Stephanie Hepburn is a writer in New Orleans. She is the editor in chief of #CrisisTalk. You can reach her at .
If you’ve taken Psychology 101, you’ve likely heard of the Stanford Prison Experiment, a filmed and audio-recorded psychology study conducted by famed psychologist Philip Zimbardo in 1971. Zimbardo randomly assigned male college students to be prisoners or guards in a makeshift prison in the basement of Stanford University’s psychology department. Within a week, conditions deteriorated. Guards subjected prisoners to increasingly humiliating drills and used sleep deprivation tactics. They removed prisoners’ mattresses, their blankets and, at times, their clothing.
When Douglas Korpi, Prisoner 8612, mounted a rebellion, guards took his smock and that of his cellmate and chained the naked men together. Using a screw, Korpi picked the lock of their cell. Guards found them hobbling down the hallway trying to escape. To stop them, a guard sprayed the two men with skin-chilling carbon dioxide from a fire extinguisher. As further punishment, they put Korpi in “the hole,” a utility closet turned solitary confinement.
Originally, the study was supposed to last two weeks, but things had gone so terribly amuck that Zimbardo (who died in October at age 91) ended the study not even halfway through.
Zimbardo said the study showed that “these good boys were behaving sadistically if they were guards,” revealing the permeability between good and evil. That people can go from moral to corrupt toward others in certain situations, a phenomenon he later called the “Lucifer Effect.” In 2004, he testified as an expert witness, using this argument in defense of former U.S. Army Reserve Staff Sgt. Ivan “Chip” Frederick, who pleaded guilty to assault, conspiracy, dereliction of duty, committing an indecent act and maltreatment of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib.
The Stanford Prison Experiment is well known for its ethical issues, which highlighted the need for stricter ethical guidelines and oversight in research on human subjects and contributed to the establishment of Institutional Review Boards, but also for what it taught us about how situations can influence our behavior.
A new National Geographic documentary series streaming on Hulu and Disney+ turns what people know about the Stanford Prison Experiment on its head, suggesting it was more myth than science. Directed by Juliet Eisner, “The Stanford Prison Experiment: Unlocking the Truth” features new interviews with the men who volunteered to be Zimbardo’s guards and prisoners, Zimbardo himself and Thibault le Texier, a French researcher who found discrepancies between the established narrative and the archive.
In the study’s archives, le Texier discovered that the guards were trained, contradicting Zimbardo’s claims that the young men had responded spontaneously to the prison scenario. Le Texier wrote in American Psychologist that during orientation, Zimbardo told the guards he had “a grant to study the conditions which lead to mob behavior, violence, loss of identity, feelings of anonymity…” “[E]ssentially we’re setting up a physical prison here to study what that does and those are some of the variables that we’ve discovered are current in prisons, those are some of the psychological barriers. And we want to recreate in our prison that psychological environment.”
Zimbardo tells the guards that while there are some limits, he, his staff and the guards can create boredom, frustration and fear. “We can create a notion of arbitrariness that their life is totally controlled by us, by the system, you, me, Jaffe and they’ll have no privacy at all,” he says. He adds that the barred cells will have constant surveillance. Nothing the prisoners do will go unobserved. “They have no freedom of action. They can do nothing or say nothing that we don’t permit.”
He goes on, saying they’ll strip the prisoners of their individuality by having them wear uniforms — the men wore a smock, no underwear, a chain on their right ankle and nylon over their hair to simulate a shaved head — and refer to them only by number.
“What all of this leads to is a sense of powerlessness. That is, we have total power in the situation and they have none, and the question is what will they do to try to gain some individuality, to gain some freedom, to gain some privacy, to essentially work against us to regain some of what they have now — freely moving outside — and we’re going to take away whatever freedom or any privacy they have.”
What Zimbardo didn’t share with the guards is how he would also be studying their reactions to the arbitrary power they’d been suddenly given.
In the three-part docuseries, Clay Ramsay, Prisoner 416, called the study the ancestor of reality television. However, he told CrisisTalk that doesn’t diminish his imprisonment in the “Zimbardo schema.” “How was I supposed to get out?” he said. “I was a prisoner in a prison without regulations.” He expressed similar sentiments two months after the study, telling the reporter he didn’t view what transpired as an experiment or simulation. “It was just a prison that was run by psychologists instead of run by the state,” he said.
“I began to feel that identity, the person that I was that had decided to go to prison, was distant from me, was remote, until finally I wasn’t that. I was 416. I was really my number. And 416 was going to have to decide what to do.”
Today, Ramsay calls the Stanford Prison Experiment a cultural object, one he’s embedded in, whether he wants to be or not. For years, Zimbardo tugged participants back into his orbit to take part in publicity for the study but Ramsay says the men didn’t have a voice in the narrative until recently. “Until le Texier began his work in 2016, there’s nothing we could say to supersede the authority of a tenured psychology professor at Stanford University,” he said. “We were part of the circus, but that was it.”
For these young men, it all started with a newspaper ad: “Male college students needed for psychological study of prison life. $15 per day for 1-2 weeks beginning August 14. For further information and applications, come to Room 248 Jordan Hall Stanford U.” Ramsay had already volunteered for some of the psychology experiments proliferating on campus and saw the experiment as an opportunity for room and board and to earn money. He thought he’d use the downtime to meditate.
