Selects: How the Stanford Prison Experiment Worked
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Hey, order up. Small Business Saturday is right around the corner. And so is that shop you've been meaning to check out. On November 30th, support your local community by shopping small on Small Business Saturday. Founded by American Express. Hi, everybody. Chuck here. Hope you're having a great day. Hope you're having a great weekend. I'm thinking about you, each one of you individually. I'm thinking about you. I know where you live. I'm standing right behind you. Actually, I'm just kidding. But I hope you're doing well. This one goes back to July 5th.

2018. It's a good one. I think I picked this one because I had just recently seen the movie on the Stanford Prison Experiment. The movie...

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.com.

Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and this is Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And Jerry's over there. So why don't you pull up a chair, kick back, and tell us about your problems. Because this is psychology stuff. We should just call this episode the Stanford Prison...

experiment, a.k.a. perhaps the hackiest experiment of all time, and it's really not an experiment anyway. No, but it's the most famous psychology experiment ever. Yeah, I got kind of ticked off while I was researching this. Yeah, you should, man. Because I used to think it was cool, like, oh, man, what a cool experiment. Yeah, everybody's evil at its core. But, yeah, then I researched it, and I was like, this is a bunch of B.S.,

All of it. This is one of the worst executed experiments I've ever heard of. That is so funny because while I was researching this, I was like, I'm going to have to keep it together. Maybe at the end I can really go off or whatever. Yeah, let's go off at the beginning. That's great, man. Yeah. I watched the movie today too. The 2015 one? Yeah. How was Billy Crudup? Because I loved him in Almost Famous. Well, I'm a fan. He was good.

But, like, I don't know, the movie, A, was pretty sensationalized as far as the violence. Like, they showed a lot of straight-up physical violence in the movie, which supposedly didn't occur. Right. Like, beating them with billy clubs and hog-tying them and, like, real violence. Hollywood. Actually, these days I should say Atlanta. Yeah. Yeah.

Yollywood is what they call it. Oh, there you go. Perfect. That's perfect. That sounds like a Norman Reedus creation. Yeah, it might have been. Shout out to Norman Reedus. And then, what was I saying? Oh, I don't feel like it came down hard enough on this Yahoo. What was the guy's name? Zimbardo. Yeah, Zimbardo for just...

doing a very poor job at crafting a supposedly scientific experiment. No, he was like the driving force behind that movie getting made. Apparently he'd been trying to get a movie made in America. He seems to be a pretty shameless self-promoter. For decades, yes. Yeah. It's not a good quality in a social psychologist. No. So we're going to see... I guess we'll let the cat out of the bag, but we shall see that...

The Stanford Prison Experiment, one of the most famous experiments in the annals of psychology, is not an experiment at all. No. Its findings are wide open to interpretation. Yeah. And it was conducted by a showman, basically. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, you know it's a red flag when you don't publish your findings in a medical journal. You publish them in New York. Was it New York Magazine? New York Times Magazine. Hodgman's rag. Well, a great rag, but that's not the place to go publish scientific findings. No, peer-reviewed journals are. Yeah. And they circumvented that. Yeah, for very good reasons. All right, so let's talk about the outline. So let's go back to the beginning, right? Yeah, back to the year of my birth.

1971. Wow. And Stanford, at Stanford University. Sure. Which is what, Palo Alto? Yeah. Go. Fighting sequoias. What is there? They have like a big old sequoia on their logo. I think it's like a, and then they have a sequoia with its fists up. Or is that a leprechaun? Oh, that's Notre Dame I'm thinking of.

I do feel like it has something to do with trees. Chuck's looking it up, everybody, so let me stop. It is a tree. The Stanford tree? I don't know what the mascot is, but there's definitely a tree associated. No, I looked it up. The Stanford tree. Oh, okay. Cool. And the first question is, why is it a tree? Uh-huh. What's the answer? Well, I mean, I'm sure it's just because of where it is in California, but...

That doesn't answer the real question, which is why would you have a tree? Right. Philip Zimbardo's sitting there like, quit stalling. Get to the heckling. He's still around. Yeah, he is. All right, we're at Stanford. It's 1971. Yeah, we're actually in the basement of one of the buildings at Stanford University. I think like Campbell Hall or something like that. And I think August of 1971, there were 24 young men

Almost all of them were. I think one of them was Asian American. And they are doing something pretty bizarre in this basement in August of 1971. They've been divided into two groups, guards and prisoners. Supposedly average kids. Right. And they are acting out this basically role-playing game.

