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Unraveling the Notorious Stanford Prison Experiment | MEGA Episode | National Geographic — Transcript

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0:09[bees buzzing]
0:12[bees buzzing]
0:25[Jerry Shue] In a very extreme situation,
0:29different people behaved in different ways.
0:33We want to think that everybody's capable
0:35of being bad but us.
0:38"If I'd have been there, I wouldn't have done that."
0:42But that's not what happened.
0:46[Glenn Gee] What do you think would happen
0:47if you took a bunch of college kids,
0:49randomly assign them to be prisoners and guards,
0:52with costumes and everything, and lock them in a basement?
0:57Well, this is what happened 50 years ago.
0:59[montage of disparate voices]
1:04[Shue] I've only been in jail once.
1:07Stanford Prison Experiment. [chuckles]
1:09[Cathy Lee Crosby] At Stanford University,
1:10an experiment was conducted that became a classic
1:13in the annals of social psychology.
1:15[Newscaster] Professor Philip Zimbardo conducted
1:17a legendary experiment by randomly assigning students
1:20to the roles of prison guards and prisoners.
1:24The experiment proved so dangerous
1:26that he had to end it prematurely.
1:31[Philip Zimbardo] We see how quickly the good boys
1:34become brutal guards.
1:35[John Mark] Professor Zimbardo said that evil
1:38isn't just in some of us; it's in all of us.
1:41[Doug Korpi] The control of the narrative has been Phil's.
1:44[Zimbardo] We turn to a man who always
1:45has something up his sleeve.
1:47[Korpi] The experiment has been used
1:49to explain real-life atrocities.
1:51[Zimbardo] The situation he was in corrupted him.
1:54[Shue] It disturbs me that an individual can make something
1:58the status quo for a personal benefit.
2:01[Zimbardo] Yo, it's Phil Zimbardo.
2:02[Thibault Le Texier] He's been telling the story for 50 years.
2:05He's believing his narrative is what really happened.
2:08[Clay Ramsay] There are other things that happened
2:10that we should have been told.
2:13[Le Texier] Most of the participants
2:14haven't been interviewed.
2:16[John Loftus] Zimbardo put out a nice, simple answer,
2:19but it'd be great if somebody interviews
2:21all those people involved and just see how complex this is.
2:26[Guard] One, two.
2:28[Guard] Looking good, fellas.
2:29[Guard] Three, four.
2:31[Guard] So haven't you learned from anything?
2:33[Prisoner] I want out! I want out!
2:35I want out right now!
2:36[Guard] Hold this.
2:38[Prisoner] Right now, I want out! I want out!
2:40[whistle blows, tape rewinds]
2:41[Dave Eshleman] You may think you know
2:42what you're dealing with, but believe me, you don't.
2:47[Prisoner singing] ♪ Since I saw God... ♪
2:52[birds chirping]
2:55[Producer] Good? We'll get started.
2:57-Yeah! -Alright.
2:59[Shue] What do you want to talk about?
3:00[Producer] You.
3:02[Chuck Burton] Nobody from the media has ever interviewed me.
3:05Are we hard to find?
3:07[Eshleman] The interest in it never seems to fade.
3:10The only reason that I'm still talking about it
3:12is because people want to hear about it.
3:15[Korpi] About once every decade, somebody asks me about it,
3:18and I realize, "Wow, that was kind of special."
3:21[chuckles] And I tell stories.
3:24And this thing was 50 years ago or whatever, so.
3:29Yeah.
3:32[Producer] Yet we're still talking about it.
3:33[Korpi] Still talking about it.
3:36Oh, no, no. I remember...
3:37Okay, it's all coming back to me now.
3:40[bell ringing]
3:43[dog barking]
3:45[Loftus] In the summer of 1971,
3:47I was trying to find a summer job.
3:49[Eshleman] I saw an ad in the newspaper
3:51that they were doing a prison experiment
3:52and that they were paying $15 a day.
3:56It wasn't that bad for minimum wage-type work.
3:58[Shue] It was $15 a day and three meals
4:01and a roof and a padded bed.
4:03And I thought, "I've just arrived."
4:06[Burton] And that sounded good for me.
4:07I didn't have any money.
4:08[Eshleman] I didn't know anything about prisons
4:10other than what I see in movies.
4:12I had no opinion about them
4:13other than that they must be very evil places.
4:16[Korpi] I didn't give a [bleep].
4:17All I cared about was a summer job.
4:19[Ramsay] They were going to do this for two weeks in August.
4:23[Karl Van Orsdol] It was being run by Stanford,
4:25and Zimbardo had a high reputation in the community.
4:30[Loftus] We called him a disco psychologist.
4:32[Van Orsdol] I applied, and I didn't really know
4:34anything about it.
4:35[Ramsay] I figured it was going to be an imitation prison
4:38of some kind.
4:39[Korpi] I needed to study for the Graduate Record Exam,
4:42and I thought, "Oh, my god. This is a great thing.
4:44It's a prison experiment.
4:45I'll have all this time in the cell.
4:47I'll bring my books. I'll study."
4:49I thought it was the perfect job. [chuckles]
4:55[Van Orsdol] At Stanford University back in 1971...
4:59[Zimbardo] We wanted to see just what happens
5:01when you put good people in a bad situation.
5:05In this case, in jail.
5:07[Van Orsdol] We created a prison.
5:09And in that mock prison, we put a number of young men,
5:11college students from all over the country
5:13who happen to be in the San Francisco area
5:15in the summer.
5:16[Zimbardo] We started with 100 people that called us
5:18answering an ad, and we interviewed them,
5:21gave them personality tests.
5:23[Van Orsdol] I remember it being presented as an experiment
5:26on how individuals deal with captivity
5:30in a specific sort of prison-like situation.
5:33[Burton] There's gonna be no threat of violence,
5:34no threat of sexual assault.
5:37[Eshleman] They gave me a psychological profile test.
5:39One of these lengthy questionnaires.
5:41They tried to see if you got some kind of pathology
5:43or something like that.
5:45[Loftus] They ask you your background
5:47and had you ever been in jail,
5:50'cause they didn't want anybody that had actually been in jail.
5:53[Korpi] And I remember signing a contract.
5:55You couldn't leave unless you had a good cause,
5:59like something physical.
6:01[Burton] Out of the 125 people,
6:02the smaller group of people that they felt
6:03were the most psychologically stable,
6:05which I thought was hilarious,
6:08'cause I didn't feel very psychologically stable.
6:11[Zimbardo] We picked two dozen,
6:12and then we flipped a coin and said,
6:14"These guys are guards and these guys are prisoners."
6:16[Phil Donahue] What were your instructions to the guards?
6:18[Zimbardo] We simply said maintain law and order,
6:20don't let the prisoners escape,
6:22and the control of the prison is up to you.
6:24[Burton] This was the '70s.
6:26We were all rebellious, young, drug-using,
6:29anti-war, long-haired kids.
6:31Everybody involved in this could imagine being a prisoner.
6:34Not one person could put themselves
6:36into the mindset of being a guard.
6:40[Shue] I was glad to hear that I would be a prisoner.
6:43I figured that would be a passive role.
6:45[Korpi] I imagined that I would have time to study,
6:48so I imagined myself being a prisoner.
6:50[Van Orsdol] I didn't sort of volunteer to be a guard.
6:53[Eshleman] I said I would have preferred to be a prisoner,
6:55but I was chosen instead to be a guard.
6:57I was a little disappointed, but it was still $15 a day,
7:01so, hey, you know, let's do it.
7:06[Loftus] They sent us guards out to a surplus store
7:09and we were supposed to pick out uniforms.
7:12[Van Orsdol] I had the khaki uniform that we were issued.
7:16[Eshleman] We were issued a night stick,
7:19mirrored sunglasses, a uniform.
7:21[Burton] That was so contrary to the identity
7:23that probably any of us young men had ever thought of
7:27as like authoritarian, rough, mean.
7:31Having reflecting sunglasses and a uniform, carrying a club
7:34was just like, you know, "What is that?"
7:38Hehh, wah!
7:39I mean.
7:40[Zimbardo] We only wanted to have normal, healthy,
7:42average American youth.
7:43[Donahue] Yeah.
7:44[Zimbardo] When we began, there was no difference
7:45between the people who were gonna play guards
7:47and the people who were gonna play prisoners.
7:53[Korpi] On Sunday morning, I'm waiting in my home,
7:57and this cop car comes up.
7:59And a guy is in the street with a huge camera.
8:02And a cop comes to my door and he says, "We're arresting you."
8:07So I can't imagine what the neighbors were thinking.
8:13[Shue] They had the police handcuff me
8:15and take me downstairs.
8:19[Korpi] There's a camera filming Doug
8:21who's got his hand on the top of the car.
8:23And they're frisking him.
8:24They're putting him in handcuffs.
8:25[camera shutter clicks]
8:28They put me in the back of the cop car.
8:30They drove off, and this guy is filming the whole thing.
8:33And I really wanted to tell the neighbors,
8:35"This is just an experiment!"
8:37[siren]
8:41[Shue] The next thing I remember is the cops fingerprinting us
8:45at the police station.
8:50[Van Orsdol] I remember being a little shocked
8:53at the level of authenticity.
8:55It was a real event in a way in these prisoners' lives.
9:00[camera shutter clicking]
9:02[Zimbardo] We tried to create an environment
9:03which was a functional simulation
9:06of what happens in prison.
9:15[Shue] As you can see in the footage,
9:17when the police dropped us off,
9:19we were blindfolded at that point.
9:22We didn't know where we were,
9:24and we just wound up in this hallway.
9:30I just remember being told to strip.
9:36[Guard] Socks off, too.
9:38[Shue] And stand with my hands against the wall,
9:41and they sprayed me.
9:44[Eshleman] We would make them wear
9:45these very simple, scratchy smocks.
9:50[Loftus] A smock with their number on it.
9:53[Eshleman] It kind of went down to mid-thigh,
9:55and they didn't let them wear their underwear.
9:57[Loftus] They would be wearing a nylon stock over their head
10:00to simulate having shaved heads.
10:06[Korpi] They put like chains, just on one foot, and lock.
10:10[Shue] It was part of their plan to dehumanize us.
10:15[Van Orsdol] They became an object in a system
10:18as opposed to an individual.
10:28[Korpi] There were three prison cells,
10:31and each of the cells was the size of a small bedroom
10:34with a couple of mattresses.
10:37And they had windows on the doors with bars on them
10:40so that you can come by and take a look in there
10:41and see what was going on.
10:43[Loftus] There was a camera at the end of the hall.
10:45There was a false wall and a hole in it.
10:47And if there's anybody in the hall, it was recording behavior.
10:52[Gee] From your cell, one couldn't see the entire hallway.
10:55All I can do is hear the noise.
10:58[Mark] At first, everything about it was uncomfortable,
11:01except probably the sunglasses
11:03'cause I did like to wear sunglasses.
11:05Especially if your eyes are red from getting high,
11:07that was helpful.
11:09[Burton] First day, there was that feeling of awkwardness
11:12to kind of get us into our roles.
11:14But that feeling disappeared very quickly
11:16with all the stuff that was happening.
11:18[Eshleman] I took a leadership role, deliberately.
11:21Somebody must have been spending a lot of money
11:22to have this experiment put on,
11:24and they were trying to show the bad effects of prison,
11:27but nothing was happening.
11:29I said, "Okay, here's what we're gonna do."
11:31I was making the plans.
11:33[whistle blows] Morning, girls!
11:35[Guard] Open the cell.
11:36[indistinct shouting]
11:40[Eshleman] We would get them out of their cells,
11:42line them up in the hallway.
11:47[Eshleman] And I would take them through drills.
11:49[Prisoners] One, two, three, four, five, six,
11:51seven, eight, nine.
11:54[Eshleman] I shouted in their faces quite a bit.
12:01[Korpi] One of the guards, we called him John Wayne.
12:05[Eshleman] They gave me the nickname John Wayne.
12:06And it's kind of curious, because John Wayne never played
12:09evil characters in his films, he always played the hero.
12:12Well, we were all against the Vietnam War.
12:15John Wayne came out in full support of the Vietnam War.
12:18So if you're an evil dude, you're an enemy...
12:22[indistinct shouting]
12:24Then what the hell are you talking about?
12:26...you're John Wayne.
12:28[Shue] John Wayne was a very dramatic presence.
12:32[Eshleman] This time, louder.
12:33[Korpi] He kept doing irritating things.
12:35[Eshleman] You tell me who's boss. [whistle blows]
12:38At first, I tried to make it kind of entertaining,
12:40and I would make up the drills as I pretty much went along.
12:48[Eshleman] It was singing stupid songs
12:50or it was telling the guy next to you that you loved him.
12:53Anything that we thought would be kind of humiliating for guys.
12:59[Eshleman] We had them refer to us as,
13:00"Yes, Mr. Correctional Officer."
13:10[Eshleman] We referred to them by their numbers.
13:19[Eshleman] So all things designed
13:20to sort of dehumanize the prisoners.
13:23[Shue] We started out having fun, laughing and joking.
13:27And they told us to chant something,
13:29we would bastardize it somehow.
13:37[laughter]
13:38[Korpi] And you know that the "guards" couldn't hurt you.
13:41I mean, it's an experiment, for God's sakes.
13:43We're all White, middle-class students.
13:45What are they gonna do to us?
13:46[Shue] They started to selectively punish smartasses.
13:51[Van Orsdol] Just harassment, basically,
13:53and wanting the prisoners to show respect to the guards.
13:57[Zimbardo] We're really dealing now
13:59with power relationships
14:00between people who have some power to control others
14:04and people who allow themselves to be controlled.
14:07It's a gradual process.
14:08You get socialized into the role.
14:10[Eshleman] It's almost surreal when you think about it.
14:12Everybody was taking this as if it were a real prison.
14:16I think that I took control of the group of guards
14:18and they followed my lead.
14:31Woo!
14:33I had just finished my freshman year
14:35where I had gone through hazing at a fraternity.
14:40And they would take us through different humiliations.
14:46They poured molasses all over my head.
14:49They made me rub this very burning ointment on my genitals.
14:54I said, "This has got nothing to do with anything.
14:56It's just you guys being sadistic bastards."
15:02And some of that you hold inside,
15:05and if you're in a position
15:07where you can return this cruelty to somebody else,
15:12maybe you know how to do it.
15:19[Burton] Dave had cultivated this persona
15:22of this despised, hated, feared figure of authority
15:26that nobody wanted to mess with.
15:34[Burton] I tried to be a sidekick to him
15:36in a lot of the stuff we were doing.
15:47[Burton] Everybody was in their role.
15:49We were already settling into
15:51this is what it's like in a prison.
15:57[Burton] One, two, three, four.
15:58We just kind of contrived things
16:00to make the prisoners feel bad about themselves.
16:03In this very short period of time,
16:05we were endeavoring to break them down.
16:23[Burton] My name is Chuck Burton.
16:25I live in Mexico for more than half of every year
16:29where my name is either Carlos or Carlitos.
16:34In 1981, I became a tax preparer,
16:36and I basically worked for 36 years doing tax returns.
16:40I decided I didn't want to spend my life indoors anymore.
16:46So I spend my life outdoors as much as possible.
16:50This all fits in the context
16:51of a pretty deep Buddhist meditation practice.
16:58My younger days were very difficult.
17:02I was super small.
17:05I was the smallest kid in high school.
17:08My parents made the mistake when I was in third grade
17:10of skipping me because I was intellectually so far ahead.
17:13This was a very difficult thing in my adolescent years
17:16and into my early 20s.
17:19In the Stanford Prison Experiment,
17:20it was one of the first times
17:22I can remember in my life feeling powerful.
17:33[Korpi] So we're in these cells, and I learned they weren't
17:36gonna let anybody come in to give me my books.
17:39And I thought, well, wait a minute.
