them to the police station. I want you to blindfold them. And then we'll take it from here. And the prisoners, the slash the participants, no, had no idea that was happening. Then they got to the experiment, they got to the fake prison. They were searched again, they were stripped, they were sprayed with water. They were given smocks to wear

• 12:47Jemma Sbeg?

  without underwear. They were assigned identification numbers. They were made to wear, um, a stocking cap over their hair. So it kind of made it look like they had a shaved head. He really was, he was really getting into this simulation of the prison. He really wanted it to feel like you were stripped of your identity, you were being humiliated, you were being controlled, and you were ultimately powerless. I want to really remind you of this quickly. This study was approved by an ethics board. He went to an ethics board and said, hey, guys, here's my plan. What do you think? And they were like, yeah, all right, sounds

• 13:28Jemma Sbeg?

  fine. And that was only like fifty odd years ago. There are people who are involved in this study who are very much still alive. One of them is ironically, a very well-known prison reform advocate now. And he was in his twenties when this took place. So whilst all of that was happening with the prisoners, the guards, they wore uniforms, they carry battens, they wore mirrored sunglasses, they worked in shifts. So the prisoners had to be there day and night, the guards got to leave, they rotated in and out. And they were essentially instructed to like, keep peace, keep order. They are in charge of

• 14:06Jemma Sbeg?

  this fake institution. The simulation, let's just say, it became very intense, very quickly. The participants were very distressed. They, well, they displayed a lot of symptoms of distress. That's important to say displayed, because we're going to get into that a little bit later. They were obviously very anxious. Some of them even appeared to have emotional breakdowns. And the guards became really, really punitive. They would, really did start to humiliate the participants. They just started to disrupt and deprive them of sleep.

• 14:46Jemma Sbeg?

  They became very insistent on very arbitrary rules. And it quickly became apparent that it was a bit of a mess. Like, this was really going the way that they expected, but a lot faster than they expected it to. The craziest part of this, this study was supposed to last two weeks. These people were paid for fourteen days. It ended after just six. When the experiment is reported, often it's that the guards became so abusive and the prisoners became so distressed that Zimbardo, he just put a stop to the experiment. That is only partly true. Zimbardo himself had actually taken on the role of a prison superintendent.

• 15:31Jemma Sbeg?

  He was not just observing from the outside at a detached kind of distance. He wasn't just watching through the cameras. He had actually positioned himself within the institution that he had created. How the experiment ended in actual fact was that this woman, her name was Christina Maslach, she was a PhD at the time. Later, she became Zimbardo's wife, which is another thing. But she was visiting him at work, I guess. And she was visiting the experiment and she walked in and she was so disturbed by what she saw that in the moment she challenged Zimbardo directly and was essentially like, you don't

• 16:12Jemma Sbeg?

  know what you have created. This is a terrible idea. This is completely unethical. You need to stop. And she kind of cut through a lot of the male ego as like this voice of reason. This is where the Stanford Prison Experiment really gets his notoriety, as being more than just a study. And actually about the ethics of research itself, right? It is so shocking that this was allowed to happen. I think that's why people are so fascinated by it. One of the biggest ethical criticisms of this study is that participants were exposed to significant psychological harm. A lot of the participants became very distressed, despondent, scared. And yeah, they technically agreed to be part of the

• 16:56Jemma Sbeg?

  study. They were paid. But would they have agreed if they knew the full extent of it? What they realized afterwards, when people were analyzing and reading into the study protocol, was that Zimbardo didn't really properly inform them. He didn't really tell them the extent to what they were going to endure. And so he actually didn't obtain informed consent. And that is one of the most critical things you need to obtain, you need to have before you, before you conduct any kind of psychological experimentation. There was also that huge conflict in roles. As I mentioned, Zimbardo was both the lead researcher and he himself was playing a role in the fake prison. He was the prison superintendent,

• 17:39Jemma Sbeg?

  meaning that the person responsible for protecting the participants was also invested in maintaining the prison simulation and also was very, very susceptible to getting carried away and experiencing the same kind of behavioral changes that he was trying to observe in other people as a neutral party, as a neutral researcher. So it really, really blurred the lines between observation and participation. I don't know whether he included this in his ethics application. To be honest, again, I don't know how the heck this got approved. But I would assume that that would be a major, major red flag if a researcher

• 18:20Jemma Sbeg?

  was also essentially experimenting on themselves as they experiment on other people. Even afterwards, Zimbardo kind of never fully took responsibility for what happened. He did become quite a strong research ethics advocate, but kind of in the way of like, look at this, I became such, I was a victim. Like, can you see that if this happened to me, this could happen to anyone? We need people to tell us not to do this stuff. And people are kind of like, I think most people know, most people don't want to play prison with a bunch of people who they have authority over. And they don't, you know what I mean? Like, I think a lot of people know not to do that and to not give people weapons and

• 19:04Jemma Sbeg?

  to not arrest them in the middle of the night. And we don't really need a big, higher power body to tell us that. But I guess he said, we do. The study was also subject to a few Controversies around its method as well. For decades, the Stanford Prison Experiment was treated as this prime example of how people internalize oppressive roles. Anybody could do this. You and me, if we were put in the same position, this would happen to us. Give someone the role of god, they will quickly become a god. They will quickly become cruel. Later, though, scholars kind of argued that the interpretation of this was way too simple.