Of guards versus prisoners. For $15 a day. In a simulated prison in the basement of this hall at Stanford University. Yeah, which would be about $93 today, funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research. Is that right? So it would be $93 a day? Mm-hmm. And it was originally going to be two weeks, so I'm sure some of these guys were like, heck yeah. Yeah, I mean, I kind of forgot what it was like to be a college student. That'd be...

you know, what, between $1,200 and $1,400 starting off your summer? It'd be about $1,302 if my quick math is correct. Good scratch for a 21-year-old. Yeah, two weeks on summer break. That's right. So you were divided into two lots, like you said. They asked people supposedly what you wanted to be unless this was purely a movie creation, and they did try and look up and try and find out the differences. Yeah.

But they supposedly asked him, and most everyone said, or in fact everyone said prisoner. And one of the reactions from who ended up being the bad guard, the guy said, they asked him why, and he's like, because nobody likes guards.

Right. It's like, why would anyone want to be a guard? Yeah. Because they thought we'll just be prisoners because they just will lay around and smoke cigarettes. Right. So we'll kind of unpack what that suggests later on. Sure. Okay. So you've got these guys and they're down here for this experiment. And so coming at it from the way this is the popular interpretation of what happened at the Stanford prison experiment. Okay. Yes.

You've got 12 guards and 12 prisoners. The prisoners had been arrested, by the way. By the real Palo Alto police. Yeah, they weren't told when, but the real cops came by, arrested each one of them.

for, you know, a variety of crimes. Booked them at the Palo Alto police station and then transported them to the jail, the fake jail at Stanford. Yeah, they call it the Stanford County Jail. And they did a legit job. They put up signs. They had these rooms decked out like jail cells. They had a hole. They did a really believable job of making this seem like a prison environment at least. Right.

So you've got these prisoners who've been delivered. You've got these guards who are waiting there for them. And as far as Zimbardo has ever said, these guards were told, you have to protect the prison and everything else is up to you. The only rule is there's no physical punishment.

We're just here to observe. Yeah, like here's your uniforms. Here's your sunglasses. Yeah, and then the prisoners were booked in with wearing smocks. Yeah. No shoes, no underwear. Yeah, naked under the smocks. Chained at the ankles. And then they wore like those stocking cap do-rags. They had a panty on their head. To simulate they're having their head shaved.

Right. And, you know, this is the early 70s, so most of them had these big afros and long hair and stuff under these panties. Right. So this is, like, at first everything's pretty normal. The guards don't quite know what to do. They're a little timid. The prisoners apparently relished this immediately and started, like, finding where the guards' boundaries were.

And they started to band together. And there was actually, I think on day two, the turnover from day one to two, there was a prisoner riot. Yeah. I mean, like you said, they were sort of laughing at first. And I think we didn't mention too, and this will end up being very, very problematic. And the first sign that he didn't do a good job, Zimbardo actually acted as the superintendent of the prison, involved himself in his own experiment.

And he had some graduate assistants that were assisting in the program. They acted as a parole board, and one of them was the warden. That was, yeah, an undergrad, actually. Oh, were they undergrad assistants? Well, the warden, Jaffe, his last name was Jaffe, he was an undergrad at the time. And actually, he had come up with the experiment on his own. Oh, he was the guy, huh? Uh-huh. And then Zimbardo was like, this is a really good idea. Let's do this for real. Imagine the press. Right.

So, yeah, like you said, it escalated pretty quickly after kind of laughing at first. These guards got into their roles, to say the least, and...

really kind of started being jerks in quick order. And after the prisoners were like, hey, this is kind of funny. Like you're not being very cool. And they were kind of smacked down and made to do things like push-ups and jumping jacks. And they would withhold food. And eventually they would take their beds away from them and stuff. It just got worse and worse. And there was, I think like you said, on day two, a...

An uprising. They got together, threw the cots off their beds and threw the bed frames against the door and wouldn't let them in. Right. So there was a prisoner riot. Yeah. That's pretty significant, right? And what's equally significant is that the guards, by the second day, started to show signs of like real cruelty toward the prisoners. They started treating them very poorly. Right.

they started engaging in basically acts of torture, like waking them up randomly in the middle of the night, making them get up. Like you said, push-ups, which is interpreted as physical punishment. Because again, you couldn't hit them with the rubber hose, you couldn't hit them with the baton, you couldn't punch them. But if you make somebody do a bunch of push-ups, that's physical punishment too. Yeah. And it was within the bounds apparently. Yeah, they were referred to only by their prison numbers. They would never say their names.

