The Psychology of your 20s - 462. The truth about the Stanford Prison Experiment
Episode Date: September 27, 2026The Stanford Prison Experiment is one of the most famous studies in psychology, but also one of the most controversial. In this bonus episode, we look at what actually happened in the basement of Stan...ford University in 1971. We explore: The landscape of psychological research at the time of the study How participants were selected and assigned roles The theatrical procedure of the study The unexpected outcomes and why it was stopped early Ethical lessons around consent and researcher responsibility Why the study is so influential to our understanding of institutions, power and authority The Debunking Psychology series: HERE Watch on Netflix: HERE Follow Jemma on Instagram: @jemmasbeg Follow the podcast on Instagram: @thatpsychologypodcast Subscribe on Substack: @thepsychologyofyour20s For business: psychologyofyour20s@gmail.com Our favourite sources:http://pdf.prisonexp.org/ijcp1973.pdf https://scholarship.richmond.edu/heroism-science/vol10/iss1/5/ https://gen.medium.com/the-lifespan-of-a-lie-d869212b1f62 The Psychology of your 20s is not a substitute for professional mental health help. If you are struggling, distressed or require personalised advice, please reach out to your doctor or a licensed psychologist. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Hello everybody, welcome back to the show.
Welcome back to the podcast.
It's so great to have you here back for another mini bonus episode of the show, which is part of our debunking psychology series.
If you are new to this series twice a month, we take a common psychological theory, an idea, a term, a concept that has been, I would say, a little bit misconstrued by the internet or by online chatter.
And we basically go about setting the record straight.
These are concepts and ideas that might not be able to, you know, be part of a one hour long episode,
but are still really, really crucial and really, really important, I at least think, to know and to know the details of correctly.
So far we have done myths about the brain.
We've done the theories in life of Sigmund Freud.
What else?
Stockholm Syndrome, personality tests.
narcissism, and today we are going to do the Stanford Prison Experiment. This is our first time
during the series, zeroing in on one specific study, and I think we chose a really, really good one.
There have been countless movies, countless TV shows, countless documentaries about this
experiment. It is in practically every single psychology textbook under the sun. But what actually
happened. How many of us truly know the details of this study, how it came to be, how it came to
end, and the legacy. You may have also heard in the news that Netflix is planning on doing a new
version of the experiment as a reality TV show. And I thought, you know what? If they're thinking
of doing that, it might be time to go back and examine why that's probably not a good idea.
no hate to Netflix, of course, you can't bite the hand that feeds you and all that.
But I just felt like a psychological history lesson seemed rather timely.
So without further ado, let's get into the Stanford Prison Experiment in all of its glory.
So to start at the very, very beginning, after World War II, there was this weird period of time
where psychologists just seem to have a lot of permission to just do the most outrageous
experiments if it meant that we could understand better how Nazism happened,
how this level of authoritarianism and violence and genocide occurred.
People really wanted to know.
We wanted answers about evil.
We wanted to know how evil happened and how ordinary people ends
up doing things that we always thought they wouldn't do. Essentially, people wanted to know
is this capacity to do awful things in all of us, or were these just really awful people?
So the Stanford Prison Experiment was one kind of such study that was trying to figure that out,
and it was led by a man named Philip Zimbardo. He was a social psychologist at Stanford,
and he was really focused in a broader sense on ideas of persuasion,
de-individuation, the psychology of the mob mentality, the psychology of evil.
Basically, you just wanted to understand, as everybody did at that time, how do good people do bad things,
or were they even good people to begin with?
So this particular study took place in August 1971, and it was funded by the US Offel of Naval Research.
So, the military.
And what they were really interested in was anti-sophiles.
social behavior, particularly in military prisons and in authority structures.
According to the Stanford Prison Experiment Archive, the original purpose of the study was to
understand how norms, roles, labels, uniforms, social expectations, create a prison environment,
even when everything should be going well.
Basically, what makes a prison?
Is it just four walls?
or is it what is expected of people within it?
Like I said, this experiment was very, very of its time.
Around the same time, there was another very famous set of studies by Stanley Milgram
where they were like cool.
I can't remember what they were exactly called,
but they were basically studies on obedience.
And in these studies,
very ordinary people had very shockingly administered what they believed were dangerous electric shocks
to random people,
because an authority figure had told them to.
And the psychology community was like, that can't possibly be right.
How could this happen?
We want to test this in some different environments.
So Zimbardo, the creator or the founder of the Stanford Prison Experiment,
wanted to go above and beyond.
And he wanted to really look at what happens when one group is given power
and another group is stripped of it.
And then both groups are placed into an institution,
designed around control.
So this is how they got participants to take place in this study.