17:41In prison, they give you books.
17:43How can you deny this in an experiment?
17:47And there's nothing to do.
17:49[Guard] 3401.
17:53[Korpi] And the guards kept doing irritating things
17:54like not giving us utensils to eat and [bleep].
17:56They were making life yucky.
18:02[Korpi] But the job was to be a prisoner.
18:04And what do prisoners do? They get to act naughty.
18:07And we knew we could do anything.
18:08So it was like this incredible sense of freedom.
18:13So I thought, "Well, we'll make this a rebellion."
18:16And it turns out the doors opened into the cells.
18:19So I thought, "These guards keep waking us up.
18:21Well, screw that.
18:22Let's just put the beds in front of the door
18:24so they can't come in.
18:25Get your bed in front of the door!
18:27One vertical, one horizontal.
18:29Don't let them in.
18:30And that pissed off the guards.
18:33[Guard] Get reinforcements!
18:34[Prisoner] Yeah, you're gonna have to push harder than that.
18:36[Eshleman] That was a reason for us to get tougher with them.
18:38We could not have them challenge our authority as guards.
18:41[Zimbardo] The prisoners rebelled.
18:42That was the turning point,
18:44because then the guards had a reason to crush the rebellion
18:47and think of these other students as dangerous prisoners.
18:50[Guard] Get, get them out.
18:51[Prisoner] Oh, man.
18:52[Prisoner] Come on! Come on!
18:53[Eshleman] We took their beds away.
18:55[Burton] Back up.
18:58[Eshleman] To remove that element of comfort.
19:01[Prisoner] Whoa! Whoa!
19:02[Prisoner] Leave me alone. Come on, man.
19:05[Korpi] They beat us when they took the beds out.
19:07So they won that round.
19:08[Burton] How about that?
19:10[Korpi] So they're not winning the next round.
19:12[Burton] The prisoners had gotten together and decided
19:15that they were gonna fight their way out of this
19:16and mounted a rebellion.
19:18Get back from the door.
19:19At that point, it escalated.
19:21[Korpi] I ripped off my number and I threw it in the hall.
19:24And I said, "Let's all rip off our numbers
19:26and let's all throw them in the halls."
19:27Tear off your numbers!
19:29[Prisoner] Yes!
19:30[Korpi] And when they would call me 8612, I wouldn't respond.
19:32I said, "My name is Doug!"
19:34[Prisoner] You can't take our smocks, man.
19:35[Guard] Yes, we are.
19:36[Prisoner] You're not taking our...
19:37[Guard] Smocks off.
19:38[Korpi] They took our smocks.
19:39And underneath our smocks, we had nothing.
19:41Me and this other guy, they chained us together.
19:44One arm to one arm, and one leg to one leg.
19:46Naked.
19:48So now they're thinking, they got me, they've won.
19:51I wasn't gonna let them win.
19:56Come on, dogs.
19:58I've always been an extrovert.
20:01[laughing]
20:03A dog's gotta take a dump.
20:05I've always had a lot of energy. I'm an energized guy.
20:08Growing up, I suffered a cultural lag
20:11when I was in high school.
20:13And then I went to UC Berkeley,
20:15and it was during the really raucous years.
20:23It was rebellionville.
20:25The antiauthoritarian spirit was part of the zeitgeist.
20:28We were all feeling this way.
20:30That's where I became political.
20:32I used to have wonderful hair.
20:35[laughs]
20:36You got to yell and scream and rail against the man.
20:40It taught me that I had a perspective,
20:43that I was creative,
20:45which means breaking out of the box in some way.
20:49I wasn't the usual guy that was just gonna go along with things.
20:53I was gonna have my way.
21:02In the prison cell, there were plugs.
21:04And in the plugs, there's a screw.
21:07If you take that screw out, you can use that as a screwdriver.
21:10The mechanism that locked the door was on the inside.
21:15So we use that screw,
21:17every time the guard would go out of the way.
21:21We'd go and unloosen some of the screws.
21:23He'd come back, we'd... [whistles]
21:26And he'll be waiting for the shift change.
21:29We opened up the door.
21:31We looked to see if they were gone.
21:34And then hobble down the other way,
21:38naked, and around the corner,
21:40thinking that we were gonna escape.
21:42So they figured out we escaped and they came and got us.
21:45[Guards] Hey, come here!
21:48Come on. Come on.
21:50[Korpi] When they threw us back in the cell naked,
21:53and I thought, oh, my god. This is not fun anymore.
21:57This can't get any better. It can only get worse.
22:08[Loftus] Hands off the door.
22:10This one guy was rattling the bars and calling me something,
22:14and I grab this fire extinguisher
22:17to get him away from the bars, and I sprayed him with it.
22:21I thought it was funny.
22:25[Korpi] When the repercussions were being too severe,
22:28all I remember thinking, "This is a bad, bad job.
22:32I gotta get out of this job."
22:41[Korpi] [bleep] This is for real.
22:43These people don't want to let me out.
22:45What am I gonna do? And I had to be creative.
22:48So I said I had a tummy ache,
22:50because I thought that would get me out.
22:52So they pulled me in the back, Zimbardo was there,
22:55that's where I really remember Zimbardo for the first time.
22:59Phil is big, 6-foot-1, 220 pounds.
23:04I was 110 and 5'8".
23:08He was a professor at Stanford.
23:10Zimbardo's a fancy guy.
23:12I was intimidated.
23:14He said, "Doug, you can't leave because history being made,
23:18and you're the leader of the rebellion, for God's sakes.
23:21We need your input in this important event."
23:24When I came out of that room, I had the definite impression
23:28that I couldn't leave the experiment.
23:47[Van Orsdol] Locking them in the hole was the most disturbing.
23:51It was a small closet
23:53which was very dark and dank and very small.
23:56And it would be quite a frightening experience.
24:07[Korpi] They threw me in the hole.
24:09[door slams]
24:15I was in this closet on my side lying down.
24:20And it's dark.
24:21And I remember being really like,
24:23"Oh, [bleep], I can't get out of this experiment."
24:27Somebody had control over my life.
24:30I'm in this emotional state.
24:43[Shue] I could hear him screaming about,
24:45"I'm burning up inside."
24:50[Korpi] I'm [bleep] up.
24:51And then I got desperate.
24:53I want out! I want out!
24:55I want out right now!
24:57Right now, I want out!
24:58I want out!
25:00[hyperventilating]
25:02[Mark] Being isolated in that little dark space, he cracked.
25:06[screaming]
25:10[Zimbardo] Prisoner 8612 was suffering
25:12from acute emotional disturbance.
25:13We had already come to think so much like prison authorities
25:17that we thought he was trying to con us.
25:20[Eshleman] The guy's a wimp. He can't take it.
25:22He must be just a very weak-willed individual.
25:25Turn around. Push-ups!
25:26There's nothing we're doing here that's even close
25:28to what they do if you try to join a fraternity.
25:30[Zimbardo] Took quite a while before we could be convinced
25:33that he was really suffering, and then we released him.
25:36[bird chirping]
25:43[machine humming]
25:50[Korpi] Did you see what Debbie gave us yet?
25:52Our neighbor gave us dessert.
25:55My girlfriend, Theresa, came down to Stanford to pick me up.
25:59We got in the parking lot and I could relax,
26:01and I said, "Oh, phew. I got out of there.
26:04Thanks for coming and saving me, honey."
26:06[laughs]
26:07You want me to make you a cup of coffee, sweetie?
26:09[Theresa Hanna] Yeah.
26:11[machine humming]
26:12It was in the evening and they called and said,
26:16"He's really upset and he says he wants to go home,
26:19so I think maybe you should come and get him."
26:22I got there and the guy, the guy says, "Well, you know,
26:25he seems to be having some kind of mental breakdown."
26:28I majored in psychology, too, so I was aware of all these,
26:32you know, human subject experiments
26:34and that there were moral problems
26:36with subjecting human beings to artificially abusive situations.
26:42You seemed really upset that they would keep you
26:46against your will, and that made you very, very angry.
26:55[Korpi] I blame Zimbardo for doing that experiment on me.
27:02It was a horrible job, and Zimbardo was the perpetrator.
27:09I was a victim.
27:11Zimbardo would say,
27:12"It's getting the job done for the greater good."
27:16The problem is he doesn't care who he hurts along the way.
27:30[Ramsay] The Stanford Prison Experiment began,
27:33and I had not been called.
27:36So then I was disappointed, like, "Oh, shoot."
27:37You know, it's like whatever it was gonna be, $220, you know?
27:42Ah, too bad.
27:43And I forgot about it completely.
27:49But then the phone rang and they said,
27:53"We would like you to come in." And I went, "Great!"
28:02[Ramsay] So I arrived at Stanford.
28:05They told me what building, what door, so I went in.
28:16And I kind of went, "Where is everybody?"
28:21[Guard] Got fresh meat here.
28:22[Guard] Think so.
28:25We got his stuff here.
28:26[Ramsay] They stripped me, deloused me, put the gown on me,
28:33and the anklet chain, and then took me down to my cell.
28:43[Guard] ...you guys will be out here all night
28:44if you don't get it right.
28:45[Ramsay] If you were in a cell,
28:46you couldn't see anything, really.
28:48I could hear a little bit of what was going on
28:51on the other side of the wall.
28:54[Guard] Well, why don't you apply it to yourself?
28:56Inmate 2093, think about just what a...
28:59[Ramsay] There were things going on right there
29:00that you didn't understand,
29:02and especially coming in in the middle,
29:04that was true for me.
29:06Your real communication was limited
29:09mostly to the people who were in the cell with you.
29:14[Shue] Clay was a standby prisoner,
29:16and we wound up in the same cell,
29:19and we had good talks about lots of things.
29:23So there was a bond there.
29:36[Burton] The prisoners were very subdued.
29:39They had already been subjected to trauma.
29:43And they were not in much of a mood to challenge us in any way.
29:47[Eshleman] The prisoners simply were exhausted.
29:57And they were in a much different environment
29:59than we were.
30:00We did an eight-hour shift.
30:02We can go home,
30:04reconnect with the real outside world,
30:08and then resume the next day.
30:10They're there 24 hours a day,
30:12had no idea what time it was, whether it was night or day,
30:14how long they'd been there,
30:16so you can see why they would despair.
30:19[Zimbardo] What we wanted to do is create
30:21a central psychology of imprisonment,
30:23and that's all about power.
30:24Every prison is about power.
30:26The prisoners have to be ultimately dehumanized,
30:29end up thinking of them as animals.
30:31And the guards have to be impersonal, distant.
30:33[whistle blows]
30:34[Guard] Everybody out in the hallway. Come on.
30:36[Guard] Come on. Let's go.
30:37[Eshleman] We amplified it day after day.
30:40It's like, "What can we do today
30:41to top what we did the day before?"
30:43[Ramsay] The foundation of the harassment
30:45was breaking up our sleep.
30:47[Guard] Good morning.
30:48[Ramsay] To be woken at 2:00 in the morning.
30:50[whistle blows]
30:51[Eshleman] Everybody out in the hallway.
30:52Come on. Come on. Up.
30:54[Ramsay] And again at 4:00 in the morning.
30:56[whistle blows]
31:02[Ramsay] That is a really effective way
31:03of breaking people down.
31:05[Prisoners] 4075, 1043.
31:06[Ramsay] And so everybody's up and you're on your feet,
31:09you're not really awake,
31:10and then they try to think of things to do.
31:12[Prisoner] 819, 54, 86.
31:15[Eshleman] Wait.
31:20[Guard] That's terrible.
31:21[Ramsay] John Wayne in particular,
31:23he would pick one and say he'd done something wrong.
31:25Pull him out, make him do push-ups.
31:34[Prisoner] One, two...
31:35[Ramsay] He would insult us in a way that he hoped
31:37would get a rise out of somebody,
31:38so that then that person could be punished.
31:42[Prisoner] No, sir.
31:45[Ramsay] If somebody seemed to not like that person
31:47getting punished, then pull them out of the line
31:50and make them do the punishing.
31:55[Ramsay] And just kind of build it up from there.
32:03[Shue] Clay wasn't comfortable with what's going on.
32:05It was a little too rough and angry.
32:16[Eshleman] He didn't understand the drill, so to speak,
32:19you know, he's coming in fresh from the outside,
32:21and he didn't want to cooperate.
32:23And so we picked on him
32:25and made sure that we would break his will.
32:29[Prisoners] Life is but a dream!
32:30[Eshleman] Good. Everybody up against the wall.
32:32[Ramsay] I could understand people feeling like
32:35it's only two weeks,
32:37but I was absolutely not an "it's only two weeks" person
32:40about anything.
32:42[Prisoner singing] ♪ Row, row, row your boat ♪
32:44[Ramsay] I didn't think any moment of my precious life
32:48was worth wasting.
32:50Once I had arrived at the conclusion something was stupid,
32:53then I was out of there.
32:55♪ Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream ♪
32:57♪ Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily ♪
32:59♪ Life is but a dream ♪
33:02[Eshleman] Not bad.
33:06[Ramsay] During high school,
33:07I wanted to be a great avant-garde novelist.
33:10I thought that college was some kind of ideological trap.
33:14And instead, I was gonna join the Merchant Marine
33:17and I was gonna work six months of the year,
33:19and then, I would take the money and I would go to Mexico,
33:21and I would write my masterpiece.
33:24If someone had said, "Aren't you gonna miss your friends?"
33:26I would have gone, "This is important."
33:31I was the sailors' janitor.
33:34What I did was get up at 5:00 in the morning
33:37and go look at the sunrise.
33:39I did meditate.
33:42I would go up on the bow,
33:43which is a fantastic place to meditate.
33:47With the experiment, I do recall thinking
33:51that I'll just have a lot of time to meditate,
33:55that it will be reflective,
33:57because people will leave you alone. [chuckles]
34:01[Prisoner] One.
34:02[Eshleman] I want to hear 'em. Yeah, louder!
34:03[Shue] Clay had been in the Merchant Marines.
34:07He had been there and done that,
34:08and he wasn't gonna do this for fun.
34:14[Ramsay] And I thought to myself,
34:16"Is this what I would call an experiment?" [chuckles]
34:21[Eshleman] Three over there.
34:22[Ramsay] It is just a mess.
34:25I began to think about how could I get myself released.
34:28And at that point, I had the idea of a hunger strike.
34:32[whistle blows]
34:34[Eshleman] Hot dog day!
34:44Eat that hot dog, Prisoner 416.
34:47[Ramsay] It's not easy in a real prison
34:48to break somebody's hunger strike.
34:51It was a surprise for them,
34:53because they hadn't figured out what do you do?
34:56[Burton] Our meal that evening was sausages,
34:59and he wouldn't eat them.
35:05[Burton] Both Dave and I were just enraged
35:07that this guy was challenging our authority.
35:11[Ramsay] They did try to jam food down my throat.
35:14[Burton] He was just, "No way."
35:18[Ramsay] It was clear that they didn't know how far to go.
35:21[Burton] And so we put him in the hole.
35:24[Guard] Go ahead.
35:29[Ramsay] I am put in the big empty box.
35:33I don't think I could stretch out 100%, but close,
35:35but I had privacy.
35:38Remember, I was also sleep deprived.
35:42So I was thinking about my novel,
35:44which was about the cultural revolution
35:47of California by acid.
35:53It was a kind of fever dream.
35:55[Eshleman] Thank you, 416.
35:57[Burton] Over there. Alright. That's fine.
35:59[Eshleman] In order to turn the prisoners against the prisoner
36:03who went on a hunger strike,
36:05we let them know that if he was not going to eat his dinner,
36:09we would take their blanket away.
36:28[Shue] The other three remaining prisoners all said,
36:30"No, I won't give up my sheet."
36:33And I liked Clay and we had shared a cell, and I said,
36:35"Yeah, I'll give him my sheet."
36:37I thought I was above the game at that point.