They were made to memorize everyone else's prison number and like they would line them up and tell them to repeat their numbers for like an hour if they didn't do it fast enough. And then in reverse order, they would get punishment. They would do the kind of the classic moves of punishment.

holding one responsible for the punishment of others. Yeah, that's a big one. Like if you didn't make your bed good enough, then no one could go to sleep, stuff like that. The guards also innovated carrots here and there too. They actually made one cell like a good cell. Like they put a bed in it with like bedding. If you were in that cell, you were eligible for like good meals.

better than what the other prisoners had. And there were room for three inmates in there at a time. And so it instilled this sense of

and, and, um, skullduggery, I guess, backstabbery among the prisoners to, to curry favor with the guards, like by informing on the other ones so that you could get a chance to be in like the nice cell. Yeah. And I think even before that, like when they went to do the, when they went to stage the uprising, I don't think there were three rooms of three and I think six of them, two of the rooms participated and one of the rooms did not. And, uh,

because not all the guys, you know, not all the prisoners, like, rebelled as much. Some of them just kind of went along with it. Interestingly, some of the guards did not descend into cruelty. Right. They actually, some of them did, like, favors, went out of their way to be nice to the prisoners. But in...

who wrote this article points out very significantly, they didn't stand up to the cruel guards or officially object to their behavior. Right. They went along with it, but then... Because they thought they had to. In their own way, they did what they could to retain their humanity. So there are two huge points, and one of them...

There's one among the guards and one among the prisoners. And the one among the prisoners comes 36 hours after the beginning of the experiment. And this prisoner, his name, it would later be revealed, was Douglas Corpy. He had an emotional breakdown, a nervous breakdown. 36 hours after this experiment starts, one of the prisoners becomes so emotionally involved in this simulated prison experience

At the cruelty, the simulated supposedly cruelty of the guards that he had a nervous breakdown. Well. And had to be removed from the experiment. And this is like, this is Zimbardo's, this is the official line for the Stanford prison experiment. Oh, so we're still playing along? Right. And has been for decades. Yeah. He also said that one of them broke out in a psychosomatic rash. There was all manner of, of.

various levels of psychological breakdowns happening. On the other side, the big star among the guards was a guy named John Wayne who you referenced earlier. Yeah, his name was Dave Eshelman. And he was the one who... He was the ringleader. He's the one that came out as the most brutal guard of them all. And all the other guards kind of fell in line behind him and took their cues from him. So this whole thing's going on. This is crazy town. This place in...

Six days. Six days this thing descends into chaos. Supposed to be two weeks. Yes. There was rumors that there was going to be a breakout, and so they moved the experiment. There were that guy, Douglas Corpy, who had a nervous breakdown, ended up getting put into the hole.

This broom closet for, I think, overnight. And was finally released because the researchers actually stepped in and said you should probably let him out. It was just utter chaos. And then eventually Philip Zimbardo's girlfriend at the time, a woman named Christine Maslach. Yeah, his wife-to-be.

Oh, she married him, huh? Yeah, still married. So she came and just dropped in to see how things were going and was so outraged at what she saw that she was like, you're so far beyond the line. You have to stop this now. Like, this has descended into chaos. You can't do this. These people are treating these prisoners horribly. Like, how are you letting this go on? And he went, I'm okay. Fine. Fine.

And so the next day he canceled the experiment. Again, after six days, and it was scheduled to go on for two weeks. And so...

He comes out, tells the world in this New York Times magazine, guys, if I took you, if I took you, Josh, and I took you, Chuck, and put you as guard and prisoner in even a simulated prison and put a smock on Josh and took his underwear off and put a stocking on his head and gave Chuck a baton and some glasses, Chuck would be.

Beat Josh up. And Josh would probably have his spirit broken and have a nervous breakdown. It's in everybody. Evil is in everybody. Crumbling at the first sign of adversity is in everybody. We're all just pathetic weaklings. Stanford Prison Experiment. And he ran off and said, I'm famous. All right. That's a great setup. So we'll take a break here and come back and talk a little bit about the more about the experiment and the realities of it right after this.