Because I think if I saw a newspaper ad that said,
we want to put you in a simulated prison environment for, I don't know how long, two weeks
and see what happens to you.
And also you might be a prisoner, you might be a guard.
We can't really tell you at this stage.
I would probably be like, I'm not that desperate for money.
I'm okay.
But a lot of people, a lot of men in the kind of Palo Alto community were interested.
They advertised in this paper, the two papers, the Stanford Daily and the Palo Alto Times.
And they said, all right, we're going to give you $15 a day, which is about $120 a day now,
if you come and participate in this study.
And they targeted specifically male college students.
More than 70 people applied.
They then interviewed those 70 people and they excluded people and they excluded people and
the basis of medical problems, psychological difficulties, criminal records, all of that stuff.
And what was left were 24 young men, mostly healthy, mostly middle class, all Ivy League
college students. And then they randomly assigned them to either be a prisoner or a prison guard.
The random assignment in this situation was very, very critical. Zimbardo's argument was that
the two groups were not fundamentally different to begin with. These people were,
were all quite similar. These people weren't particularly sadistic. One group wasn't particularly
dominant. The other group wasn't particularly submissive. They were randomly assigned. But he
believed that when they were put into a specific role, that they would inhabit that role.
And when specifically they were put into a position of authority, they would gladly take that
authority regardless of their initial kind of temperament. So this mock prison, where was it built? It
wasn't out of prison. It was in the Stanford Psychology Department. And what they did was they
closed off the lab rooms. They basically closed off a whole corridor of the building. And they made the
rooms on that corridor cells. And then the corridor was the prison yard. They even had a small
closet. They called it the hole. It was solitary confinement. There were no windows. There were no
clocks. And the researchers used cameras and they used intercoms to kind of monitor what was happening in
side. The other thing they did, which I was like, that seems like, Zimbardo really, he really
wanted to make this seem very real for the participants, was that they literally arrested them.
So these people were not, again, they weren't criminals. They were random college students who
had agreed and were getting paid to do the study. And they were kind of told, like, you just show up
at this time and then we'll get started. And for the people who he designed prisoners, he kind of tricked them.
What he actually did was he sent out a number of police cars.
And he kind of got the local police force in on the study.
And he was like, I want you to arrest these people.
And then I want you to read them their rights.
I want you to search them.
I want you to take them to the police station.
I want you to blindfold them.
And then we'll take it from here.
And the prisoners slash the participants had no idea that was happening.
Then they got to the experiment, they got to the fake prism.
They were searched again, they were stripped, they were sprayed with water, they were given
smocks to wear without underwear, they were assigned identification numbers, they were made
to wear a stocking cap over their hair, so it kind of made it look like they had a shaved
head.
He really was, he was really getting into this simulation of the prison.
He really wanted it to feel like you were stripped of your identity,
you were being humiliated, you were being controlled, and you were ultimately powerless.
I want to really remind you of this quickly.
This study was approved by an ethics board.
He went to an ethics board and said, hey guys, here's my plan.
What do you think?
And they were like, yeah, all right, sounds fine.
And that was only like 50 odd years ago.
There are people who are involved in this study who are very much still alive.
one of them is ironically a very well-known prison reform advocate now and he was in his 20s when this took place
so whilst all of that was happening with the prisoners the guards they wore uniforms they carry batons they wore mirrored sunglasses
they worked in shifts so the prisoners had to be their day and night the guards got to leave they rotated in and out
and they were essentially instructed to like keep peace keep order they are in charge of this fake
institution. The simulation, let's just say, it became very intense, very quickly. The participants
were very distressed. Well, they displayed a lot of symptoms of distress. That's important to say
displayed, because we're going to get into that a little bit later. They were obviously
very anxious. Some of them even appeared to have emotional breakdowns. And the guards became
really, really punitive. They really did start to humiliate the participants. They just started to
disrupt and deprive them of sleep. They became very insistent on very arbitrary rules and it quickly
became apparent that it was a bit of a mess. Like this was really going the way that they expected,
but a lot faster than they expected it to. The craziest part of this, this study was supposed to,
last two weeks. These people were paid for 14 days. It ended after just six. When the experiment
is reported, often it's that the guards became so abusive and the prisoners became so distressed
that Zimbardo, he just put a stop to the experiment. That is only partly true. Zimbardo himself
had actually taken on the role of a prison superintendent. He was not just observing from the outside at a
detached kind of distance. He wasn't just watching through the cameras. He had actually positioned
himself within the institution that he had created. How the experiment ended in actual fact was that
this woman, her name was Christina Maslach. She was a PhD at the time. Later, she became
Zimbardo's wife, which is another thing. But she was visiting him at work, I guess. And she was
visiting the experiment and she walked in and she was so disturbed by what she saw that in the
moment she challenged Embardo directly and was essentially like, you don't know what you have created.