Even before the study began, Zimbardo stirred publicity by inviting KRON-TV to film the prisoner arrests by a uniformed Palo Alto police officer, which it did. The prisoners were taken in the back of a police car to the police station for booking, where they were fingerprinted and blindfolded before being transported to the basement of Stanford’s psychology building. Once at the prison, the men were stripped naked, deloused and put into a uniform before being placed in their cells.
On the second day of the experiment, Zimbardo sent out a press release saying nine students were imprisoned in the basement of Jordan Hall. He said he was the prison’s superintendent and David Jaffe, his undergraduate research assistant, the warden. The experiment’s objective, he explained, was to understand what goes into “creating and maintaining a prison environment” and the effect of the prison experience on all involved, including “the prisoners, guards and power establishment.”
“One prisoner is already begging to be released,” Zimbardo wrote. “He will see a psychiatrist and be given a medical parole if he is not malingering. One of the guards refused to continue because he said ‘it was too heavy,’ the other guards got too much into it.” He is likely referring to Korpi as the prisoner wanting out of the study. Guards had put him in solitary confinement and Korpi began screaming that he was “burning up inside” and couldn’t “take it anymore.”
Zimbardo had told the men they could only leave for medical or psychiatric reasons. “I think they really believed they can’t leave,” he told Jaffe and other staff. At one point, they discussed planting a girlfriend for one of the guards — Dave Eshelman, who prisoners called John Wayne — and putting rats in the hallways. Zimbardo said doing so wouldn’t be unsanitary but that albino rats bite if provoked. He and his staff seem concerned the study would end early.
“If nothing happens, it will end,” said Zimbardo. “If too much happens, it will end.”
After Korpi appeared to have a mental health crisis, Zimbardo released him. The next day, rumors circulated that Korpi had faked his distress and planned to disrupt the study by breaking into the prison with friends. In an 88-page narration of the study, Zimbardo said he asked the Sergeant of the Palo Alto Police Department if he could transfer “all our prisoners” to the department’s old jail. The request was denied.
Ramsay took Korpi’s place. Within 36 hours, he, too, wanted out.
“I thought to myself, ‘Is this what I would call an experiment?’” Ramsay said in the docuseries. “It is just a mess. I began to think about how I could get myself released and at that point, I had the idea of a hunger strike.” His refusal to eat angered the guards. They put him in “the hole” as punishment.
Ramsay suspected early on that the study wasn’t scientifically sound. “If there was a research design, I couldn’t see any elements of it,” he told CrisisTalk. What convinced him, though, was when he went before the parole board. The room was dark with a single light directed at him, “like an interrogation in a 1940s Hollywood movie.”
“There were two experimenters and one person I later figured out must have been their prison consultant, and they were all going in different directions and clearly didn’t know what each other were going to do next. I came out of that convinced that there was no real plan behind this that you could dignify with the term experiment.”
Ramsay says Zimbardo ran with unproven postulation. “He was working on the basis of a certain theory of human nature that people are infinitely malleable [to] environments and cues.” This gave way to the notion that particular systems are problematic and people are helplessly affected by those systems’ influences, diminishing their culpability.
In 2004, Zimbardo testified as an expert witness in the defense of former U.S. Army Reserve Staff Sgt. Ivan “Chip” Frederick. Frederick served about three years of an eight-year sentence for his role in abusing Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison.
“This is as good as a guy gets,” Zimbardo said in the docuseries. “He was a good father, a good husband. I said, ‘Your honor, this is an extension of the prison study. Chip Frederick never would have done any of this had he not been put in that night shift. Everybody who was put in that basement at night was corrupted.
“What he did was awful but I was able to reduce his sentence. And then I decided I would write a book about it. I called it the Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil.”
Zimbardo did respond to criticism of the Stanford Prison Experiment, including that of le Texier, in a statement: “In this response to my critics, I hereby assert that none of these criticisms present any substantial evidence that alters the [Stanford Prison Experiment] main conclusion concerning the importance of understanding how systemic and situational forces can operate to influence individual behavior in negative or positive directions, often without our personal awareness.”
In the National Geographic docuseries, he calls the study a “demonstration, where right and wrong, reality and illusion, is all jumbled.” “And it’s up to the audience to pull it apart because the playwright just gives you all this material and you have to say what’s real, what’s not true, what’s true, what’s false.”
People in mental health crisis are particularly vulnerable to harm while incarcerated. They are also more likely to be killed by an on-duty police officer, with the Washington Post police shooting database reporting that 20% of those killed were identified as having a mental illness.
For over half a century, the Stanford Prison Experiment has been invoked in explaining a wide range of abusive behavior in the carceral system, including police brutality. Zimbardo himself draws this parallel in a 2015 interview with Tribecafilms.com following the release of “The Stanford Prison Experiment,” a film he co-wrote. “It’s not just the uniform that transforms people,” he said. “Look at the differences between policemen and firemen…cops don’t have the same sense of family or camaraderie. Younger cops don’t feel they can go to older cops and say, ‘Hey, I’m not sure what I should do in this situation — what would you do?’” “To me, there’s a fundamental difference there. It’s not something where you put somebody in a uniform and give them power and they abuse it.”
Ramsay says he feels an ongoing responsibility to shed light on the study’s lack of scientific validity. “I disagreed in my 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s — I disagree with what [Zimbardo said was] the outcome,” he said. “It has no scientific value, it’s a cultural object, and that has been very misleading for many people.”