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All right, so you've got John Wayne in there. I don't think we mentioned that he took on the persona of the prison boss in Cool Hand Luke. He did a fake southern accent and everything and dove right into this role. If you talk to Dave Eshelman today, he will say he's very much on record as saying, I'm not some jerk, and I didn't get off on being sadistic. He said, I wanted to—

Do what they paid me $15 a day to do, which was to be a prison guard and to treat these guys poorly. Right. And so I, you know, he said I did some drama in high school and I literally acted this part as well as I could. That was, I felt was expected and wanted from me. Right. And I put on this fake Southern accent. And if you like ask friends and family today, they would laugh at this because I'm really not this guy at all. Right. Because he really comes off as...

as a bit of a villain in this movie for sure. Well, he perpetrated real cruelty on other people. And we'll get to that later. He said he feels bad about it too. And he should. Yeah. Because the other people actually did suffer, uh,

under this guy's leadership as the ringleader of the mean guards. Like they wore pink on Wednesday. It was terrible everywhere, right? So he really should feel bad, and apparently he does. I saw that all over the place too, that he feels bad for it. But the point is, is that he has said –

Like, this didn't happen organically. Like, I felt encouraged to play this role. Right. That's a big deal because the findings of the Stanford Prison Experiment say if you take some people and say you're a guard, you're a prisoner. Give them some power and you will turn evil. They will turn evil.

Within a day. Yeah. A day, they said about this guy. And this guy's like, no, I was just, like you said, doing my job, what they were paying me 15 bucks a day for. Yeah. Let's put that one to the side. All right, put a pin in that. Let's go visit with Douglas Corpy, who was the prisoner who, in 36 short hours of this simulated prison experiment, lost his marbles and had a nervous breakdown and had to go home.

Right? One of the other two pillars of the findings that people are either evil or easily crumble in the face of adversity from the Stanford Prison Experiment. And again, this is how this thing's been taught for like 50 years, okay? Yeah. So Corpy comes out and says, I was faking that. And I put on a big act so I could get out of there because it sucked. And I didn't want to be there anymore. Right. So I fake like I was – and he like – one of his quotes was –

I don't have it here, but he basically said, like, any trained clinician would have been able to see right through this. Like, when I hear the tapes years later, it's like, I'm not an actor. I wasn't, like, apparently the John Wayne guy at least had been in, like, high school plays. And college, too, I think. Yeah, and he was like, I was not an actor. And it was so clear to me looking back at these tapes that,

that I was faking it. Faking a nervous breakdown. Yeah, faking a nervous breakdown to get out of there. Right. So the reason why he said later that he did fake this nervous breakdown is because he took the job because he thought he'd just be laying around, like you said, smoking cigarettes, being a prisoner. Yeah. And he would get to study for the GRE. He was about to enter grad school. I didn't see that. Well, they said, no, you can't have your books. No, they didn't give him anything. And this guy was like,

whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute, this is day one. He's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, like, I need those books. I'm taking the GRE, basically leaving here after two weeks and going to take the test. Like, I've got to spend this two weeks studying. They're like, you can't have your books. So he quickly saw that the only way out was to fake this nervous breakdown. And Billy Crudup went in there and said, why is everyone saying, whoa, whoa, whoa? Only I can say, whoa, whoa, whoa. Whoa, whoa, whoa.

Yeah, so we've kind of poo-pooed the two major findings from this study already. So that's a huge deal, right? Because, again, the idea is that if you put people, any random people, remember, these are just average, like, middle-class white kids. Which is another problem. Right. If you put any, well, you know, 1971, that means everybody. Right. That's the whole world, right? Yeah. If you put anybody in the world in this situation, they're going to either turn evil or lose their marbles. Right.

So those are the two findings. That's what everybody took it as at first. It later came out, no, this guy was acting, this guy was faking. So what else do we have then? Well, we have this idea that Zimbardo insinuated himself as part of the experiment, and that actually created the findings from the Stanford Prison Experiment.

So should we put a pin in that? Sure. Or do you want to talk about that now? No, no. I want to go where you want to go. All right. Let's put a pin in that then and talk a little bit more about what went on that week. They had everything from visitation, like you could write a letter to your family or girlfriend or whoever you wanted to come visit you to ask for visitation rights. And the family came in, and they did. They came in and visited for an hour, and there were, in some cases, parents who were like, I don't know about this. This is...

Like, this seems like a really weird thing. Right. And Zimbardo would be like, oh, no, it's totally fine. Like, you know, they're... I'm a psychologist. Yeah, like, they want to be here. Like, ask them. And the kids, you know, they did say that they wanted to stay. Okay. Yeah.