36:53[Shue] Later that night, he's still in the closet.
36:57The guard ordered the prisoners to pound on the door.
37:04[Shue] Basically, I just didn't want to make waves,
37:06and I thought, "Well, he knows I'm his friend,
37:08and I'll do this just to keep things smooth."
37:17[Shue] I could have said, "No, I will not pound on that door."
37:19But it was easier to just go through the motions
37:22and say something calming.
37:25Um...
37:27So...
37:33So I respect what he represented.
37:44[Eshleman] Because of our solidarity,
37:45we were successful in our aim
37:48to break down the solidarity of the prisoners
37:50to where the prisoners were turning against each other.
37:53[Burton] I was so angry at being challenged on this basis
37:57when we had never been challenged.
37:59And at one point, I started walking
38:02by this little tiny closet that he was in...
38:05[voice breaking] ...and hitting it with my club.
38:08[sniffles]
38:10I've never come to grips with how or why that happened.
38:16[Zimbardo] But the reality of that prison was so deep,
38:19once you're in that setting,
38:21your identity as a good guard or a bad guard
38:23becomes really important to you.
38:26The level of aggression the guards escalated,
38:28they would think of more and more
38:30sadistically creative things to do to show that they had power.
38:34The worst abuses happened at night.
38:37Because at night, I went to sleep.
38:39So, when the cat's away, it's time to play.
38:42[Shue] Tried to put us
38:43in sexually embarrassing situations.
38:47[Zimbardo] Guards would say, "Okay.
38:48You guys are female camels, bend over.
38:49You guys are male camels, hump them."
38:52[Prisoner] Oh, no.
38:53[Shue] A guy would be in a push-up position,
38:55and somebody else was supposed to mount them like a dog.
38:59[Zimbardo] They would simulate sodomy,
39:01their butts were exposed.
39:03You had five kids having emotional breakdowns.
39:06It was out of control.
39:13[Eshleman] You give somebody absolute power,
39:15they're gonna want to use it.
39:16And if you make people objects by assigning them a number,
39:20instead of referring to them by name,
39:22I don't see you as equal to me anymore,
39:25and therefore anything I do to you is justified.
39:31[Zimbardo] The fifth day.
39:32Would you like to see the rest of the facility?
39:33One of the people that came down was a young woman,
39:35Christina Maslach, and she and I had just started dating.
39:39[Christina Maslach] I just came down to the prison basement
39:43just to see what was happening.
39:44[Eshleman] Down, up, down, up.
39:47[Maslach] And I just got sick to my stomach.
39:48I thought that, "Oh, my god, this is awful."
39:51Philip said, "Oh, you see that?" You know, kind of thing.
39:53And I just got upset.
39:55[Zimbardo] And she starts tearing up and runs out.
39:57And I run after her and I said, "What's wrong?"
39:59And she said, "What you're doing to those boys is terrible."
40:02[Maslach] These are young people and they're being treated badly,
40:06and there's no reason for this.
40:08And why are you doing it?
40:10You have to stop it now.
40:12[Zimbardo] We are creating the prison
40:14in which people are suffering,
40:16where the guards are behaving sadistically, brutally.
40:19At times, even I forgot I was an experimenter
40:22and acted like a prison warden.
40:26And at that point, we said, "Enough, we have to end this."
40:35[Eshleman] I came in for my shift
40:36and was told, "That's it. They called it off."
40:39And I said, "Oh, so early?"
40:42You know, I thought it was just getting started.
40:45[Shue] John Wayne had played his role
40:47about as hard as he could play his role given the constraints.
40:51I mean, the only way he could play his role any harder
40:53would be to physically abuse Clay.
40:56[Ramsay] The only good news was that they were gonna let me out.
41:01[Van Orsdol] I remember being quite disappointed
41:03that it ended early and surprised why.
41:06[Burton] The people that had created
41:07this Frankenstein monster were controlled by the monster,
41:12up to the very top.
41:14[Eshleman] Shortly after they called it off, it hit the news.
41:18[Ted Koppel] Philip Zimbardo,
41:19professor of psychology at Stanford University.
41:22[Eshleman] It was sensational.
41:26[Crosby] What did your experiment prove?
41:28[Zimbardo] Evil behavior can be elicited in the best of us.
41:31We underestimate how strong the situation is.
41:34These good boys were behaving sadistically
41:37if they were guards.
41:38[Eshleman] It was a dramatic story.
41:39He got tons of news coverage.
41:41[Burton] Lots of people wanting to talk to him,
41:42lots of people want to hear his opinion.
41:44[Shue] Zimbardo became an authority on prison.
41:46[Man] He spent his career speaking as an expert witness
41:50in court cases defending people in prisons
41:52who'd done awful things.
41:53[Analyst] You testified in the Abu Ghraib scandal.
41:56[Zimbardo] I was part of the defense team.
41:58[Ramsay] And then it became an academic object
42:00because it found its way into textbooks in social psychology.
42:04Students are introduced to it year after year after year.
42:07[Mark] He wrote a book.
42:08[Newscaster] Entitled The Lucifer Effect,
42:09Understanding How Good People Turn Evil.
42:13[Eshleman] He's got a narrative to tell,
42:14but he can be a little more forthcoming
42:17about what really went on.
42:22[Le Texier] I never thought about debunking
42:24the Stanford Prison Experiment.
42:27But then I went through the archive.
42:33There are large discrepancies
42:35between the official narrative and the archive.
42:38What Zimbardo says happened
42:39is not what the archives says happened.
42:42He's caught into his own trap.
42:49[Le Texier] It can prove that you can do very bad science
42:51and go away with it.
42:55The official narrative was a lie.
43:00After going through the archive,
43:01I started to realize that what Zimbardo says happened,
43:05it was not what really happened.
43:07[Mark] Zimbardo was disingenuous.
43:09[Man] I'm the guy that you never heard about
43:11that you should be hearing about.
43:12[Eshleman] We were all on the same page
43:14to prove that prisons are an evil environment.
43:16This is set up for the guards to abuse.
43:18[Hanna] I can't have them kill each other.
43:20[Le Texier] The experimenter is putting their hands
43:22into the material.
43:23[Eshleman] If you listen to the tape,
43:24it does sound a little suspect.
43:26[Le Texier] The participants couldn't get out.
43:28[Korpi] He's re-traumatizing.
43:29[Man] Why did you do that to those kids?
43:31[Eshleman] Come on.
43:32[Man] Have you ever...
43:34[beep]
44:22[Producer] In the 50 years since the experiment,
44:25no one had done as extensive research as you.
44:29[Thibault Le Texier] Yes.
44:33It started as a side project.
44:35I used to do found footage films.
44:41And I discovered the Stanford Prison Experiment.
44:44I've heard about it, but never really digged into it.
44:48I decided to fund a trip to Stanford
44:51to go through the archive,
44:53because I wanted to be able to film from the archive.
44:58I thought it was fascinating to investigate this.
45:01The narrative is very striking.
45:04It's really a story about good and evil,
45:07about these innocent young students
45:10behaving like tough guards
45:12just because they were given power in the situation.
45:16It plays on the inner fears of people
45:18that there's a monster inside of all of us.
45:21Maybe all men are potential rapists.
45:24Maybe we are all potential Nazis.
45:27[Man] The monster isn't out there.
45:30It's in you.
45:31[Le Texier] The Stanford Prison Experiment
45:33became rapidly famous.
45:34[Jon Stewart] The famed... [Amy Goodman] Stanford...
45:36-Prison... -Experiment.
45:37[Joe Rogan] Are you aware of the Stanford Prison Experiment?
45:38[Melissa Harris-Perry] Dr. Z, this is a high nerd moment for me.
45:41I know all of your work very well.
45:44[Philip Zimbardo] My legacy is to make psychology appetizing
45:48to the general public.
45:49[Le Texier] You have a rock band
45:50called the Stanford Prison Experiment.
45:53You have series talking about it.
45:55[Actor] In your cell!
45:56[Le Texier] And you have feature films,
45:57a German one, an American one.
45:59[Zimbardo] It's important to get it right, but for me,
46:01it's equally important to make it interesting.
46:04[Le Texier] It was in many books,
46:05books about group violence, World War II, obesity.
46:09It was told in colleges, everywhere in the US.
46:12[Student] I'm Dr. Zimbardo.
46:13We're recreating the Stanford Prison Experiment.
46:16Let's go, prisoner.
46:17[Student] I have six participants involved
46:18in something I call the Stanford Prison Experiment.
46:21[Eminem] ♪ Hi! My name is... ♪
46:22[Man] Zimbardo.
46:23[Le Texier] It has become more of a pop culture item
46:26than a scientific item.
46:27[Zimbardo] I want to reach the world.
46:29[Host] His Holiness, the Dalai Lama
46:31and Professor Phil Zimbardo.
46:32[applause]
46:34[Le Texier] Zimbardo says that the Stanford Prison Experiment
46:36explains how millions of people could agree with mass murdering.
46:40[Zimbardo] In Rwanda, people killed
46:42800,000 of their neighbors.
46:45That's the power of the situation.
46:47[Le Texier] He has a very simple explanation
46:49to this very complex world event.
46:51[Zimbardo] Maybe it was a bad barrel that corrupted them.
46:53[Le Texier] You really feel like you understand human nature
46:56after you've learned about the Stanford Prison Experiment.
46:59Zimbardo became worldwide famous from this and other topics.
47:04[Newscaster] Philip Zimbardo.
47:05[Newscaster] Dr. Zimbardo.
47:06-Philip Zimbardo. -Phil Zimbardo.
47:07-Phil Zimbardo. -Dr. Zimbardo.
47:09[multiple voices] Philip. Philip. Philip. Philip.
47:10Philip. Philip. Philip. Philip. Philip. Zimbardo.
47:12[Zimbardo] Yes. Philip Zimbardo.
47:14[Le Texier] But after going through the archive,
47:16I started to realize that the official narrative was a lie.
47:20[Zimbardo] I hope that the message gets carried to the public.
47:22[Newscaster] It just did.
47:38[Dave Eshleman] Well, you know, the popular narrative
47:40for this thing, as you probably know,
47:42is that you take these normal people
47:44and you put them in this evil environment
47:45and suddenly they become evil.
47:47But, you know, I just, I don't think you can draw conclusions
47:50from it because of the way that it was done.
47:52And the effect that he had in tipping the scale, so to speak.
47:56[Doug Korpi] Zimbardo had a perspective he wanted to advance
47:59when he did the experiment, that the guards did do evil things
48:03and the prisoners did become more passive
48:05than they might otherwise, but it's not the whole story.
48:10[John Mark] If you want to have an experiment
48:12where everyone's the same, you should use fruit flies.
48:16[Eshleman] We all behave because we have reasons
48:18to behave the way that we do.
48:19It's very good theater,
48:20but I don't think it qualifies as good science.
48:29[Le Texier] At Stanford, in the archive,
48:31you have pretty much everything that was recording
48:34during the experiment.
48:35You had the forms that the prisoners and the guard
48:38had to fill, reports that the guards had to write every day.
48:42A lot of press.
48:45There was about six hours of films
48:47and 15 hours of audio material.
48:51For the next two weeks, I sat every morning at the library
48:53and went through these boxes.
48:56I also went through all the articles and books
48:59written by Zimbardo.
49:02I discovered in the archive elements that I found shocking.
49:07[Producer] Can you walk me through
49:08what happened on day one?
49:11[Le Texier] It depends on what you call day one.
49:16I found in the archive
49:17that there was a whole training day for the guards.
49:21And Zimbardo talked about this training day in his articles
49:25and in his books,
49:26but he's saying that it's just to restrain them
49:28from using violence, for instance.
49:30[Lester Holt] Were they given guidelines at all?
49:32[Zimbardo] They were given very simple guidelines.
49:34If the prisoners escape, the study is over,
49:36maintain law and order, but no physical abuse.
49:39Essentially they were given no training in how to be a guard.
49:42[Le Texier] Actually, in the archives,
49:44you can see that it was a real training session.
49:47[Zimbardo] We got these clubs.
49:49They'll have no privacy.
49:50We have total power in the situation.
49:53It's totally controlled by us.
49:55[repeated] Totally controlled by us.
50:00[Le Texier] And the discovery of Kent Cotter
50:01was another red flag.
50:04[Kent Cotter] I'm the guy that you never heard about
50:05that you should be hearing about,
50:07because I am the guy that quit.
50:10[Producer] Why is it important to know about you?
50:13[Cotter] Well, not everybody participated.
50:15I would think there would be...
50:17that should have come up at some point.
50:26I was born in the Midwest
50:28and came to California as soon as I could,
50:31because California was the place to be.
50:33Everybody's doing drugs and smoking pot.
50:35And so I came out to move to Palo Alto.
50:38I did odd jobs, handyman stuff.
50:41And I was doing experiments at Stanford.
50:44In fact, I don't really remember any of them.
50:45I just remember making the money,
50:47and that was a good thing, other than the, the prison experiment.
50:53I signed up for this experiment and walked into this room
50:58and found out that I'd been chosen as a guard.
51:01They had all the guards come to this meeting
51:03to explain what they were doing in the experiment.
51:21[Cotter] My feeling about Zimbardo
51:22was distrust and suspicion.
51:25There was something about the way
51:26that he conducted himself in the meeting.
51:38[Cotter] To me, it seemed like the whole thing,
51:40we were being pushed in a direction.
51:41That that's why we were there, to do what they expected.
51:45It sort of escalated, you know,
51:46it was like guys are really getting into it.
51:48You could do this and, you know, you can control them like that,
51:50and it was hard for me to listen to it,
51:52but also I felt more and more isolated from that group.
51:57I just decided I wasn't gonna participate in it.
51:59So, I started thinking right then, how do I bail out of this?
52:02Right after the meeting, I went into his office
52:04and I told him I just couldn't see myself doing this.
52:08I had a real problem with what the guards were saying.
52:11His initial reaction to me was, "Well, why don't you stay, then?
52:14Why don't you stay and redirect this?"
52:16And I said, "I don't think it can be redirected."
52:20I felt like this was set up for the guards to abuse.
52:25So how could it go any other way?
52:28[Le Texier] Zimbardo wanted people to believe
52:30that the participants were spontaneously responding
52:33to the situation, whereas the case of Kent Cotter
52:36showed that even before starting the experiment,
52:39the participant could really easily guess
52:42what Zimbardo wanted to prove.
52:45What's also a red flag is that Zimbardo always pretended
52:48that the guards made up their own rules.
52:51[Zimbardo] First thing the guards said is, "We need rules."
52:53And so they set about
52:54to make up the systematic number of rules.
52:56[Interviewer] The guards made the rules?
52:57[Zimbardo] Oh, oh, absolutely.
52:59[Interviewer] Not you? [Zimbardo] Oh, no, not at all.
53:01[Le Texier] But in the archives, I discovered a lot of evidence
53:04showing that the guards were given the rules
53:07that they were to enforce.
53:09They knew what punishments they could impose to prisoners.
53:16And in their own reports, they wrote at the end of each day,
53:20schedule followed pretty closely.
53:22Punishment.
53:26They were following a script.
53:27They were not reacting spontaneously to the situation.
53:31[Zimbardo] Oh, this is all spontaneous.
53:32The only thing we told the guards were,
53:34"We want to maintain a prison here for a week,
53:35do whatever you have to maintain law and order."
53:40[Eshleman] After all of these instructions,
53:42I felt that we were all on the same page
53:44with what we wanted to see come out of this,
53:46and that was proof that prisons are an evil environment.
53:51Given the times and given the fact we were students
53:54and very anti-establishment, we would have done anything
53:58to prove that this prison system was an evil institution.
54:02We were happy to play that role.
54:08[guitar playing]
54:14[Man] Test one, two.
54:16[Eshleman in British accent] Uh, okay.
