The Stanford Prison Experiment: What went wrong in the experiment that horrified the world?

A new three-part Nat Geo series titled "The Stanford Prison Experiment: Unlocking the Truth" takes a closer look at what happened at one of the 20th century's most infamous academic researches. It goes against the description of what went on in the experiment as told by the main researcher and repeated over and over again in media for over 50 years. 

The original 1971 experiment, conducted by Stanford University psychologist Philip Zimbardo, recruited two dozen male college students for a study advertised as "a psychological study of prison life," aiming to explore power, authority, and the human psyche. The basement of a Stanford University building was transformed into a makeshift prison for the study. Zimbardo randomly divided students into guards and prisoners in a simulated prison environment for six days.

The experiment quickly went awry. The study turned dark almost immediately, as guards, drunk on power, mocked, humiliated, and cruelly punished the prisoners, leading to the guards' descent into brutality and causing prisoners to have breakdowns during the experiment. Philip Zimbardo paid some students for two weeks of work to participate in the experiment, but he had to shut down the study early, even though it was supposed to run for two weeks, partly due to a visit from his girlfriend.

The findings of the Stanford Prison Experiment caused a media sensation, proving that circumstances can make normal people act like tyrants, a concept Zimbardo called "the power of the situation," and it has become a staple in psychology courses and pop culture as a warning about how quickly people can become oppressive under the right conditions. However, the experiment has received significant criticism about its ethics and methodology.

The docuseries revisits the experiment contradicting Zimbardo's account.

Director Juliette Eisner started working on the documentary during the pandemic. She began looking at old psychological studies exploring human nature and became fascinated by the Stanford Prison Experiment. Her interest was heightened by the summer protests in 2020 concerning police brutality. "I wanted to hear from those people," she told Ars Technica. Eisner found that the original subjects were very hard to find, but she persevered and tracked most of them down. She said, "Every single time they picked up the phone, they were like, 'Oh, I'm so glad you called. Nobody has called me in 50 years. And by the way, everything you think you know about this study is wrong,' or 'The story is not what it seems.'"

Over the course of making the documentary, Eisner's focus shifted to the power of storytelling. "Even when stories are riddled with lies or manipulations, they can still capture our imaginations in ways that we should maybe be wary of sometimes," she said. She particularly noted this caution when stories "come out of the mouth of somebody who is such a showman, such an entertainer."

The docuseries includes candid interviews with former participants, providing a new angle on the experiment's ethical ambiguities and its complex psychological impact. Dave Eshleman, the guard nicknamed "John Wayne," has said he was an actor and saw the experiment as a role, recalling that he adopted a "mean guard" persona to meet Dr. Philip Zimbardo's expectations. Eshleman shared, "After the first day, I sensed that, unless things changed, the experiment would not succeed," explaining that he felt compelled to push boundaries.

Clay Ramsay, assigned the role of a prisoner, was shocked by the intense psychological strain he endured. Ramsay decided to go on a hunger strike out of frustration with what he saw as the experiment's exploitative nature. He shared, "I did that only because I was certain that I had to create some kind of fear of consequences in the experimenters." Ramsay feels that much of the trauma came not from the experiment itself but from its ongoing notoriety and how Zimbardo used their experiences to bolster his career.

Participants were explicitly guided into behaviors that fit Zimbardo's vision for the study, and Eshleman notes that he and other subjects perceived Zimbardo's goal of indicting the carceral system, leading them to behave in ways that supported that aim. Zimbardo's extensive instructions and dual role as both designer and "warden" gave him immense authority, making it unclear whether the guards should see themselves as subjects of the experiment or as confederates in running it.

Thibault Le Texier, a French researcher who has worked to debunk the experiment, identified additional problems with the study by scrutinizing Zimbardo's archives. He suggests that the lessons drawn from such studies need revisiting and accuses Zimbardo of intentionally misrepresenting the experiment for personal gain.

Psychologists have been critiquing the Stanford Prison Experiment since it became part of the discourse, but their points have mostly failed to penetrate public consciousness. In 2007, psychologists Thomas Carnahan and Sam McFarland found that the presence of the words "prison life" in the ad narrowed the field of potential participants to those with higher levels of aggressiveness, authoritarianism, Machiavellianism, narcissism, and social dominance, and lower on measures of empathy and altruism.

Zimbardo's narrative has shifted over the years, continuing to justify the study's design and defending the outcomes as genuine psychological responses to authority. Eshleman believes his portrayal of a brutal guard was a performance shaped by the perceived demands of the experiment's leaders. He describes feeling like part of the research team rather than just a subject, believing it was his responsibility to ensure the experiment's success, and he adopted an aggressive stance because he felt it would help Zimbardo achieve his goals.

Ramsay feels that the experiment's legacy has been shaped by selective retellings that favor Zimbardo's version of events. He points out that the real value of the documentary is in exposing how scientific mythologies are constructed and maintained. Eshleman and Ramsay's perspectives suggest that the real lesson of the Stanford Prison Experiment lies in how behaviors can be shaped by authority figures and structures.

The docuseries "The Stanford Prison Experiment: Unlocking the Truth" is now streaming on Disney+, which shows clips of Zimbardo promoting his findings decades after the experiment, including appearances on MSNBC, The Daily Show, and a TED Talk.

Sources: Ars Technica, TIME Magazine, Forbes, The Daily Beast, Yahoo News

This article was written in collaboration with generative AI company Alchemiq