Which is important. Okay. So what else is important? Like no one in the visiting hour I don't think were like, get me out of here. Okay. They're all like, no, this is all part of the act. Okay. Essentially. All right. They had parole hearings inside the course of a week somehow. They said that if they could be released, if they would forfeit the money, and this is after I don't know how many of the six days, but they could –

not get paid and be paroled if they went in front of the parole board. They went in front of the parole board, some of them did, and most of the prisoners said that they would give up their money, in fact, and the parole members, like,

Like I said, they were the graduate assistants. They even had one former prisoner, this guy that was a 15-year... Sam Quentin. Yeah, inmate, 15- or 17-year inmate on the board that I guess Zimbardo, I want to call him Zamboni. So he actually was a friend of Jaffe's, the guy who originally actually conceived of this experiment as an undergrad. So he brought him in on it. Right, so he was on the parole board, and he was kind of one of the ones...

at least in the film version that was kind of saying like, no, this is like how it is. Like you should keep it going. Right.

But I don't know how much of that was dramatized. I don't either. That's one of the problems with this is, you know, so much of the documentation has been not released over the years. And when it does get released, it contradicts the official line. And it's very tough to separate truth from fiction, especially when you introduce a Hollywood movie into the whole thing just to drive those nails in the coffin too of reality and fact. There's been a lot of, in the years since, a lot of complaints that

A lot of these kids were screaming, I want to go home, I want to go home. And for his part, Zimbardo said in the contract, it says, I want to exit the experiment as the –

official line to say and they could have gone home and he was like but you hear no one ever said I want to exit the experiment they would say I want my mommy or I'm going crazy or my god please stop this please stop this right but they never said those exact words the safe phrase the say yeah the safe phrase but it turns out that's bunk too right yeah it turns out that if you look at the contract that they had that he's referencing that say the rules and everything in the agreement

There's no safe word to be mentioned. It certainly doesn't say if you say, I want to quit the experiment, you get released from the experiment. So he's just flat out lying about that then. From what I understand, yes. And what article was this that you sent? There's a really good takedown in Medium called the...

The Lifespan of a Lie. Yeah, it's a good one. And it's based on, that title's based on a, I think a documentary by a, documentary or book by a French filmmaker, which, who titled his version, The Birth of a Lie.

And it's basically about how the Stanford Prison Experiment was just basically, it was bunk from the get-go, which we'll kind of pick that apart in a little bit. And that just fascinatingly has been perpetuated over, again, basically 50 years. It just entered the cultural zeitgeist and just stayed like an infection.

All right, some other things that happened to make it realistic. They brought in a lawyer when parents asked for one and played along like it was real. They brought in a chaplain who came in to speak to prisoners, and he played along with it too. They basically did everything that you would think would happen in a real prison on a slightly scaled-down level. Right, but the upshot of all of this is Zimbardo saying, like,

Do you see what's going on here, everybody? Yeah. Like I just put some guys in, like nine guys in at a time or 12 guys as guards, 12 guys as prisoners, and their parents came for visiting hours. A lawyer came. That's how real the simulated prison became in people's minds. Just imagine what a real prison is like, right? Yeah.

And he was saying they could have left at any time if they just said the safe word, and no one ever said the safe word. There is some evidence that these people were basically kept there against their will.

Um, especially after Douglas Corpy basically faked his emotional breakdown and then was thrown into a broom closet in, in retaliation for it. Yeah. Um, that he should have very, very clearly should have been left or allowed to leave and to even be led to think that you couldn't leave, which is apparently the idea that spread throughout the prisoners. Um,

That would be like keeping someone against their will. Yeah, and he did leave but was supposed to – agreed to come back supposedly to like play a different role as a prisoner who like maybe escaped and came back I think. OK. But didn't come back. Right. And –

I think five people were released early before the whole experiment was called off. All prisoners, no guards left the experiment, which is telling. Yeah, well, and they were working in shifts, though, which is important. Okay, that is a big one, too. But if you consider that no one asked to be a guard, they all asked to be prisoners, but then none of the guards left the experiment. Right. To me, that's interesting on its face, right? Sure. There's something to that. But the whole thing...

just kind of falling apart after Zimbardo's girlfriend at the time came. The idea that up to this point, these people had engaged in this fantasy and thought that they couldn't leave when they really could, that's controversial in and of itself. Sure. Because again, there's evidence that they were led to believe they couldn't leave. And that's different. That changes things entirely. Yeah. So you want to take another break and then pick this part some more? Sure.

Yeah, let's do it. Kind of fun. Hey, come on in. Small Business Saturday is right around the corner. And so is that shop you've been meaning to check out. On November 30th, support your local community by shopping small on Small Business Saturday, founded by American Express. Pick up a new outfit, a handmade gift, some vintage vinyl, maybe even some local tea. Thanks so much. See you soon.