54:17When you do your mic cable, if you bring it down around here,
54:20come around to the left.
54:22Can you do that?
54:24My stage name is Nigel.
54:25This is Nigel and Clive and the British Invasion.
54:33Come to my dressing room.
54:35And here I must leave you.
54:44Really, really nice there.
54:46The hair is growing out a bit,
54:47covers the bald spot, doesn't it?
54:49Which ones do you prefer? Do you like these here?
54:53Or these?
54:57These are a bit smaller, aren't they?
55:04You're a star.
55:05Go out and knock 'em dead.
55:07Let's do some music.
55:12A one, two, three.
55:16In high school, I got very much into theater.
55:18I was in every play, every musical, the choir.
55:21And then I decided I wanted to be an actor.
55:24My acting teacher always said, "Do not break character,"
55:28and that is the goal.
55:42Are you wearing your hearing aid?
55:44The way that I was portrayed in the experiment by Zimbardo
55:48was that I step into this evil environment
55:51and suddenly I become this evil character,
55:53when in fact before I stepped into the experiment,
55:57I stay outside and I get in character.
56:00And when I'm ready, I enter, and now I am my character.
56:11[Zimbardo] You see how quickly the good boys
56:13become brutal guards.
56:19[Eshleman] It's like it never occurred to them,
56:21like they've never been to improv class.
56:29[Prisoner] One, two, three...
56:30[Eshleman] So, I decided I would become Strother Martin
56:33from Cool Hand Luke.
56:35He said, "You know, man, I can be a nice guy..."
56:37[Strother Martin] Or I can be one real mean son of a bitch.
56:40[Eshleman] I would bang my nightstick against my hand.
56:43I would say, "I'm gonna hit you so hard,
56:46it's gonna kill your whole family."
56:50And I kept a straight face.
56:53[Jerry Shue] He was pretty convincing.
56:55[chuckles]
56:58[John Loftus] "What we have here is a failure to communicate."
57:01Prisoners thought it was hilarious.
57:07[Eshleman] I never broke character.
57:09That would have destroyed the whole effect
57:11that I was going for.
57:12I like to stir it up.
57:13You know, I was kind of a jerk in that way, frankly.
57:16[Zimbardo] He was creative in his evil.
57:19He would think of very ingenious ways to degrade,
57:22to demean the prisoners.
57:25[Eshleman] A lot of the behaviors that appeared
57:27in the experiment, maybe given a couple of months,
57:29you would have seen the same thing happen,
57:31I just made them happen in a couple of days.
57:33I was very sympathetic to what I thought their goals were,
57:37and that was to prove that prison was a lousy place.
57:41Turn it around. Push-ups.
57:43So, I may have made an impact on, you know,
57:45the understanding of human nature with my acting job.
57:50Thank you, 416. [bang]
57:52-Over there. -Oh, that's perfect.
57:55[Korpi] Not all the guards became sadists; only some did.
57:58Phil makes it into like everybody became a sadist.
58:01[Zimbardo] He became a sadist.
58:02Guards behaved sadistically.
58:04What it brang out was the worst.
58:06Cruel, sadistic, dominating.
58:08Going way beyond the rules that they had set.
58:10[Korpi] You had different feelings
58:11toward different guards.
58:13Some of you were worse [bleep] than the others.
58:15You're all [bleep], but you're a really bad [bleep],
58:19you're a medium [bleep].
58:20Some were really, really deeply into their [bleep].
58:23[Zimbardo] These good guards were totally into the role
58:25of being sadistic, controlling, dominant.
58:28[Korpi] They're different people.
58:30But Phil doesn't think they're different.
58:38[Mark] Professor Zimbardo truly believes that there is an evil
58:43that lurks in every human.
58:46He was using this experiment to make his point.
58:51He said it's part of human nature.
58:53It wasn't even true of the nine guards.
58:59I didn't like being a guard at all.
59:01I had a lot of compassion for the prisoners.
59:06[ding]
59:07When I had been at Stanford in France,
59:10I was smoking pot every day.
59:12We smoked openly on the campus.
59:16My first quarter, I took Buddhism, Confucianism,
59:20and Daoism, Jewish mysticism, and Chinese art,
59:25but I also just absorbed what I could absorb.
59:30I'd had very close encounters with getting arrested for hash,
59:34so when I saw this prison experiment,
59:38it just really felt like it'd be a way
59:40to have a cathartic experience of what it would have been like
59:44had I been incarcerated.
59:46When I was a guard, I thought pretty much every day
59:50about giving some joints to the prisoners.
59:54I wanted to be one of them.
59:56[Guard] Three. [Prisoners] Three.
59:59[Guard] Four. [Prisoners] Four.
1:00:00[Guard] Too slow!
1:00:01[Guard] Five. [Prisoners] Five.
1:00:02[Mark] One day, the warden,
1:00:04who was a graduate student of Professor Zimbardo,
1:00:07took me aside and he said that they had noticed
1:00:11that I wasn't acting tough.
1:00:30[Mark] They thought I was kind of laying back
1:00:32and kind of letting others take the lead,
1:00:35and I was pretty neutral.
1:00:38All of which was true.
1:00:46[Mark] He kind of gave me a pep talk about how I needed
1:00:48to help out my fellow guards and how to help out the experiment.
1:01:02[Mark] They did try and interfere with the way
1:01:05the experiment was going
1:01:06and they tried to mold it to their expectations.
1:01:23[Mark] They could say whatever they wanted to say,
1:01:25but I wasn't gonna change anything.
1:01:28[Le Texier] Real scientific experiment,
1:01:30you would not intervene to produce the results you want.
1:01:34And you can see the experimenters
1:01:37really putting their hands into the material
1:01:40that they're supposed just to watch.
1:01:42This is bad scientific methodology.
1:01:44Unfortunately, when you produce science
1:01:46just in order to make something striking,
1:01:50that's when you're on a slippery slope.
1:01:53With his team, Zimbardo was not behaving as a scientist.
1:01:57He was behaving as someone
1:01:59who really wanted to shock the world.
1:02:05What's more is that the ethical dimension of the experiment
1:02:09wasn't questioned at all.
1:02:11You have the feeling that the prisoners could get out
1:02:15at any moment and, which was not true.
1:02:17Actually, the participants, they had signed a document saying
1:02:21that they could only get out
1:02:23with the authorization of Zimbardo.
1:02:28One prisoner, Doug Korpi, is trying to rebel and get out,
1:02:32and Zimbardo tells him he cannot leave.
1:02:35[Korpi] Zimbardo told me that I couldn't
1:02:37get out of the experiment with a tummy ache.
1:02:39All I'm thinking is, "[bleep], this is for real.
1:02:42These people don't want to let me out."
1:02:44And I'm pissed off.
1:02:54[Korpi] They threw me in the hole.
1:02:56[door slams]
1:02:59I was in this closet...
1:03:01[Guard] Don't let him in.
1:03:03[Korpi] ...on my side, lying down
1:03:05in the dark.
1:03:07And I remember being really like, "Oh, [bleep].
1:03:10I can't get out of this experiment."
1:03:13Somebody had control over my life.
1:03:16I'm in this emotional state.
1:03:18[bleep]
1:03:19And then I got desperate.
1:03:21I had to be creative.
1:03:26And that's when I decided I had to act like I was crazy.
1:03:32I thought, well, there's three things you need to do.
1:03:34You need to be agitated in your body,
1:03:36you needed to be screaming, and you needed to generate tears.
1:03:40I want out! I want out! I want out!
1:03:43All I was thinking was, keep this up, keep this up.
1:03:45Try not to give in too quickly to saying,
1:03:48"Oh, I'm faking it to get out."
1:03:50You don't just sit and be upset.
1:03:52You, you have to act upset.
1:03:54I was acting agitated.
1:03:57And it's a lot of work.
1:03:59Somehow traumatizing to, to rev yourself up
1:04:03into that mental state.
1:04:05It was yucky.
1:04:07[Zimbardo] In 36 hours, the first prisoner
1:04:10had an emotional breakdown.
1:04:11[Eshleman] If you listen to the tape of the mental breakdown...
1:04:17[Eshleman] It does sound a little suspect, I'll be honest.
1:04:20[Prisoner Actor] I'm burning up inside, don't you know that?
1:04:24This door isn't locked.
1:04:26[laughter]
1:04:28So, if I touch this, it doesn't lock?
1:04:31[Guard Actor] No, I don't think it, I don't think it does. No.
1:04:34[Prisoner Actor] So, I should hit this one?
1:04:35[Producer] Starting on, he says,
1:04:37"At some point, I was lying down."
1:04:39Just at some point, you're lying down.
1:04:41[Prisoner Actor] You want me to just start lying down?
1:04:42[Producer] Yeah.
1:04:44[Guard Actor] In the action, you just woke up, but--
1:04:45[Prisoner Actor] Okay. Sounds great. Yeah.
1:05:06[Le Texier] Zimbardo explained that he had a lot of material,
1:05:09but actually, he recorded only six hours
1:05:12of over 150 hours of experiment.
1:05:17He recorded mostly the spectacular,
1:05:19the most violent parts of the experiments.
1:05:23This is also the way Zimbardo wanted it to happen.
1:05:27[Guard Actor] Come on out.
1:05:28[Stephen Scott-Bottoms] One of the things that most
1:05:29interested me about this experiment
1:05:31is that what you have is people who are being asked to play
1:05:34the roles of guards and prisoners
1:05:35in a simulated setting.
1:05:37[Producer] This is cell two and this is cell three.
1:05:40This is the cell room...
1:05:43[Scott-Bottoms] And this basically, immediately
1:05:45is comparable to any number of improvisation exercises
1:05:48that happen in acting workshops.
1:05:51[Producer] And see what we want to happen.
1:05:52[Scott-Bottoms] Which is a bit like saying
1:05:53is there a difference between experiment and experience,
1:05:56which are almost the same word.
1:05:58[Guard Actor] Guess we'll never know!
1:06:00[Scott-Bottoms] In French, they are the same word, expérience.
1:06:02And what really interests me
1:06:04about these behavioral experiments
1:06:06is that the way they get written about by the scientists
1:06:10is always from this completely objective, distant perspective.
1:06:14The subject behaved in this manner,
1:06:17as if they're rats in a maze.
1:06:19Nobody's actually asking the rats what they think
1:06:22is happening, because that's not how scientists do it.
1:06:39[Korpi] This is all B-roll.
1:06:43[Producer] How do you think the experiment has affected Doug
1:06:46over the years?
1:06:48[Theresa Hanna] He gets some gratification out of being able
1:06:52to tell his side of the story, because his side of the story
1:06:56is quite different from Zimbardo's side of the story.
1:06:59And if Zimbardo had his way,
1:07:00no one would say anything but what Zimbardo proposes.
1:07:03It gives you some power
1:07:04over what was a terribly disempowered situation.
1:07:08The fact that one of the prisoners had a mental breakdown
1:07:12because of the "treatment" of the guards,
1:07:15it gave the whole experiment a huge pop, you know?
1:07:19It's like, "Oh, look, even after five hours
1:07:23of very mild oppression,
1:07:27we can cause mental breakdowns in people."
1:07:31Well...
1:07:32[Korpi] Why didn't he understand
1:07:33I was just trying to get out of a bad job?
1:07:36[Hanna] Because he didn't want to.
1:07:37That didn't fit his narrative.
1:07:39His girlfriend at the time said, "This is out of control."
1:07:42And he goes, "Oh. Oh. Yeah, okay.
1:07:45You mean I can't have them kill each other?"
1:07:48No, you can't.
1:07:49So that's when he finally--
1:07:50But I think up till that moment, he was, he was in heaven.
1:07:55[Korpi] Yeah. He really was.
1:08:02[Producer] What is your understanding
1:08:03as to why the experiment ended early?
1:08:06[Eshleman] What I'd been told was that Christina Maslach,
1:08:08after witnessing my supposed magical transformation
1:08:12from normal kid to sadistic bastard,
1:08:15that she went to Philip and demanded
1:08:17that he stop torturing these boys
1:08:19and call an end to the experiment.
1:08:21[Shue] Probably there was good reason to shut it down,
1:08:24not to mention that his girlfriend chastised him
1:08:28for doing this.
1:08:29That made a good headline.
1:08:31[Christina Maslach] I just began to feel sick to my stomach.
1:08:33I had this just chilling, sickening feeling
1:08:37of watching this, and I just turned away.
1:08:39[Guard Actor] Down, up, down, up.
1:08:41[Zimbardo] She came down, saw that madhouse and said,
1:08:43"You know what? It's terrible what you're doing to those boys,
1:08:46and you are responsible."
1:08:47And I ended the study the next day.
1:08:49The good news is I married her the next year.
1:08:51[laughter]
1:08:54[Shue] The woman with fresh eyes
1:08:56saw the inhumanity and woke him up.
1:09:00[chuckles] God.
1:09:01Wonder if he scripted that, too.
1:09:03[Le Texier] It wasn't until 15 years after the experiment
1:09:06that Zimbardo created this narrative,
1:09:08saying that Christina made the experiment stop.
1:09:12He wanted drama and a Hollywood ending.
1:09:15[Clay Ramsay] At first, Zimbardo had implied
1:09:18that this had gone overboard, so we reined it in.
1:09:24It was clear that this was not a structure built to last.
1:09:28It was built to stay hanging there for long enough
1:09:32to get certain kinds of images of behavior.
1:09:36That was its purpose.
1:09:37He now had a lot of material, a lot of video, a lot of audio,
1:09:42and he might just have gone, "This is good."
1:09:45[tape rewinding]
1:09:49[beep]
1:09:50[Scott-Bottoms] The very first version of the story
1:09:53that he tried to tell was the version that says,
1:09:57"Prisoners are badly affected by prison conditions.
1:10:01Look what happened to our prisoners inside a week."
1:10:04And there's a truth to that, but it didn't sell,
1:10:06because a lot of people turned around and said,
1:10:08"Why did you do that to those kids?"
1:10:10And so, almost immediately you get the Attica Uprising,
1:10:16the bloodiest prison riot in American history,
1:10:18which happened the month after the Stanford Experiment.
1:10:21[Newscaster] Nine hostages and 28 convicts were killed,
1:10:24perhaps 100 convicts injured,
1:10:26as the authorities moved in with force to bring an end
1:10:29to a revolt which started last Thursday.
1:10:32[Scott-Bottoms] I don't think we would be talking about this now
1:10:34if not for Attica, which made the prisons
1:10:37this enormous thing in the popular culture.
1:10:40[crowd chanting]
1:10:41We want to know why the guards and the state troopers
1:10:43have gone in there with shotguns and tear gas
1:10:46and killed that many prisoners.
1:10:47What could be going on there?
1:10:48[Protester] What about the thousands of prisoners
1:10:50who die all over the country?
1:10:51[Scott-Bottoms] Zimbardo realized that
1:10:52it's a much better way to spin the story
1:10:54if you look at what the guards did,
1:10:56so let's tell the story that way.
1:10:57[Zimbardo] Guards have total power.
1:10:59Getting away with murder. Evil of prison.
1:11:00Prison. Prison. Prisons.
1:11:02[Scott-Bottoms] This is what Zimbardo is brilliant at
1:11:04is finding an angle in order to get people to talk about
1:11:07the thing underneath it that matters.
1:11:11[applause]
1:11:15[Zimbardo] We wanted to ask the question what happens
1:11:17if you take people, all of whom are good,
1:11:19and put them in a bad place?
1:11:21Does the goodness of people dominate the bad place,
1:11:23or does the bad situation come to corrupt the good people?
1:11:27And the sad answer was the latter.
1:11:30[Karl Van Orsdol] I did not believe that we were part
1:11:32of the experimental subjects.
1:11:33I believed we were helping implement the experiment.
1:11:37[Chuck Burton] You know, they never said anything about
1:11:39that they're studying us, too.