• 19:47Jemma Sbeg?

  Firstly, the study was done on exclusively Ivy League men who were, let's be real, probably more likely than the average person to be a bit of a rule follower. Right? They got, they got into Stanford. There was obviously some kind of rule and some kind of plan and some kind of system that they understood and that they played by. A further 2019 paper, um, that also examined a lot of the deeper archives and interviews, claimed that there was also evidence that the researchers, not just Zimbardo, but some of the other researchers who were present, were encouraging a certain kind of behavior. They were trying to create a certain kind of result.

• 20:29Jemma Sbeg?

  And so as a result of that, they got a lot of, like, people did behave with cruelty. They did behave sometimes with punitive violence. But were they doing that because that was their natural instinct? Or were they doing that because there were these people saying, this is what we expect to see, deliver that. This is what we want you to do. This is what we thought you would happen. And that's not happening, so you're disappointing us. Basically, were the expectations of the researchers actually shifting the results? If you put somebody in a lab coat in a room who has authority, who was a researcher or a lecturer, and you are just a student, are you just going to follow along with what they are saying because you yourself are worried about some kind of form of punishment?

• 21:14Jemma Sbeg?

  Something else really interesting is also seen in how the participants responded after the study, a few years down the line. And I want to talk about that after this short break.

• 21:29Jemma Sbeg?

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• 26:18Jemma Sbeg?

  So, Zimbardo, after this study came out and after people were a little bit shocked, to say the least, he argued that there was no evidence of long-term harm. He was like, nothing, these guys were fine. They went home, they had some food, they were, they were good. Like, they knew it was an experiment, everything was happy and all was well. What a lot of people point out is that, how would he know? Because something that Zimbardo didn't do was that he didn't properly debrief his participants. The prisoners' accounts post-study actually highlight a really complex mix of genuine

• 27:00Jemma Sbeg?

  distress and also performed distress that confused them and made them really question what kind of people they were. On one hand, some of the men were truly messed up by the environment. You know, imagine being stripped of your name, forced into a uniform, and then when you finally look a researcher in the eye and you ask to go home, they tell you, no. There was a part of this that was a little bit of a hostage imprisonment situation. And that creates a very terrifying feeling of, of helplessness. And for a few of these guys, that anxiety and that resentment lasted for years. They felt like they were genuinely trapped in a lawless society. They felt like, I cannot believe that at an institution like Stanford, this was allowed

• 27:45Jemma Sbeg?

  to take place. But on the other hand, some of these men basically said, I was just performing. I was just performing. Really, I didn't feel anything. I was just doing what I was told to do. And people are really torn between whether they are telling the truth or whether they are just saying that because some part of their humanity, their personality, their sense of self was revealed to them, and they didn't like it. It's a lot easier to say, I was just playing the role that was assigned to me, I knew it was fake the whole time, rather than, oh no, like, I really fell under the trance, and what this revealed about me was something that I didn't really like.

• 28:31Jemma Sbeg?

  So there's an example of this that I think is important. That is the example of this man called Douglas Corpey. So in the original recordings of the study, his reaction was probably one of the most famous. He was captured screaming, he was having an hysterical breakdown on the audio tapes. Those audio tapes went like the equivalent of viral back in 1970, a lot of people heard them. Years later, though, he said, no, I was fine. I wasn't having a psychotic break. I was just playing pretend. He essentially said, you know, I was a college kid, um, my exams are coming up, I kind of realized that, oh, I probably can't be here for two weeks, I need to study. But because the researchers wouldn't let him leave, he realized his only ticket out

• 29:15Jemma Sbeg?

  was to put on a massive performance. He literally said, like, I just needed to make sure that the clinicians believed that I was going crazy so I could get out of there. That's a tricky thing because that does show what people will do when they are in a situation they don't want to be in. They will perform and act the way that we want them to. But it also kind of undercuts, I don't know, it's complicated because then the fact that he knew he was acting means that we probably know that the guards maybe did also feel and know that they were acting a little bit. So how much of the behaviour was real versus performed?

• 29:55Jemma Sbeg?