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Well, AT&T is bringing them to millions of people across America. And that's good news for everybody. Connecting changes everything. AT&T. All right. The final takedown. I'm waiting for Philip Zimbardo to release a book about like our jackhammer episode. That's fine.

I would read it. All right, so where are we here? Basically, we're at the point where he has ended the experiment, and now we're dealing with the fallout since 1971 and how this should be viewed. One of the big things that came out of that French book, The Birth of a Lie, is the filmmaker unearthed a recording of

That was, I don't know where he found it, but he found it and released the transcript of it that clearly has, if not Zimbardo, at least Jaffe, definitely Jaffe, coaching the guards. Yeah, to be more brutal. Right, be a tough guard. Just think of how the pigs do it and do it like that, I think is what the quote was, right? Yeah, when the whole idea of this thing is to try and prove that

Without any influence... Yes. This is what happens. Right. So there's a couple of things that happen. Methodologically, there's a lot of things that happen the moment they started coaching those guards. Number one, they took any organicness out of their behavior. They were then doing what they thought they were expected to do, like John Wayne. Yeah, for sure. Who just went over the top is what it was. And then number two...

They made them co-experimenters. Yeah. Like the whole thing was supposed to be guards and prisoners. And we're going to watch. As test subjects or participants. And when you coach the guards, they're co-experimenters now. Now the experiment's entirely on the prisoners.

which you can say, okay, well, then those findings still worked. Well, that gets thrown out when you base the whole thing on a guy who is faking. Right. Right? But you make the guards co-experimenters, and you just completely take out any objectivity from this experiment. That's problem one with the methodology. Well, and the fact we already mentioned that one of the researchers was a warden, and Zamboni. I keep wanting to call him Zambrano. That's fine. Go ahead. Zimbardo. Zamboni. Zamboni.

himself was the superintendent. Like, the minute he decided to do that, like, I looked up, I think he was, like, in his late 30s when he did this. How did he not, like, was he that bad at doing his job? How did he not know, like, wait a minute, this will taint the experiment? Do you want to talk about why people think that he was so... Yeah. Okay, so...

He was a, he wasn't, I think still is, a social activist for sure. And he had decided, and I can't really disagree with him, that prisons were brutal places where brutality lived and that they were inherently brutal. And so if you take somebody and put them into this place, you're doing a real disservice to humanity by throwing somebody in a brutal place that you know is brutal. So his aim was to get reform to happen. Yes. Yes.

From the outset. Well, I mean, I can't fault that, but you can't call it a scientific experiment either. No. And it actually supposedly backfired as well because one interpretation of his findings is that it's all or nothing with prisons. Prisons are inherently brutal or you can't have them. So either you have prisons and you have brutal prisons or you have no prisons.

And so faced with that choice and with rising crime rates in the 70s, a lot of people doubled down on getting tough and made prisons even worse and built more prisons and said, T.S., we're not even going to try to reform you anymore. We're just going to send you to these brutal places that are inherently brutal and there's nothing we can do about it.

So it would have backfired in that sense. But in the idea that he was doing something with the best interests of his fellow people at heart, again, like you said, it's tough to fault him for that. He just really, really gave social psychology a black eye.

Yeah, so one of the other things he did wrong, and this one I just can't figure out either, is he didn't have a control group. And one of his – this guy wasn't in the experiment, but one of his colleagues came by one day and was like, you know, what's your control? What's your independent variable? Yeah, and he was like, what? What?

Yeah. He's like, I don't have one. So if you run an experiment of any sort, Grabster uses a great analogy where if you're trying to figure out what the effects of radiation are on tomatoes, you pick a bunch of tomatoes, you weigh them, you check them for color,

you make sure that they're identical to another set of tomatoes. So you have two sets of basically identical tomatoes. One you irradiate, one you do not, and after a set amount of time, you go back and see what the differences are. And then you can say probably that when you irradiate tomatoes, these are the effects, and the effects are the differences between the two. Same thing with the prison experiment, right? Yeah, what would you have here? Two different cell blocks? Yeah.

And one that literally isn't coached and completely left alone. That's what I would have done for sure. And then one where you're saying, hey, be brutal and we'll see if everyone falls into these roles. Exactly. That would have been great. And actually some researchers in 2001. Oh, yeah, they did. They did exactly that. They basically ran the experiment with just that control group you suggested. It was called the BBC Prison Study.