1:11:40That doesn't excuse lots of my behavior,
1:11:43but it's a backdrop for some of my behavior.
1:11:45[Eshleman] If it was made clear to us
1:11:47that we're there to be studied, not to help study prisoners,
1:11:52we would have acted completely differently.
1:11:55[Le Texier] In the archive,
1:11:56several guards say they've been shocked to discover
1:12:00that they were a subject in the experiment.
1:12:03Zimbardo, he pretended that they were not observed.
1:12:06[Guard] It's been a pleasure.
1:12:07[Le Texier] And the guards, they thought
1:12:09they were a part of the experimenters,
1:12:11they were not part of the subjects, which is a lie.
1:12:15They thought they were like theater actors,
1:12:18and the experiment was not about their behavior,
1:12:21it was about the prisoners' reactions.
1:12:24But they were part of the experiment, too.
1:12:29He had this agenda, let's make something very striking,
1:12:33very graphic, very extreme.
1:12:36Let's go to the media with this argument.
1:12:39The Stanford Prison Experiment was like a media event.
1:12:42It was not planned really as a scientific experiment.
1:12:45It was more like producing material
1:12:48that could be used by the journalist.
1:12:54The media was a central character
1:12:56in the aftermath of the Stanford Experiment.
1:13:03Right after the end of the experiment
1:13:05Zimbardo was invited on KRON-TV,
1:13:07which was a local station in San Francisco.
1:13:09And there he met a TV producer, Larry Goldstein.
1:13:14He had the idea of doing a piece on the experiment.
1:13:18Zimbardo is telling him that there have been ups and downs,
1:13:22but what Larry Goldstein would like to show
1:13:25is the situation building up,
1:13:27the violence growing and growing,
1:13:29and in so he's pushing Zimbardo to change his narrative
1:13:33and to have a narrative which is more linear.
1:13:48[Zimbardo] On day two, the prisoners rebelled.
1:13:52[Zimbardo] By day three, the guards were exerting control
1:13:55over every aspect of the prisoner's life.
1:14:02[Zimbardo] Only four days had passed,
1:14:04and the guards' sense of moral value had been totally altered.
1:14:08Things had gotten so bad
1:14:09that we no longer had a group of prisoners.
1:14:11What we had were individuals struggling for survival.
1:14:15[Le Texier] He's streamlining the story.
1:14:17And that's how, in November,
1:14:19they screened the piece on the Stanford Prison Experiment.
1:14:22It gave a national publicity to the experiment.
1:14:28[Ramsay] Some of this video is just really compelling.
1:14:32It has the feel of pornography without really going there,
1:14:39and it has a moral justification
1:14:42for why you're watching this thing.
1:14:45And that kind of combination
1:14:47becomes one of the ancestors of reality TV.
1:14:52[Korpi] This was unscripted, free flowing.
1:14:55It was creative.
1:14:56It was a great idea.
1:14:57And he knew it would get press.
1:14:59[Eshleman] This particular experiment
1:15:00really made a name for him,
1:15:02and I think that he basks in the limelight.
1:15:05[applause]
1:15:07He really built his career on this.
1:15:10[Korpi] Zimbardo, for years and years,
1:15:12told this story to the media.
1:15:14[John Davidson] Please welcome Dr. Philip Zimbardo.
1:15:16[applause]
1:15:20[Zimbardo] The guards then began to escalate their use of power.
1:15:24Brutal, sadistic. Some of them creatively sadistic.
1:15:28They were often here with no clothes on.
1:15:30You can't see someone's eyes.
1:15:32This prison is about to erupt.
1:15:34[Korpi] He's a genius at figuring out
1:15:36what will attract media attention.
1:15:39[Zimbardo] In this demonstration,
1:15:40we want to see whether ordinary people blindly obey someone
1:15:43who seems like an authority
1:15:45when he asks them to do something potentially dangerous.
1:15:48[taser clicking, yelling]
1:15:50What just happened?
1:15:51[Announcer] What makes good people do bad things?
1:15:54[applause]
1:15:55[Dr. Phil] You've been at this a while.
1:15:56[Zimbardo] I've been creating evil for a long time.
1:16:04[Holt] Welcome back, everyone. Right now at MSNBC,
1:16:05charges of abuse of Iraqi prisoners.
1:16:07[Newscaster] These powerful images lie at the heart
1:16:09of the prisoner abuse scandal.
1:16:11Naked Iraqis forced to create a human pyramid
1:16:14while US soldiers look on grinning.
1:16:17[Goodman] The pictures were leaked to the press
1:16:19and first revealed to the world in May of 2004.
1:16:22[Holt] Many of us are just trying to figure out
1:16:23what happened to make apparently normal soldiers
1:16:26to do the things depicted in the pictures.
1:16:27[Anderson Cooper] You might wonder what kind of person
1:16:29could participate in those situations.
1:16:31[Ramsay] When the news came out about the Abu Ghraib prison,
1:16:35Zimbardo implied that Abu Ghraib
1:16:38was the replication of his experiment.
1:16:41[Zimbardo] I had seen those images 35 years ago.
1:16:44My good guards did that in our mock prison
1:16:46the same way these Army reservists did it
1:16:48in Tier 1A Abu Ghraib.
1:16:51[Shue] That might be a little bit of a stretch.
1:16:54[Loftus] If we were killing other students,
1:16:58that might be a valid judgment.
1:17:01[Stephen Reicher] Zimbardo acted as witness for the defense.
1:17:05[Goodman] You testified in the court martial
1:17:08in the Abu Ghraib scandal.
1:17:10[Zimbardo] Yes, I did. I was part of the defense team.
1:17:12Coming to the defense of Chip Frederick,
1:17:14what that gave me the opportunity to say,
1:17:16"Were these bad apples
1:17:18or were these good American soldiers put in a bad barrel?"
1:17:21Before Chip Frederick went down in that dungeon in Abu Ghraib,
1:17:24he was as normal, healthy as the good guards in my study.
1:17:28And within several weeks, he was as bad as the worst ones.
1:17:35[Korpi] At Abu Ghraib, politically he's saying,
1:17:37"Look, it's not the individual, it's the [bleep] institution."
1:17:44[Eshleman] Does it excuse any bad behavior you may have done?
1:17:47You know, beyond my control,
1:17:49you know, I was, I was following orders.
1:17:51[Reicher] Now, we have this narrative,
1:17:53the scenes of sort of homoerotic humiliation
1:17:57that went on in the SPE are so much like those pictures
1:18:01that we saw of the prisoners in Abu Ghraib.
1:18:07[Le Texier] Zimbardo started talking about sexual abuse
1:18:11in the Stanford Prison Experiment
1:18:13right after the Abu Ghraib scandal.
1:18:15[Zimbardo] Our guards were forcing the prisoners to engage
1:18:18in simulated sodomy, exactly as in, in this prison.
1:18:21[Le Texier] He's pretending that guards made some prisoners
1:18:24play sexual games in the Stanford Prison Experiment.
1:18:37[Le Texier] Zimbardo exaggerated these games,
1:18:40because it was very useful
1:18:41to match the Stanford Prison Experiment
1:18:43with the Abu Ghraib scandal.
1:18:45But we know that's not what happened.
1:18:47[Ramsay] Abu Ghraib revived interest in the experiment,
1:18:51and Zimbardo saw the opportunity for a book.
1:18:54[Newscaster] Stanford University psychologist Philip Zimbardo.
1:18:57[Goodman] It's called The Lucifer Effect.
1:18:59[Stephen Colbert] The book is The Lucifer Effect.
1:19:01[Stewart] Now, when you say the slow descent of man
1:19:03from good to evil, it took a week, did it not?
1:19:05[Zimbardo] No. It actually took 36 hours.
1:19:08[laughter]
1:19:10[Ramsay] Without Dr. Zimbardo continually pressing his case,
1:19:15the Stanford Prison Experiment would have lapsed into the haze
1:19:20where most previous social psychology experiments exist.
1:19:25It takes continuous pumping to keep the bicycle going.
1:19:29[applause]
1:19:36[Le Texier] When I started doing research on the experiment,
1:19:39I never thought about debunking it.
1:19:43Zimbardo was a reputed Stanford professor who did it,
1:19:46and nobody debunked the experiment in 50 years,
1:19:50so I thought, "Okay, it's not me, this French guy from nowhere
1:19:53who is going to debunk this."
1:19:55When I went through the archive,
1:19:56I had no idea that the official narrative
1:19:59was not what really happened.
1:20:02But when you do science, you have a commitment to the truth,
1:20:05and you cannot let something false circulate like this.
1:20:09Maybe I'm a bit old-fashioned,
1:20:11but for me, it's a duty to make things right.
1:20:15I decided to write a book
1:20:17and to get in touch with the participants.
1:20:21[Eshleman] I got a call from Thibault.
1:20:22[Shue] Thibault.
1:20:23[Korpi] Thibault.
1:20:24[Mark] Thibault.
1:20:26[Korpi] Oh. Thibault.
1:20:27Thibault, Thibault, Thibault, Thibault.
1:20:29[Producer] Thibault. [Korpi] Thibault.
1:20:30[Mark] He's very bold.
1:20:32He wrote a book that was very damning in picking apart
1:20:38the experiment and the methodology.
1:20:41And I think as a result of his book,
1:20:44other researchers are looking at the experiment
1:20:48with a more skeptical eye.
1:20:53[Producer] I noticed, John, that sometimes
1:20:54you, you close your eyes when you speak.
1:20:56Is that something that you do often?
1:21:00[Mark] If it's normal conversation, no.
1:21:04If it's thoughtful, yeah.
1:21:11[Reicher] I'm a social psychologist
1:21:13at the University of St. Andrews,
1:21:15and I have been studying human social behavior,
1:21:18in particular group and collective processes,
1:21:21for more years than I would like to remember.
1:21:25Around 1999, the BBC came to us and it said,
1:21:30"We now have the technology, which we didn't have before,
1:21:32to observe behavior systematically
1:21:35and want to use that to revisit the Stanford Prison Study."
1:21:39So, we took the same basic setup.
1:21:41[Man] 15 men randomly divided into two groups.
1:21:43One group of men given power over the other.
1:21:48[Reicher] We thought that the guards
1:21:50would impose their authority.
1:21:51And we were rather surprised to find that didn't happen at all.
1:21:54They hated being guards.
1:21:55[Guard] I don't want to be a guard, to be honest, really.
1:21:59I'd rather be a prisoner, really, in all honesty.
1:22:01[Reicher] We began to realize that actually leadership
1:22:04was absolutely critical,
1:22:06because the more you look at Zimbardo's study,
1:22:10you realize that the guards
1:22:11didn't just become guards willy-nilly.
1:22:14He acted as leader to tell them what to do.
1:22:17But without leadership,
1:22:19you don't get the types of toxic behavior
1:22:21we saw in Zimbardo's SPE, and we don't see in our study.
1:22:29♪ And how'd we let ourselves get duped like this? ♪
1:22:34♪ No, no ♪
1:22:37♪ No, no ♪
1:22:40♪ Childish leaders who cannot lead ♪
1:22:45♪ Wealthy plutocrats consumed by greed ♪
1:22:50♪ Hate groups growing ♪
1:22:52When I went to college,
1:22:53I wanted to stay in the arts and theater,
1:22:55and I ended up in a place down in Southern California
1:22:57called Chapman University, had a very good music department.
1:23:02♪ President ♪
1:23:05I love my music, and I create things.
1:23:07I write plays, I direct them.
1:23:13I'm a very nonviolent guy.
1:23:17I can't even be mean to my cats.
1:23:19And I think that comes from, a lot from my father,
1:23:23who grew up almost Amish.
1:23:26He's extremely gentle
1:23:29and would never even show anger,
1:23:33unless we really pushed him to the brink.
1:23:36And I think that's who I've become
1:23:38is kind of more like my father.
1:23:40I'm mellow.
1:23:43People really need to learn the difference
1:23:45between a role somebody's playing and who they are.
1:23:53Because of the experiment, I still get hate mail from people.
1:23:56People that say, "You sick [bleep].
1:23:59You sadistic bastard. I hope you rot in hell."
1:24:02And you know, somebody going as far
1:24:04as to go on to like my business page and talk about how,
1:24:09you know, they went to get a loan from me in my business,
1:24:12and I ended up, you know, torturing them
1:24:14or something like that.
1:24:15You know what I mean? Come on. This is my business.
1:24:18[Reporter] Dave, you've probably had one of the most
1:24:19notorious reputations.
1:24:20They called you John Wayne
1:24:22because they said you were brutal and you were sadistic.
1:24:24[Eshleman] Mm-hmm.
1:24:25It's been fascinating to see how the interest
1:24:28never seems to go away.
1:24:30I mean, here we are, it's been 50 years,
1:24:32and, you know, I'm still talking about it.
1:24:34I get asked to come and give a lot of talks,
1:24:36do a lot of interviews.
1:24:38What most people are surprised at is the level of humiliation
1:24:42that we tried to put the prisoners through.
1:24:44I started inventing my own daily humiliations.
1:24:49When you give somebody the absolute power
1:24:52to control what other people are doing,
1:24:55then they're gonna use that power.
1:24:57I go talk to high school classes.
1:24:58The teacher will announce, "Oh, you know,
1:25:00we've been talking about the prison experiment,
1:25:02and I have one of the guards,
1:25:04you know, coming in to talk to us.
1:25:06The guy that they would call John Wayne."
1:25:08And the students goes, "He's coming here?
1:25:11Oh, my god. What do we do?"
1:25:12You know, it's like, "Is he gonna torture us?"
1:25:16So, I think they're always surprised to find
1:25:17that, you know, I'm a pretty easygoing guy.
1:25:20It bothers me that they don't take the time to look beyond,
1:25:24you know, the very surface.
1:25:26And that's one of the problems, of course,
1:25:28I think with the way the experiment has been perceived
1:25:31and has been disseminated in popular culture by Zimbardo.
1:25:35[Phil Donahue] Dr. Philip Zimbardo
1:25:36is professor of psychology at Stanford University,
1:25:39and several years ago engaged in a fascinating experiment
1:25:42wherein he chose middle-class students,
1:25:45put them all in a group. How many?
1:25:47[Zimbardo] Well, there were a dozen guards and 10 prisoners.
1:25:50[Donahue] Okay.
1:25:51[Korpi] 50 years later, the experiment should be irrelevant,
1:25:54but I'm still pissed at Phil.
1:25:56[Zimbardo] What happened that's not in the film
1:25:58is that within 36 hours, the first prisoner had
1:26:01what could be called an emotional breakdown.
1:26:03[Korpi] It wasn't the experiment that pissed me off.
1:26:06It was a stupid experiment.
1:26:07There was a bunch of obvious manipulation of us.
1:26:11But then he kept calling after that
1:26:14to get me on all these TV shows.
1:26:16They don't take your bed and your clothes in prison!
1:26:19It was so many things.
1:26:21[Donahue] You were a prisoner?
1:26:22Okay.
1:26:23That was you just yelling?
1:26:24[Korpi] I mean, year after year, he's retraumatizing you.
1:26:27I didn't like that I had to work so hard to get him to back off.
1:26:30[Woman] I was wondering how the prisoners' attitudes
1:26:32towards each other changed during this experiment.
1:26:35[Korpi] I was only in the experiment
1:26:36a day and a half or two days.
1:26:38I got out quick.
1:26:39I don't want to talk to that guy.
1:26:40I don't want to deal with him, and I had to.
1:26:43He would come at me this way and that way.
1:26:45And he was articulate and he's well-published
1:26:47and he's gonna give me work.
1:26:48[Zimbardo] I think that we are vulnerable to the conman.
1:26:52We are vulnerable to influence.
1:26:53[Korpi] The control of the narrative has been Phil's.
1:26:56He can't help that.
1:26:57He's just a narcissistic [bleep].
1:27:00That's Phil.