  How much of it as well was, again, the social desirability effect before and after? I'm acting this way to make somebody happy, i.e. the researchers, and then afterwards, I'm telling a certain narrative of how I felt in the experiment so that I can keep up the facade of the reality I want to believe, that being, no, I didn't go crazy, I'm actually totally fine, or, no, I'm not actually evil, I was just performing because it was an experiment. So would we get the same results today? Maybe not. I think that's what everybody is interested in watching when this Netflix series comes out. Like, these people know they're being filmed. Are we going to see the same reactions? I also think this study, the original, had twenty-four

• 30:37Jemma Sbeg?

  male college students as a participants. They were the same age, they were, I'm pretty sure all of them or the majority of them were white, they were relatively affluent, and there was no control group, there was no control group. So people say, and I think this is a fair point, we look at the Stanford Prison Experiment, we think it says something deeper about humanity. In some respect, it does, but it really just says something deeper about that part of humanity. One of the big challenges that people bring up is why and how would this study change if women were involved? The whole reason the study ended was because a woman walked in and was like,

• 31:17Jemma Sbeg?

  this is ridiculous, this is crazy, like, what are you doing? So if we were to do a similar study with all women, would we see the same results? If we were to do a similar study with people who weren't in college, or people who were older, or people who were from different backgrounds, would we see the same things? People have tried, and it's been very difficult to replicate the original findings of Zimbardo's study, primarily as well because nobody wants us to do that again. So the ethics hurdles that need to be crossed over are just too high for somebody to do this study exactly as it was done in the past once more. For Zimbardo,

• 32:01Jemma Sbeg?

  the legacy of this study was basically his entire legacy. He continued to write about it, he continued to speak about it, he continued to give it, give the study as an example of the widespread availability or presence of evil and institutional behaviour. He didn't ever really acknowledge that he had maybe done the wrong thing. He would write these long articles and these long rebuttals that, in the end, yes, his experiment may or may not have harmed people, but it was worth it. It was worth it because we learnt so much. It was worth it because that is a study that could never be done again, nobody would allow it,

• 32:43Jemma Sbeg?

  so thank God we did it at least once, and we tried it and we saw what we could find. Some people have argued that, you know, maybe he's right. Maybe a study like that had to be done in order for psychology and in order for these scientific communities to be like, we can't just do any experiment we want to do. We need to have rules, we need to have guidelines. You know, we needed experiments like this one and like the Obedian studies to veer us back onto a safe, nice, nice path. I don't know, I feel like maybe we didn't, but whatever you think of the study, it does have a huge cultural legacy. Firstly, it led to a great deal of prison

• 33:26Jemma Sbeg?

  reform discussions. As I said, one of the men involved is now a huge prison reform advocate, probably because he saw with his own two eyes how toxic this could become, and it massively popularised the concept of situational power and the idea that ordinary people placed in a powerful institution or situation can behave in ways that we never would have predicted. When we think about dictators, billionaires, tech, AI geniuses, who these days seem like hell-bent on destroying the world and being powerful and being important, and, you know, everybody says they were once these nice innocent kids, they, they never would have heard a fly. Is this what's happening? Is there a level of power that no human should ever have access

• 34:10Jemma Sbeg?

  to, no matter what, because it will turn them into a bit of a beast? Or are some people just born bad? Were these people always going to be like that regardless of the money or the power that they had access to? It's a big debate. And that's why I think people continue to be fascinated by this study because of what it says about us and the lingering question we all have, which is, what would I have done? What would I have done, really, if I was in that study? We all think that we'd be able to stand up and say, this is really wrong, let's stop this right now. We all think that we wouldn't succumb to like the power trip, but I'm sure many of those men thought that as well, and a lot of those guys would have thought, that never would be me, how did, like, how could Nazism happen? How could people do

• 34:54Jemma Sbeg?

  such evil things? And then it seems as if they were doing evil things, even if they pretend or they say they were acting, the situation still created that reaction of, of needing to act. Personally, this might sound controversial, but if we could do away with all of the ethical concerns, I would like to see this study done on women. Really, I would. I, I think it would have happened very, very differently. It's never going to happen, but if there was another, like, but if they did, I think it would be really interesting to see whether this is, everyone could be, everyone who was in this situation could act this way, or whether it

• 35:39Jemma Sbeg?

  is men specifically of a certain age and a certain demographic who will act this way, and of a certain ambition level, should I say. If we had a bunch of like women or a bunch of people who perhaps weren't that hell-bent on being successful or being a good student, like, would we see the same thing? I don't know. I guess we'll never know. I would, I would love to see it. I'll be watching that Netflix show, if it ever happens, very closely, because I think, yeah, I think it will, I don't know, I think it will bring about a lot of conclusions that, that were left open-ended by this study, like the performance element, the social

• 36:19Jemma Sbeg?

  desirability element, and the gendered element as well. That is all I have time for. Thank you for listening. If you liked this debunking psychology episode and you like episodes that have a bit more history to them, we have a whole Spotify playlist of these kinds of episodes for you to binge. There's episodes on personality tests, Freud, Stockholm Syndrome, dopamine, narcissism, I, there's just so much there. Honestly, I always, I get to that, I get to like five and I forget all the other ones we've done, but I will leave a link in the description. I would very much recommend you check it out. Thank you to our researcher, Libby, for her assistance with this episode. Make sure that you are following us on Instagram

• 37:00Jemma Sbeg?

  at That Psychology Podcast if you want more content like this, or you can follow us on Substack, and if you haven't yet, press subscribe, press follow wherever you are listening, and please leave us a five-star review if you learnt even one thing from today's episode, or if you feel called to do so. And until next time, be safe, be kind, be gentle to yourself. We will talk very, very soon.

• 37:26Jemma Sbeg?

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• 38:51Jemma Sbeg?

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