Yeah, Haslam and Riker. Yeah, and basically they did the same thing. They did not do any coaching. They didn't do any intervention. They did the thing exactly like you're supposed to or like Zimbardo should have from the outset. And they found that – again, they made the control group to the original Stanford Prison Experiment –

They found that the exact opposite happened. The prisoners stayed banded together. The guards were totally in disarray and disorganized. The brutality never emerged, and there wasn't any violence from what I understand. Yeah, and this is where it gets really scummy if you ask me. Zimbardo found out about this, and supposedly Haslam and Riker said they discovered he was privately writing editors to keep them from getting published.

I'm claiming that they were fraudulent. Yeah, in the journal that they released their findings in, he wrote an appendage to their article and said, just don't even listen to these guys. I'm Philip Zimbardo. Man. So, yeah, I thought that was pretty scummy, too, if he did that. Yeah.

So you've got methodologically, there's even more problems too. In the original newspaper advertisement, Chuck, he said... Prison experiment. Prison experiment, everybody sign up. Yeah, that was a problem in and of itself. They shouldn't have known what they were doing. No, exactly, until they showed up, right? So you're going to get a big wide swath of people, and then once they find out what the experiment is, maybe they'll say no thanks or whatever. But this was like attracting...

A 2007 follow-up study found narcissistic, hostile...

overly aggressive authoritarian types like flies to honey. Yeah, or the opposite. Well, that seems to be the case in this case. Yeah, which was, in fact, one of them was a liberal activist who kind of purposely went in there because he thought maybe these findings could be used one day for prison reform. Well, I think also most of the...

What I got from Jaffe coaching the people is say, like, think about what the pigs would do and then do that. Because we really got to show them how brutal prisons are. I think...

everybody who showed up basically was against prisons. But whether you're against prisons or for them, you were automatically tainted before you even showed up for the interview. Yeah. Because they wrote prison experiment in the ad. So from the outset, there was bias. There was no control group. It attracted a biased cross-section of people. Zimbardo participated. He was a participant. And that actually, Chuck, led to the second set of findings that...

Zimbardo had influenced this and become a participant himself. And here's the current interpretation of all of it, okay? This seems to be the current du jour interpretation of the Stanford Prison Experiment. Not that people are inherently cruel and inherently will just crumble in the face of authority, although that might still stand, but that...

People will be – are capable of cruelty if they're recruited by an authority figure. Right. The second set – and there's actually been three sets of interpretations. The second set was that Zimbardo inserted himself and that it actually demonstrated what's called situationist theory. Yeah, and that's basically that external circumstances are the drivers of human behavior. Right.

Right. So the point was not that people are inherently cruel on an individual level. But the situation that they're put in, they will quickly find those roles. If there's a power structure above them. Right. That is that has normalized this and is expecting them to fulfill those roles. And this really tied in with.

You know, this is 1971. People were still really trying to figure out what the heck had just happened with the Nazis. It was only like 25, 26 years before. So this idea that this banality of evil, this made perfect sense in that respect, right? There is a bureaucracy that had normalized evil and you were just following orders. Right. That was the second interpretation of the Stanford prison experiment.

Yeah, well, and not just the Nazis, but everything like the Vietnam War, which was, I mean, this was 1971. Right. And like the Maile Massacre. And, you know, I was just following orders like this tied in. This has its fingers in a lot of relevant politics of the day. Right. So apparently it also tied in really well to Attica. And Zimbardo must have just couldn't believe his good fortune that there was a bloodiest person.

prison riot in American history happened like a couple weeks after he made the news in the New York Times Magazine with this journal article or this article that he wrote, right? Yeah. But that actually played into it too because apparently following orders, a lot of guards just fired blindly into the tear gas smoke of this prison riot and killed tons of unarmed prisoners and hostages. So Zimbardo's like, okay, that's fine. However we're going to interpret this,

I'm cool with that. The third one, I'm not quite sure that he would be cool with. The current one. Which is bad science. I think... So what I saw is that a lot of social psychologists said, we've known this is bad science all along, but the findings were really interesting and worthwhile. So we didn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. The third one is that...

Zimbardo inserted himself, and what this study really showed was that people will engage in acts of cruelty if there is a figure of authority recruiting them to what they think is a righteous cause. And in this case, it was Zimbardo himself.