1:27:01[Mark] Professor Zimbardo was kind of a clown.
1:27:04[Reicher] I think the traditional narrative of the SPE
1:27:08needs to be challenged.
1:27:09[Korpi] Anybody that tried to reduce human behavior
1:27:11to such simple notions is fraud.
1:27:13[Reicher] Fraud. [Eshleman] Fraud.
1:27:14[Shue] Fraud.
1:27:15[Loftus] Kind of fraudulent.
1:27:16[Scott-Bottoms] And that's what Zimbardo did.
1:27:23[Zimbardo] So, I'm looking at the camera?
1:27:26In the last year, the Stanford Prison study
1:27:28has received lots of criticism.
1:27:31"The Stanford Prison Experiment is a lie."
1:27:33"Zimbardo is a fraud."
1:27:35And none of their criticisms hold up.
1:27:38Zero.
1:27:40-♪ See no evil ♪ -♪ See no evil ♪
1:27:43-♪ Hear no evil ♪ -♪ Hear no evil ♪
1:27:47-♪ Speak no evil ♪ -♪ Speak no evil ♪
1:27:51[Burton] I am Chuck.
1:27:52[Korpi] I'm Doug. [Burton] Doug.
1:27:53[Eshleman] Gentlemen, good morning.
1:27:55[Shue] Morning. [Eshleman] I'm Dave.
1:27:57[Burton] There's the man.
1:27:58[Eshleman] Do you? [Korpi] And you are?
1:27:59[Shue] I'm Jerry Shue. 5486.
1:28:01[Burton] Okay. [Ramsay] Hi, Dave.
1:28:03[Eshleman] Dave. How are you, Clay?
1:28:04[Ramsay] Hi. I'm Clay.
1:28:05[Van Orsdol] Clay. Karl.
1:28:07♪ Not today ♪
1:28:09[Korpi] Isn't this incredible?
1:28:19[Producer] We good?
1:28:22[Director] Are you guys gonna be in the other room?
1:28:23[Producer] I'm gonna be here. [Director] Okay.
1:28:25[Philip Zimbardo] I thought not to wear a tie.
1:28:27[Director] I think it's better.
1:28:28[Zimbardo] I mean, with a jacket, it's semi-formal.
1:28:31I have 100 ties, really great ones.
1:28:34Somebody said, "Men shouldn't wear ties anymore."
1:28:37And so I wore a tie just as anti-conformity.
1:28:42The last year, the Stanford Prison Study
1:28:44has received lots of criticism.
1:28:48"The Stanford Prison Experiment is a lie."
1:28:51"Zimbardo is a fraud."
1:28:52[Thibault Le Texier] Zimbardo was not behaving as a scientist.
1:28:54He was behaving as someone who wanted to shock the world.
1:28:58[Stephen Reicher] He took a narrative
1:28:59and he sold it hard and well.
1:29:01[Doug Korpi] Phil makes it into, like, everybody became a sadist.
1:29:04[John Mark] It wasn't even true of the nine guards.
1:29:07[Le Texier] The experimenters putting their hands
1:29:09into the material.
1:29:10[Stephen Scott-Bottoms] Why did you do that do those kids?
1:29:12[Dave Eshleman] He really built his career on this.
1:29:14He basks in the limelight.
1:29:16[Korpi] A stupid experiment.
1:29:17There was obvious manipulation of us.
1:29:19[Mark] Zimbardo was disingenuous.
1:29:21[John Loftus] He's an egotist.
1:29:22[Jerry Shue] Huckster. Disco psychologist.
1:29:24[Zimbardo] They don't really like you. I think they like me.
1:29:26[Korpi] [bleep] [Zimbardo] Yo.
1:29:27[Loftus] Salesman. Showbiz.
1:29:28[Zimbardo] It's Phil Zimbardo. [Shue] Hustler.
1:29:30[Le Texier] The official narrative was a lie.
1:29:32[Zimbardo] None of their criticisms hold up.
1:29:34Zero.
1:29:39Last June, almost every day for a week,
1:29:42a different critic appeared,
1:29:44criticizing a different aspect of the study.
1:29:47[Scott-Bottoms] My first instinct was to go,
1:29:49"Oh, I'm gonna debunk all this."
1:29:50But then the longer I spent with it,
1:29:52there's something really interesting
1:29:53and important happening.
1:29:56[Director] Have you ever tried to reenact
1:29:58the Stanford Prison Experiment with your students?
1:30:01[Actor] Hands against the wall, please.
1:30:02Please take off your shoes.
1:30:04I want you to go a bit faster!
1:30:06[Scott-Bottoms] I have done hour-long improvisations
1:30:09of guards versus prisoners,
1:30:10because essentially, the Stanford Experiment
1:30:13is arguably the most influential piece of performance art
1:30:17of the 20th century.
1:30:18Zimbardo says it is the lesson in what happens
1:30:22when a situation imposes itself on the people inside of it.
1:30:25[Actor] That's it. That's it.
1:30:27[Scott-Bottoms] But we can't generalize about situations
1:30:29any more than we can generalize about people.
1:30:32Any interactive circumstance that involves multiple people
1:30:36will result in different experiences
1:30:40of that same situation
1:30:41and different understandings of what happened.
1:30:44[Actor] I'm trying to tell you.
1:30:45[Scott-Bottoms] So, you shouldn't ever take
1:30:46one person's opinion as the truth.
1:30:49It might be their truth,
1:30:51but somebody else will have a different truth.
1:31:05[Zimbardo] So, this is when I had a,
1:31:06the start of a little bit of a mustache,
1:31:08but pure, pure and clean.
1:31:11And this is the start of the mus--
1:31:13No, this had to be in the '70s
1:31:14'cause it's, it's the long, long hair.
1:31:17And this is a great picture.
1:31:18I'm actually holding a sword.
1:31:20I have an admiral's uniform.
1:31:22This is my mother Margaret, my father George.
1:31:26So, this is, this is me.
1:31:28That's the Bronx, 1950, I think.
1:31:34I was born in 1933, in the Depression,
1:31:37which is a terrible time to be born.
1:31:40My parents were second-generation Sicilian,
1:31:44uneducated, and we grew up in the South Bronx in the ghetto.
1:31:48People lived in very close proximity in small apartments.
1:31:52It was a toxic environment.
1:31:55When I was five years old, I got double pneumonia
1:31:59and whooping cough at the same time.
1:32:02I spent five months in the hospital.
1:32:05And there are no wonder drugs, which means zero treatment.
1:32:11And kids died all the time.
1:32:15In the hospital, time got distorted.
1:32:18Every day was the same. Every night was the same.
1:32:21Time simply flowed on.
1:32:26Life was boring.
1:32:28The only thing we had were comic books.
1:32:33It's 1939 and Superman comics had just come out.
1:32:37And I can remember devouring it.
1:32:39We would share the comic books with each other,
1:32:41and we'd just tell stories about good versus evil.
1:32:44I was able to create alternative realities
1:32:48that made our little bit of life in the hospital
1:32:51more interesting.
1:32:53They can imprison my body, but my mind is always free.
1:33:00This is the power of the human imagination,
1:33:02the ultimate power on Earth.
1:33:04That hospital experience, that five months,
1:33:06ingrained so much into my brain,
1:33:09the forces of good versus the forces of evil,
1:33:11and that life could be really short.
1:33:14And so whatever time you have on Earth,
1:33:17whatever power you have, you want to do good.
1:33:20[crowd shouting]
1:33:25[Reicher] After the war, social psychology was sometimes
1:33:28referred to as Holocaust psychology.
1:33:32Many of the great scholars in the discipline were obsessed
1:33:37by the question of how the Holocaust could happen.
1:33:40How so many people could be slaughtered,
1:33:42not for anything they'd done,
1:33:44but simply because of who they were.
1:33:46The human capacity for inhumanity towards others
1:33:50has dominated the field.
1:33:53[Participant] Two.
1:33:54[Participant] Two. [Participant] Two.
1:33:56[Participant] Two.
1:33:58[TV narrator] The subject denies the evidence of his own eyes
1:34:00and yields to group influence.
1:34:03Asch found subjects went along with the group
1:34:05on 37% of the critical trials.
1:34:08[Reicher] Solomon Asch, who started work on conformity.
1:34:12Stanley Milgram who did the famous obedience studies.
1:34:15Milgram argued that ordinary people could do great harm.
1:34:29[Reicher] People could inflict electric shocks
1:34:31on innocent victims.
1:34:36[Reicher] Milgram opened the door, and therefore it's easier
1:34:39for psychologists like Zimbardo to push it further.
1:34:46[Zimbardo] Psychology in the '60s was focused on
1:34:49predicting individual behavior.
1:34:51[TV narrator] Without visual cues, what shapes can a man
1:34:54most easily distinguish by feel alone?
1:34:58[Zimbardo] This was the era of personality testing,
1:35:01personality traits, individual differences.
1:35:04I always challenged that,
1:35:05saying we have to give more attention to situations.
1:35:09From my own experience in the hospital,
1:35:12it was the situation that forced me to use my imagination
1:35:16to triumph over that hospital experience.
1:35:21It was always the situation which individuals
1:35:24find themselves that influenced their behavior.
1:35:31The Stanford Prison Study is really an extension
1:35:33of that idea, showing the power of the situation.
1:35:42I got a lot of criticism for the ethics of the study
1:35:46and controlling the story afterwards,
1:35:49but it was really a pure exploration,
1:35:51what happens when you put good people in a bad place?
1:35:57At the time, I thought the study had an immediate appeal
1:36:00about power, about looking into the dark places of prisons
1:36:05that we never see, that we can only imagine.
1:36:08And it was really intended to be used in college classes.
1:36:11I never expected it would become a "media darling"
1:36:14that I could not ignore.
1:36:20[Zimbardo] Oh, yeah. No, again... [clears throat]
1:36:23In the prison study,
1:36:24we tried to put enough into the experiment
1:36:27to make the power of authority feel real.
1:36:30I had arranged with the chief of police to do these arrests.
1:36:34I had contacted the local TV station and I told them,
1:36:39"I'm gonna do this experiment.
1:36:40I'll give you an exclusive to it."
1:36:42That made the study work,
1:36:44changed the whole mindset of the prisoners,
1:36:48that "I'm under the control of the authorities."
1:36:51If the kids came and said, "I'm here to begin the study,"
1:36:54they were in charge.
1:36:56So, the media arrests mean that you are no longer in charge.
1:37:02So, that started the study off in high gear.
1:37:06[Director] Can all of the actors and our participants...
1:37:09[Zimbardo] I thought about the experiment
1:37:10as an improvisational drama.
1:37:14The basement yard, it was the stage,
1:37:16the actors were prisoners and guards with different uniforms,
1:37:20and the video camera was the audience.
1:37:25[Scott-Bottoms] The important thing to understand
1:37:27about an experiment like this
1:37:28is that there is an element of theatrical artifice.
1:37:32But that doesn't mean that there's not also a level
1:37:34of psychological reality; and the two coexist.
1:37:38As a participant in the experiment,
1:37:40what can you learn about yourself
1:37:42by really living that situation?
1:37:44[Guard] Enough.
1:38:00[Korpi] Oh, my goodness. Look at this here.
1:38:02[Crewmember] Hi, Doug.
1:38:03[Korpi] Prisoner 8612.
1:38:08This is unbelievable.
1:38:09They took our clothes, and they took our bed.
1:38:12[Crewmember] Big fan of your work.
1:38:13[Korpi] Big fan of my work, huh?
1:38:15[Chuck Burton] Hey.
1:38:16So, I'm just supposed to act natural?
1:38:17[Korpi] You're Chuck? [Burton] I am Chuck.
1:38:19[Korpi] I'm Doug. [Burton] Doug. You were a...
1:38:21[Korpi] Prisoner 8612. What were you?
1:38:23[Burton] I was the guard.
1:38:24[Korpi] Really? You were a guard, huh?
1:38:26[Burton] Somebody had to be.
1:38:27[Eshleman] Hello, gentlemen. Good morning.
1:38:29[whistle blows]
1:38:30[Guard] Morning, girls!
1:38:31[Eshleman] I'm Dave. [Burton] There's the man.
1:38:33[Eshleman] Do you?
1:38:34Didn't I tell you that you could not laugh?
1:38:37[Burton] What we have here is a failure to communicate.
1:38:39[Eshleman] You got it.
1:38:40And you remember some of my lines, too.
1:38:41[Burton] I remember Cool Hand Luke.
1:38:42[Eshleman] Oh, okay. [Korpi] And you are?
1:38:44[Shue] I'm Jerry Shue, 5486. [Burton] Okay. Okay.
1:38:48[Eshleman] And do you remember me?
1:38:50[Shue] Yes, I do. [Clay Ramsay] Hi, Dave.
1:38:51[Eshleman] Dave. How are you, Clay?
1:38:53[Ramsay] I was 416. I did the hunger strike.
1:38:55♪ Life is but a dream ♪
1:39:00[Director] Please be careful with the wires and cords.
1:39:01[Korpi] It's kind of cool that they actually
1:39:03went to all the trouble to make this set.
1:39:07Well, you'll see.
1:39:08[Burton] Okay.
1:39:09[door creaks]
1:39:11[door shuts]
1:39:22[Eshleman] Déjà vu.
1:39:23[Korpi] Isn't this incredible? [Eshleman] Wow.
1:39:25[Korpi] It's a pretty decent job.
1:39:26[Ramsay] Yeah. These doors look pretty solid
1:39:28compared to what I remember, honestly.
1:39:31[Korpi] Yeah. Oh, no, this is...
1:39:33[Ramsay] Were you the prisoner
1:39:35who had a psychotic break or something?
1:39:37[Shue] You were the screamer.
1:39:38[Korpi] Yeah. [Ramsay] Yeah.
1:39:40[Korpi] In the experiment, all I was thinking was,
1:39:43"This is a really bad job."
1:39:45What kind of job can you not leave?
1:39:47[Zimbardo] During this experiment, at any time,
1:39:50if you choose to stop being a participant,
1:39:53all you have to say is,
1:39:54I want to or I choose to quit this experiment.
1:39:57But Doug Korpi didn't say that.
1:40:14[Korpi] And so I was willing to do whatever it took to get out.
1:40:17[Director] Action.
1:40:23[laughing]
1:40:27[Korpi] Kids come back and they try to escape.
1:40:29You don't touch them and go manhandle them.
1:40:32You go, "Get in there."
1:40:34[Director] Action.
1:40:43[Guard] What are you guys doing?
1:40:45[Prisoner] Oh, man.
1:40:46[Guard] Get in your cell.
1:40:47[Korpi] Yeah, that was correct.
1:40:49That was right.
1:40:51[applause]
1:40:55[Zimbardo] Doug Korpi is a strange bird.
1:40:59[Korpi] Blah bluh blah.
1:41:00[Zimbardo] He's a wise guy.
1:41:02He's always cursing.
1:41:03[Korpi] Oh, [bleep].
1:41:04I don't [bleep] about myself.
1:41:06He loved that [bleep].
1:41:08Oh, [bleep].
1:41:09I [bleep] up.
1:41:10[Zimbardo] He's always putting down the guards.
1:41:15[Zimbardo] He's really an unlikeable person,
1:41:17unlikeable prisoner.
1:41:19So, he constantly gets put into solitary confinement.
1:41:25[Zimbardo] He's banging on the door, yelling and screaming.
1:41:27[Prisoner] I want out!
1:41:29[Zimbardo] Guards really want to put a pillow over his face
1:41:31to shut him up.
1:41:36[Zimbardo] He was the first prisoner to break down
1:41:37in 36 hours.
1:41:39And he was ashamed of it that he couldn't take it,
1:41:41he couldn't handle it.
1:41:43And then said, "I was faking it. I was faking it to get out."
1:41:46[Korpi] I don't have to say I was faking.
1:41:49You can hear me faking.