Making the guards co-experimenters by coaching them to be cruel. Right. And in the name of prison reform, ultimately, when they showed the world what happens when you put normal people in a prison situation. Yeah, which is what the John Wayne guy very much has said all his life since then is that this is what I thought they wanted was for me to be a bad guard. Right. So we could prove...

ultimately, that prisons need reform. And that is why he's still complicit because he's still engaged in these acts of genuine cruelty against the prisoners in the study. And that's why he should still feel bad and still does feel bad. But he did it because he was recruited in the name of...

this righteous cause by somebody who was in authority. So is this being taught this way in classes now? I don't, I think that they, especially once it came out that Zimbardo and at the very least his warden, a co-experimenter was, was coaching them to do this and that the organic cruelty is just totally out the window. I think they don't know what to do with it right now. They're trying to figure it out, like how to get these findings across or what to make of them.

Because one of these quotes from the article you sent, the guy said, I don't think it's scientific fraud in the typical sense. It was never considered to be scientific. It's typically represented in classrooms as a demonstration, not an experiment, and is a notorious case of ethical malfeasance. Right. So that's almost a fourth takeaway is that it's an example of how to not do a study correctly. Right.

Which is interesting. Oh, yeah. I mean, methodologically, inserting yourself, like lying about the findings later on or misinterpreting the results or using spin. Yeah, there's a lot here. But it was approved by the Stanford Human Rights Subjects Review Committee at the time. Those were Zimbardo's experiments who he presented this to. And they're, you know...

He still says that it was ethical. Well, it was at the time. Under the guidelines, it was ethical. But then after, they changed the guidelines. Yeah, you couldn't do this today. No. Or at least not with, like he did it.

So I did, you remember the very brief Psychology is Nuts series? I watched that. I did one on the Stanford Prison Experiment. Yeah, I watched that today. Did you? What did you think? It was good. Thanks, man. Cute little background. Yeah, I thought so too. And let's see. You got anything else? No. I mean, boy, I thought we were pretty scathing, but. We were. This is like vaping level scathing. Yeah.

This is way worse than vaping. I'm sure the vapers are like, oh, they were really hard on that guy. Yeah, the movie, you know, the documentary is probably a little more accurate, but the movie wasn't bad. Yeah. I mean, it's not great. Yeah. But it was okay. It felt like a movie of the week. Gotcha. It's an airplane movie? Yeah. Watch it on your next flight. I will. That's my recommendation. Thanks, buddy.

Well, if you want to know more about the Stanford Prison Experiment, type those words in the search bar at HowStuffWorks.com and it'll bring up this Grabster article. Since I said Grabster, it's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to call this beautiful landscaping. Hey, guys, I spent the last two years fixing up the yard in our house.

in Point Pleasant, Pennsylvania. Oh, that sounds like a pleasant place. Yeah, it is. My husband actually introduced me to your show a few years back, and thank God he did, because I've literally listened to you for hours and hours while working in the yard. Nice. It was a huge undertaking. I have a more flexible work schedule than he does, so I volunteered to absorb most of the responsibility, although he did a lot of heavy lifting, too. I enjoyed the show so much, I stopped allowing myself to listen to

Uh, to it any other time. You were only allowed during yard work. This made me much more ready to get outside and get into it. Uh, you guys were with me while I carried literally tons of redstone up hill in buckets, hauling rocks for a firing landing, planted, uh, pecky sandra,

ferns, and hostas in the rockiest soil I've ever had to work with and just clearing away overgrowth. It sounds like Tanya Harding training for the Olympics in that one montage. Which it turned out included a fair amount of poison ivy. During it, I learned about a tiny, adorable little creature called a tardigrade.

The business of head transplants, the hookworm, her favorite episode, and some haunting information I cannot unhear, such as you provided in the bullfighting and drowning episodes. You're always very entertaining, full of information. Even when I think it's boring, you make it fun. There were times you had me LOLing in my backyard, alone and covered in dirt and sweat like a crazy person. Attached are some pictures of the progress, all from your climate-controlled studio.

That is from Sharon Proshinsky. Sharon, you did a great job. That is one beautiful yard you got going. Yeah, for sure. It is lovely. It is. Nice work. We're glad we could be there with you to help you out.

Get up that hill. Yeah, and down the hill, and then back up the hill, and then back down the hill. That's right, and then back up again. If you want to get in touch with us to let us know how we've helped you out, we love hearing that kind of stuff. If you're Philip Zimbardo, we expect to hear from your lawyer. And in the meantime, you can hang out with us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com, where you can find all of our social links, and you can also send us an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com.

Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. This is Tracy V. Wilson from Stuff You Missed in History Class. Do you like podcasts, music, and audiobooks? Because when you subscribe to Amazon Music Unlimited, you get all three in one app. Imagine listening to your favorite podcasts and music on the go to work, school, the gym, or better yet, vacation. Now

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