1:41:55[Korpi] When you hear my voiceover,
1:41:56"I'm burning up inside," that's what I say.
1:42:02I mean, who says that?
1:42:03[Director] Action.
1:42:07[Prisoner] They won't let us out.
1:42:08[Korpi] No, not that gleeful. Try that again.
1:42:10[Prisoner] Not that gleeful. [Director] Action.
1:42:11[Prisoner] They won't let us out.
1:42:12[Korpi] That was good.
1:42:14[Guard] Alright, prisoners. It's time to do some push-ups.
1:42:16[Korpi] That was right.
1:42:17The guards were [bleep] around as much as we were.
1:42:19[Director] Action.
1:42:20[Prisoner] You guys get that this is a job.
1:42:21Like, this isn't an experiment.
1:42:22[Guard] Hole it is.
1:42:23[Prisoner] Dr. Zimbardo, you're a liar!
1:42:25No, this is torture!
1:42:26No!
1:42:28This is torture! Stop! Let, let go!
1:42:29[Director] Action.
1:42:30[Prisoner] No, this is torture!
1:42:32[Director] Action. [Prisoner] Let go!
1:42:34[Korpi] That was much more how it happened.
1:42:36[Prisoner] So, Doug, I think you were sitting.
1:42:38[Korpi] No, no, it was against that back wall,
1:42:39like, just like you had.
1:42:41No, the, the back wall.
1:42:43That one, yeah. And turn 90 degrees.
1:42:46[Prisoner] This way? [Korpi] No, the other way.
1:42:48That way, yes.
1:42:49Okay, and sit down.
1:42:51Okay. That's exactly how I was. Okay, now I'm thinking,
1:42:54"[bleep] how am I gonna [bleep] do this?"
1:42:57I wanted to be convincing, and I wanted out.
1:42:59And then I decided, okay, ready... act.
1:43:04[Prisoner] I'm burning up inside. Don't you know?
1:43:07I want out! I want out!
1:43:09I want out right now!
1:43:10Right now!
1:43:12[Korpi] Perfect.
1:43:13[Guard] Well done. [Prisoner] Yeah.
1:43:15[Guard] Well done. [Prisoner] Thank you. Thank you.
1:43:17[Korpi] No, not bad.
1:43:18[Prisoner] Oh, thank you.
1:43:21[Korpi] Sweet outfit.
1:43:22[Prisoner] That's it. [Guard] I like that.
1:43:24[Prisoner] I love that.
1:43:25That was good.
1:43:27[Zimbardo] Doug Korpi says, "I was pretending to be upset.
1:43:30I was just bored with the experiment.
1:43:31I wanted to get out."
1:43:35But then some years after the prison study,
1:43:38I made another video with him,
1:43:41in which Doug Korpi becomes the prison psychologist
1:43:45in San Francisco County Jail.
1:43:48[Korpi] I'm a forensic psychologist,
1:43:50and I specialize in risk analysis.
1:43:53So, if you've killed once, the judges ask me,
1:43:57"Is he gonna kill again?"
1:43:59[Zimbardo] What he hates is he lost control of himself.
1:44:02He says at some point,
1:44:04"I wanted to find out more about the mind."
1:44:07[Korpi] And maybe it was just in part this experiment
1:44:09just furthered my, my craving for control of my feelings.
1:44:13I think that speaks to why I went into psychology.
1:44:16[Zimbardo] He chose as his lifetime occupation
1:44:19to be a prison psychologist.
1:44:20What could be a more powerful effect of being a participant
1:44:25in an experiment that it changes your entire life?
1:44:30[Korpi] Phil would love to say that I was inspired
1:44:33by the Stanford Prison Experiment
1:44:35to become a psychologist.
1:44:36You know, unconscious urges, you know, maybe it's true.
1:44:41But am I aware that the Stanford Prison Experiment influenced me
1:44:46in a significant-- no, I'm not aware of it.
1:44:49It was only 36 hours.
1:44:51[Zimbardo] And so, you leave it up to the audience, you know,
1:44:53which do you think is the reality?
1:44:59[Guard] Alright, ladies. It's time for a count.
1:45:02[whistle]
1:45:04You all get the idea?
1:45:06You break the rules, you get in the hole.
1:45:08Now get back in your cells.
1:45:10Let's go. Come on.
1:45:11[Guard] Let's go.
1:45:12[Korpi] Good job.
1:45:14To this day, I'm angry at Zimbardo.
1:45:18You're not?
1:45:19[Burton] No, I was not at all angry with Zimbardo.
1:45:22Zimbardo got caught up in the same dynamic that everybody did.
1:45:25[Korpi] And you got caught up in it?
1:45:27[Burton] I don't think anybody in the experiment
1:45:29did not get caught up in it.
1:45:31[Eshleman] We guards feel somewhat deceived by...
1:45:33[Burton] Deceived.
1:45:34[Eshleman] ...leading, we were led to believe
1:45:36that the experiment was all about the prisoners.
1:45:39We were just there to help them
1:45:40get the results they're looking for.
1:45:42[Zimbardo] I could see where the guards thought
1:45:44that they were not subject of our interest,
1:45:47and they were simply doing their duty.
1:45:50But everybody fell into their roles,
1:45:52which speaks to the validity of the experiment.
1:45:55[Director] So, how much direction was given
1:45:56to the guards?
1:45:58[Zimbardo] No, it was very little.
1:45:59I mean, we have it, we have it all on video.
1:46:04Prisons always have rules.
1:46:06I told the guards, your job is to maintain law and order,
1:46:11to be sure no prisoners escape.
1:46:13Maybe we said by all means necessary,
1:46:15something generally vague,
1:46:16but we made clear you're not permitted
1:46:19to use any physical force.
1:46:21We can create boredom, we can create a sense of frustration,
1:46:24we can create a sense of fear in them.
1:46:26But I did not minimize psychological force.
1:46:30At the beginning, the guards,
1:46:31they saw themselves as nice guys.
1:46:33And guards are supposed to be mean guys.
1:46:36But then the prisoners rebelled.
1:46:37[Prisoner] It's a rebellion!
1:46:39[Zimbardo] And that was the switch in the experiment.
1:46:40After that, guards said, "These are dangerous prisoners
1:46:43and we have to show them who's in control."
1:46:46So, even though it was kids in tiny rooms
1:46:49with fake bars on the doors, it created its own dynamic,
1:46:53that is nothing was real except in their minds.
1:46:58[indistinct chatter]
1:47:04[Guard] All good? Alright. Thank you.
1:47:06There's the props.
1:47:08[Eshleman] Hey, Chase, let me give a little words of advice
1:47:10before we go out there.
1:47:12Whoever you are in your daily life, that's gone.
1:47:15You are now the meanest prison guard that has ever existed.
1:47:20What's your backstory?
1:47:21Think about that.
1:47:22Where were you born?
1:47:23What were your childhood experiences?
1:47:25Close your eyes.
1:47:27Inhabit that person.
1:47:30Now open your eyes.
1:47:33Take these glasses...
1:47:37this whistle...
1:47:41...and this nightstick.
1:47:44Who are you?
1:47:45[Guard] Dave. Guard Dave.
1:47:48[Eshleman] Guard Dave.
1:47:50[Guard] Alright.
1:47:54Alright, girls, come on out!
1:47:59Here in this hallway, I'm boss.
1:48:01Let's do some sit-ups. On the ground.
1:48:03[Guard] I want to hear them. Yeah, louder!
1:48:05[Prisoners] Two, three...
1:48:07[Guard] And these are the worst sit-ups I've ever seen.
1:48:09[Prisoners] Three, four...
1:48:10[Guard] Push-ups!
1:48:11Turn them over.
1:48:12[Guard] You heard him. Push-ups. Let's go.
1:48:15[Guard] Count them out.
1:48:15[prisoners counting out of sync]
1:48:20[Guard] Come on.
1:48:21[Prisoners] Four, five. [Guard] It ain't that hard.
1:48:22[Guard] 2196 is such a goodie little two shoes.
1:48:26[Prisoners] ♪ Pocket full of posies ♪
1:48:29♪ Ashes, ashes ♪
1:48:32♪ We all fall down ♪
1:48:34[Guard] We all fall down.
1:48:35To the ground.
1:48:36Enough. Back in your cells.
1:48:43[Eshleman] Hey, guys, you guys did great.
1:48:45Fantastic.
1:48:48[Shue] Yeah. [chuckles]
1:48:50[Eshleman] You are rocking those sideburns.
1:48:51[Guard] There you go. Hey, man.
1:48:53[Eshleman] It's funny to see yourself channeled like that,
1:48:55you know, it's really weird.
1:48:56But the one thing you could do is get a little louder,
1:48:59you know, get in their face.
1:49:00"You [bleep] piece of junk!" You know?
1:49:02[Guard] Alright.
1:49:04[Eshleman] You know, 'cause at, even at your volume level
1:49:06that there was that sense of menace there
1:49:09that should be intimidating.
1:49:11I understood that what they were trying to do
1:49:13was some sort of exposé
1:49:15about the evils of the whole prison system.
1:49:17So, I said, "Well, I'm an actor."
1:49:19I just got through watching Cool Hand Luke, you know?
1:49:23I can do a better job of this than anybody.
1:49:25I tried to be intimidating
1:49:26to where I would really instill some, some fear.
1:49:33[Zimbardo] I would expect one way for the guards
1:49:37to minimize their guilt
1:49:39is to say, "I didn't create the evil.
1:49:42I was simply following orders of evil higher-ups."
1:49:46[Guard] Six, seven, eight, nine.
1:49:49[Zimbardo] The problem is there were no orders.
1:49:52If anything, there is a day where one of the guards
1:49:55is sitting, smoking,
1:50:00and the warden, David Jaffe, says to him,
1:50:02"You're getting paid to be a guard. So act like a guard."
1:50:19[Zimbardo] That was only to one guard
1:50:21on one of the three shifts.
1:50:24Hour after hour, day after day, the guards came up with new ways
1:50:29to humiliate and essentially dominate their prisoners
1:50:33on their own, I mean, adlibbing.
1:50:35[Guard] Prisoners must never smoke in the cell.
1:50:38[Prisoners] Prisoners must never smoke in the cell.
1:50:42[Zimbardo] The guards accepted that role
1:50:44that they are part of the correctional system
1:50:47rather than they were students making some money,
1:50:51playing a game in a basement.
1:50:52[Eshleman] Didn't I tell you that you could not laugh?
1:50:55Maybe you didn't hear me right.
1:50:57[Zimbardo] Dave Eshleman and some of the other guards
1:50:59who did cruel things to the prisoners
1:51:01in retrospect have to justify what they did.
1:51:05And the easiest justification is, "It wasn't the real me.
1:51:09I was playing the role in order to make this experiment work."
1:51:13[Eshleman] You walk over here like Frankenstein.
1:51:15[Prisoner] I love you, 2093.
1:51:16[Eshleman] Get up close. Get up close.
1:51:19[Prisoner] I love you, 2093.
1:51:21I love you, 2093.
1:51:23[Eshleman] You're smiling, 2093!
1:51:24You get down here and do 10 push-ups.
1:51:26[Zimbardo] But the problem is you're improvising on a stage
1:51:31for 12 hours.
1:51:34And the audience goes away and you're still improvising.
1:51:39Some of the worst things that he did
1:51:41happened in the middle of the night
1:51:42when he had no idea that we were making videos,
1:51:45we were observing him.
1:51:46The videotaping was random, and you couldn't tell.
1:51:50And the question is how much of what he did was improv?
1:51:55And how much of it was sadistic impulses in him
1:52:00that came out to dominate somebody else?
1:52:03[Eshleman] Did I tell you to stop?
1:52:04[Prisoner] One, two.
1:52:05[Zimbardo] And we have video evidence of his delight
1:52:08in being a cruel, sadistic guard.
1:52:11[Director] What could have happened
1:52:12had Dave Eshleman not decided to ramp it up?
1:52:15[Zimbardo] I guess what would have happened,
1:52:18what happens in real prisons, nothing.
1:52:26[Eshleman] I would often use my acting just to mess with people.
1:52:29Professor Zimbardo made it a point as to come up to me
1:52:32and say, "You were fantastic."
1:52:33And that's where I felt that
1:52:34I had done what he wanted me to do.
1:52:42[Ramsay] Dave Eshleman has an excuse that works for him.
1:52:45It wasn't for real. This was artificial context.
1:52:50And inside that, I was doing an artificial thing,
1:52:54and those don't count.
1:52:58[whistle blows] [Guard] Mealtime.
1:53:00Hot dog day.
1:53:02We don't got all day.
1:53:03[Ramsay] I strongly disagreed with that.
1:53:08[Guard] Eat that hot dog, Prisoner 416.
1:53:13Eat your hot dog.
1:53:15[Prisoner] No.
1:53:16[Guard] Do you know where I'm gonna stick that hot dog
1:53:19if you do not eat it?
1:53:21It's getting crammed up your ass.
1:53:30[Ramsay] All life is real life.
1:53:34[Guard] Hole it is.
1:53:35Come on.
1:53:36[Ramsay] There is not some special box
1:53:39where what you do doesn't have consequences.
1:53:43That does not exist.
1:53:46[Guards] Way to follow the rules, boys.
1:53:48Finish eating.
1:53:49Finish up them dogs, boys.
1:53:56[Eshleman] The magical question is, you know,
1:53:57when does acting stop and reality start?
1:54:01One of the troubling things to me is if I really believed
1:54:03I was doing something for the greater good,
1:54:06would I have been willing to use my nightstick
1:54:08and hit one of these guys in the head?
1:54:12When I think about it now, I think no, there's no way
1:54:13I would have crossed the line and actually hit somebody.
1:54:16[Ramsay] Ethically, it really doesn't matter
1:54:19whether something's supposed to be play pretend
1:54:22or it's supposed to be a scientific experiment,
1:54:24or no, now where this is the real world
1:54:27but somebody else has made the rules for the real world.
1:54:31And so, my ethics are different.
1:54:33That is all [bleep].
1:54:36[Eshleman] You know, at some point
1:54:37if I actually did some psychological harm to people,
1:54:43you know, that's not acting.
1:54:45[Ramsay] True.
1:54:46[Eshleman] I would feel very guilty if I had, you know,
1:54:48actually caused anybody any harm.
1:55:10[Director] Hole cam is rolling.
1:55:13And action.
1:55:16[Guard] Prisoner 416 will stay in the hole
1:55:19for the remainder of the night.
1:55:21So, what'll it be?
1:55:23Are you gonna keep your blankets?
1:55:25What'll it be?
1:55:27[Prisoner] Keep my blanket, sir.
1:55:28[Guard] Blanket.
1:55:29[Prisoner] Keep my blanket.
1:55:32[Prisoner] Give up my blanket.
1:55:36[Guard] I think majority rules, right?
1:55:39Well, looks like Prisoner 416
1:55:41is gonna stay another night in the hole.
1:55:43You hear that, Prisoner 416?
1:55:45[Guard] Hope you're comfy, Prisoner 416.
1:55:48[Guard] But before you go, I want you to thank Prisoner 416
1:55:53like this for me.
1:55:55Thank you, Prisoner 416.
1:55:58[Guard] Thank you, Prisoner 416.
1:56:01[Burton] Oh, yeah.
1:56:02At that moment, I felt no empathy whatsoever
1:56:06for a fellow human being.
1:56:11It's very difficult to confront the fact
1:56:14that I'm actually capable of that type of evil.
1:56:19[Prisoner] Thank you, Prisoner 416.
1:56:23[Prisoner] Thank you, Prisoner 416.
1:56:29[Prisoner] Thank you, Prisoner 416.
1:56:30[Shue] Basically, I just didn't wanna make waves, and I thought,
1:56:33well, he knows I'm his friend since we had shared a cell.
1:56:38I'll do this just to keep things smooth.
1:56:41[Prisoner] 416, it's okay. We'll get you out.
1:56:44[Guard] No, no, no.
1:56:45I did not say that.
1:56:47Thank him and give a bang on the door.
1:56:51[Shue] I could have said, "No, I will not pound on that door."
1:56:56[Prisoner] Thank you, Prisoner 416.
1:56:59[Shue] But it was easier to just go through the motions.
1:57:03So...
1:57:09So I respect what he represented.
1:57:18It's very interesting that this is the pivotal memory
1:57:22that has been with me for my whole life.
1:57:28I went through the whole experiment
1:57:29kind of as a spectator, I thought,
1:57:33and felt like I was above it until I realized
1:57:37that I had been manipulated
1:57:39into pounding on the door really hard.
1:57:42And regardless of Clay's reaction,
1:57:46I was succumbing to the pressures of the situation.
1:57:50[Director] How does it feel to watch that again for you, Chuck?
1:57:54[Burton] It was a good detoxification about something
1:57:56that's made me feel terrible my whole life.
1:58:02When I got into this experiment, it was the first time
1:58:05in my whole life where I experienced having power.
1:58:09And I was so angry that somebody was resisting
1:58:12after nobody had been resisting for days
1:58:14that I just walked by and I slammed my, slammed my club
1:58:19into the door just in a rage.
1:58:21[Shue] For me, that's a surprising parallel,
1:58:23because it's the one thing I regretted ever since then.
1:58:26[Burton] This is where almost everybody involved realized
1:58:29that we had gone over a line.
1:58:39[Guard] Did I tell you to stop barking?
1:58:41[Zimbardo] As the stress built up among the prisoners,
1:58:44it also built up among the staff.
1:58:47I had done a lot of research in my life,
1:58:49but nothing that went beyond an hour or something.
1:58:54I had never been in a study that went on hour after hour,
1:58:58day after day.
1:59:01So, it was just physically exhausting.
1:59:03[Guard] You get down on all fours.
1:59:05Pretend like you're a dog.
1:59:07[Zimbardo] On the fifth day,
1:59:08Christina, who I was dating, came.
1:59:10[Guard] All fours.
1:59:11[Zimbardo] We were observing the night shift.
1:59:14[Prisoners] No!
1:59:15[Guard] Get in there.
1:59:17[Prisoners] One, two, three.
1:59:21[indistinct shouting]
1:59:24[Zimbardo] And she begins to tear up,
1:59:26and then she simply says,
1:59:27"I don't know who you've become in this week.
1:59:30And if this is the real you,
1:59:32I don't think I want to continue our relationship."
1:59:35That was a smack in the face. I said, "What?"
1:59:37[Producer] Multiple people say,
1:59:39"He planned for his girlfriend to show up and be upset."
1:59:42It became the perfect excuse to stop it.
1:59:45[Christina Maslach] Yeah, no, I don't think so.
1:59:47Because here was somebody I thought I knew.
1:59:50Here was somebody I thought, "This is the one."
1:59:52And now, I'm not sure I know this person.
1:59:55This was so shocking
1:59:57that I could have misjudged somebody so badly.
2:00:03[Zimbardo] My brain had been functioning at this other level
2:00:05of abstract intellectual.
2:00:09I was wrapped in the role of superintendent.
2:00:13I was blinded to what I had created.
2:00:20It was like being awakened from a nightmare.
2:00:26I came to my senses and I said, "Oh, my god, you're right.
2:00:29I have to end the study as soon as possible."
2:00:34[Director] Do you feel any guilt?
2:00:37[Zimbardo] Oh, sure. I was overwhelmed with guilt.
2:00:39You know, how could I not have seen what she saw?
2:00:43But there was no one to apologize to
2:00:45except, you know, the god of science.
2:00:48[Director] What about the prisoners or the guards?
2:00:50Did you ever feel like you needed to apologize to them?
2:00:53[Zimbardo] I made it explicit in the debriefing
2:00:54that, that I am sorry that I allowed this to go on too long.
2:00:59Six days is a long time for a study.
2:01:02But yes, I felt guilty, I felt shame.
2:01:05[indistinct chatter]
2:01:09[Director] What would you say to Zimbardo if he was here?
2:01:11[Korpi] Way to go, [bleep].
2:01:13[laughter]
2:01:1660 Minutes calls me up and I said, "Look, Phil,
2:01:19I don't wanna have anything to do with your [bleep] experiment.
2:01:22I'm done with it.
2:01:23Leave me alone, Phil."
2:01:25And he wouldn't leave me alone.
2:01:27[Eshleman] Didn't you change your phone number
2:01:28and he found it anyway or something?
2:01:30[Korpi] Yeah, did everything.
2:01:31[Shue] Wow.
2:01:32I'd like to know how much he's earned from this experiment.
2:01:35[Eshleman] Plenty.
2:01:36[Burton] Well, he certainly achieved fame,
2:01:40which is what he wanted.
2:01:41[Korpi] Zimbardo is the only one
2:01:43that's making money and reputation.
2:01:46This is his life.
2:01:48This is what gives him stature.
2:01:50[Van Orsdol] Attica happening so quickly
2:01:52after the experiment finished was really a great opportunity
2:01:56for psychologists to come forward and say why it happened.
2:02:00And then when Abu Ghraib pops up...
2:02:02[Korpi] Yeah.
2:02:03[Van Orsdol] You could just see all the, the lessons
2:02:05from the experiment being misused.
2:02:08It's marketing.
2:02:12[Zimbardo] After the experiment ended,
2:02:13I didn't think it would have any lasting effect.
2:02:17It was really intended to be used in college classes.
2:02:21But then three weeks after I did the prison study,
2:02:23there was Attica.
2:02:26Prisoners went on a strike and took over Attica Prison
2:02:29in New York to get attention of citizens
2:02:32about some horrible conditions.
2:02:34And this became a big media event.
2:02:37Now, the public want to know
2:02:38about what's happening in our prisons.
2:02:40[Protesters] Attica is blood on Rockefeller's hands!
2:02:43[Zimbardo] And from the Stanford Prison Experiment,
2:02:46we had video footage, giving viewers an eye
2:02:49into the secret life of what happens in a prison.
2:02:53It was reality television taking the audience into that scene.
2:02:57And suddenly, this little experiment,
2:02:59which I was ready to put to bed
2:03:01became national news, national event.
2:03:09[Zimbardo] The immediate impact
2:03:10of the Stanford Prison Experiment had waned.
2:03:13I'm now doing research on shyness,
2:03:15on time perspective, and then...
2:03:17[Dan Rather] The abuse of Iraqi prisoners by some Americans.
2:03:24[Zimbardo] These images were released to the media,
2:03:26and suddenly there is an interest
2:03:27in the prison experiment again.
2:03:29The lawyer called me and said, "Would you give testimony
2:03:33to help for one of the prison guards, Chip Frederick,
2:03:36because the military wants to give him 15 years
2:03:39because it was a disgrace to America."
2:03:42[Director] Can I interrupt you? [Zimbardo] Yeah.
2:03:43[Director] Were you hesitant to take on that role,
2:03:45in defense of somebody who committed those abuses?
2:03:48[Zimbardo] Yeah, no, because I told his lawyer
2:03:52I'm giving a tentative maybe.
2:03:54And so, I got to know him.
2:03:55I spent hours talking to him, checking his whole background.
2:03:59And I said, "This is as good as a guy gets."
2:04:01He was a good father, good husband.
2:04:03I said, "Your Honor, this is an extension of the prison study.
2:04:06Chip Frederick never would have done any of this
2:04:09had he not been put in that night shift.
2:04:11Everybody who was in that basement at night
2:04:13was corrupted."
2:04:15[Scott-Bottoms] It's quite problematic to use
2:04:16any artificial scenario to explain real torture.
2:04:21That seems, to me, cheap.
2:04:23[Zimbardo] What Chip Frederick did was awful,
2:04:26deserved some punishment, but I was able to reduce his sentence.
2:04:30And then I decided I would write a book about it.
2:04:33I called it The Lucifer Effect:
2:04:34Understanding How Good People Turn Evil.
2:04:37So really, each thing led to the next thing throughout my life.
2:04:41[laughter]
2:04:44[Eshleman] Zimbardo, unlike a lot of professors,
2:04:46is certainly not afraid of the limelight.
2:04:49I think that he likes the publicity.
2:04:51I think that this particular demonstration, experiment
2:04:56really made a name for him.
2:04:57[Shue] I've always associated his name with salesman,
2:05:01selling himself, selling his project.
2:05:03[Korpi] He knows where it's cool
2:05:05and what will attract media attention.
2:05:08This is a savvy [bleep] dude.
2:05:11[Zimbardo] Some years after the prison study, I thought,
2:05:14I really know so much psychology now.
2:05:17I've been teaching it. I've been writing about it.
2:05:20But now I'm interested in giving psychology away to the public.
2:05:24Instead of being limited to 500 kids
2:05:26who are fortunate to get into Stanford,
2:05:29how do I get my message to the world?
2:05:32Well, how about if I was on the television?
2:05:35So, I helped create a series called Discovering Psychology.
2:05:40This was presenting the tableau is psychology from A to Z.
2:05:44What does the mind's eye see?
2:05:46Many of our beliefs we accept without question.
2:05:48As soon as a baby is born, an amazing process begins.
2:05:52Behavior of animals in their own natural habitat.
2:05:55Can tests really tell us how smart we are?
2:05:57Psychology can be boring, and so I would always think about,
2:06:00how am I gonna transmit what I have here into their brain
2:06:04and make it memorable?
2:06:06By manipulating your perception.
2:06:09So, I had to get their attention,
2:06:11focus it like a juggler does.
2:06:12Going back to that hospital experience
2:06:15where I was confined to my bed.
2:06:18I had all these wonderful thoughts
2:06:19that had no place to go.
2:06:21And here was a way to share my ideas.
2:06:25[Maslach] Phil has a kind of a warmth about him,
2:06:27and I think this comes across even on TV,
2:06:29because he will get tons of letters from students
2:06:31who have never met him and have only seen him on screen.
2:06:34He inspires joy in so many people.
2:06:37They have a real affection for him.
2:06:39And he's really kind of magical.
2:06:41[Zimbardo] My most important achievement
2:06:42is the Discovering Psychology series,
2:06:44because it was turning the research into education
2:06:48for the general public.
2:06:50Let's look at it again,
2:06:51only this time from a different perspective.
2:06:54[indistinct chatter]
2:07:11[Eshleman] By the way, Clay, I apologize
2:07:13for throwing you in that hole 52 years ago.
2:07:16[Ramsay] Look at what we've gotten out of it.
2:07:18Everlasting fame.
2:07:19[Eshleman] Yeah, I doubt we'd still be talking about this
2:07:21today if I hadn't been, you know, we hadn't been such jerks.
2:07:24[Ramsay] It's all, you know, absence of a design.
2:07:26[Eshleman] Mm-hmm.
2:07:28[Ramsay] I mean, you thought this was an acting job.
2:07:30[Eshleman] Yeah.
2:07:31I don't think any of us would have thought at that time
2:07:35that it would ever become what it has become.
2:07:40I didn't, I certainly didn't think so.
2:07:42[Ramsay] If Zimbardo had, you know, not embraced it
2:07:46as his life's work afterward,
2:07:48then it certainly wouldn't have, but...
2:07:50[Shue] When I...
2:07:51[Ramsay] And that, that is another
2:07:53extremely weird thing about it.
2:07:55[Shue] He just milked this for 50 years.
2:07:57[Eshleman] Yeah.
2:07:58[Burton] Phil Zimbardo is right.
2:07:59This was an incredibly important experiment and event.
2:08:04Look at us all here 50 years later.
2:08:06I think it's a good lesson that ordinary people
2:08:08can easily do horrible things.
2:08:11We all have these capabilities within us.
2:08:13And I think this experiment was important
2:08:15in, in putting that out there
2:08:17whatever, whatever its other deficits.
2:08:19[Eshleman] The concept I think we can all identify with
2:08:22is that, you know, good people can do bad things
2:08:25in the wrong circumstances.
2:08:26I feel that this was not a legitimate way to show that.
2:08:29[Burton] No.
2:08:30[Eshleman] Any of you guys want to take a shot at us,
2:08:32you know, while we're standing here?
2:08:34[Shue] It's a, it's a little late for that, Dave.
2:08:39[Burton] I said, "Is anybody still angry?"
2:08:40And what I've discovered, a lot of people are angry at Zimbardo.
2:08:43[Ramsay] I would be.
2:08:45[Shue] I think almost every time I read something written by him,
2:08:48I got annoyed because he was generalizing.
2:08:51And that wasn't the way I felt.
2:08:52[Burton] I think human memory is designed for people
2:08:56to find a way to come to terms with who they are
2:08:59and what they've done.
2:09:01I think everybody had decades to develop a consistent narrative
2:09:06that we can live with about what happened and what we remembered.
2:09:09[Eshleman] We all have our own agendas
2:09:11that we bring into the experiment.
2:09:13I know I certainly did.
2:09:15And I'm sure each one of you did the same thing.
2:09:17[Director] What has this experience been like
2:09:19for all of you?
2:09:21[Burton] I'm so happy that Clay was not damaged
2:09:23by anything I did.
2:09:24[Ramsay] That's great.
2:09:26[Korpi] There was this one guy during the experiment
2:09:28that I thought was a total [bleep].
2:09:31And I met him, and he's not.
2:09:34[Shue] There you go. The rehabilitation.
2:09:37[Burton] Me? I didn't do anything.
2:09:39[Shue] I thought about you for 50 years
2:09:40because I felt guilty for pounding on the door.
2:09:43Here I meet you, and what the hell, you didn't even--
2:09:46[Burton] He wasn't even paying attention.
2:09:48I've been feeling guilty about hitting my club
2:09:49against the door.
2:09:50[Ramsay] Yeah, you probably don't remember it.
2:09:51You didn't care.
2:09:53[laughter]
2:09:55[Scott-Bottoms] The Stanford Prison Experiment proves
2:09:57that if you get the right combination of elements,
2:10:01that story will run and run.
2:10:03And the line between fact and fiction is extremely unstable.
2:10:07[Le Texier] There's a saying in French,
2:10:08"When the lie is beautiful, it deserves to be true."
2:10:14[Zimbardo] The Stanford Prison Study should be seen
2:10:16as a demonstration where right and wrong,
2:10:19reality and illusion is all jumbled.
2:10:23And it's up to the audience to pull it apart.
2:10:26Because the playwright just gives you all of this material,
2:10:29and you have to say what's real, what's not,
2:10:32what's true, what's false.
2:10:34And maybe that's what the enduring value
2:10:37of the Stanford Prison Study is
2:10:39it allows many different interpretations
2:10:42of the same events,
2:10:44but maybe there's no such thing as the same events.
2:10:47The Stanford Prison Experiment is what happened
2:10:49in the minds of 24 college students,
2:10:53a handful of researchers in a basement
2:10:56at Stanford University in 1971.
2:11:03[Prisoner] No, no. This is torture!
2:11:06[Prisoners] Three, two.
2:11:07Two, three, four.
2:11:11[Van Orsdol] Oh, my god. Look at this.
2:11:13Alright.
2:11:15[Ramsay] It fits!
2:11:19[Producer] Alright, everybody. That's a wrap.
2:11:21[Crewmembers] Hooray. Yay.
2:11:24[applause]
2:11:27[Crewmember] We're done.
2:11:29[Burton] Yeah, it was such a pleasure.
2:11:31[applause]
2:11:34[Crewmember] We're done.
2:11:36[Burton] Yeah, it was such a pleasure.
2:11:37It was great. It's been great.
2:11:40I'm exhausted.
2:11:48[tape rewinding]
2:11:56[tape rewinding]
2:12:01[tape rewinding]
2:12:09[tape ejects]

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