This is a terrible idea.
This is completely unethical.
You need to stop.
And she kind of cut through a lot of the male ego as like this voice of reason.
This is where the Stanford Prison Experiment really gets his notoriety as because,
being more than just a study and actually about the ethics of research itself, right? It is so
shocking that this was allowed to happen. I think that's why people are so fascinated by it.
One of the biggest ethical criticisms of this study is that participants were exposed to significant
psychological harm. A lot of the participants became very distressed, despondent, scared,
and yeah, they technically agreed to be part of the study. They were paid. But would they have agreed
if they knew the full extent of it.
What they realized afterwards when people were analyzing and reading into the study protocol
was that Zimbardo didn't really properly inform them.
He didn't really tell them the extent to what they were going to endure.
And so he actually didn't obtain informed consent.
And that is one of the most critical things you need to obtain, you need to have,
before you conduct any kind of psychological experimentation.
There was also that huge conflict in roles.
As I mentioned, Zimbardo was both the lead researcher and he himself was playing a role in the fake prison.
He was the prison superintendent, meaning that the person responsible for protecting the participants was also invested in maintaining the prison simulation and also was very, very susceptible to getting carried away and experiencing the same kind of behavioral changes that he was trying to.
to observe in other people as a neutral party, as a neutral researcher. So it really, really
blurt the lines between observation and participation. I don't know whether he included this in
his ethics application. To be honest, again, I don't know how the heck this got approved. But I
would assume that that would be a major, major red flag if a researcher is also essentially
experimenting on themselves as they experiment on other people. Even afterwards, Zimbardo kind of
of never fully took responsibility for what happened. He did become quite a strong research
ethics advocate, but kind of in the way of like, look at this. I became such, I was a victim.
Like, can you see that if this happened to me, this could happen to anyone? We need people
to tell us not to do this stuff. And people are kind of like, I think most people know,
most people don't want to play prison with a bunch of people who they have authority over and they don't,
you know what I mean? Like I think a lot of people know not to do that and to not give people weapons
and to not arrest them in the middle of the night. We don't really need a big higher power body
to tell us that. But I guess he said we do. The study was also subject to a few
controversies around its method as well. For decades, the Stanford Prison Experiment was treated
as this prime example of how people internalize oppressive roles. Anybody could do this.
You and me, if we were put in the same position, this would happen to us. Give someone the role of
God, they will quickly become a God. They will quickly become cruel. Later, those scholars
kind of argued that the interpretation of this was way too simple. Firstly, the
the study was done on exclusively Ivy League men who were, let's be real, probably more likely
than the average person to be a bit of a rule follower, right? They got into Stanford. There was
obviously some kind of rule and some kind of plan and some kind of system that they understood
and that they played by. A further 2019 paper that also examined a lot of the deeper archives
and interviews claimed that there was also evidence that the researchers, not just Zimbardo,
but some of the other researchers who were present, were encouraging a certain kind of behavior.
They were trying to create a certain kind of result.
And so as a result of that, they got a lot of, like, people did behave with cruelty.
They did behave sometimes with punitive violence.
But were they doing that because that was their natural instinct?
or were they doing that because there were these people saying,
this is what we expect to see, deliver that.
This is what we want you to do.
This is what we thought you would happen.
And that's not happening so you're disappointing us.
Basically, were the expectations of the researchers actually shifting the results?
If you put somebody in a lab coat in a room who has authority,
there was a researcher or a lecturer and you are just a student,
are you just going to follow along with what they are saying?
because you yourself are worried about some kind of form of punishment.
Something else really interesting is also seen in how the participants responded after the study,
a few years down the line.
And I want to talk about that after this short break.
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Oh my God, Lexi.
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That is wild.
I learned that about you today.
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If men were just honest about this,
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getting older and a little wiser.
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Because you told us how accommodating you are.
Obviously, I would do what I think I could do to fight the fight,
but there's only so much fight I can fight.
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So Zimbardo, after this study came out and after people were a little bit shocked, to say the least,
he argued that there was no evidence of long-term harm.
He was like, nothing. These guys were fine. They went home. They had some food. They were, they were good.
Like, they knew it was an experiment. Everything was happy and all was well.
What a lot of people point out is that how would he know? Because something that Zimbardo didn't do was that he didn't properly debrief his participants.
The prisoners' accounts post-study actually highlight a really complex mix of,
genuine distress and also performed distress that confused them and made them really question what
kind of people they were. On one hand, some of the men were truly messed up by the environment.
You know, imagine being stripped of your name, forced into a uniform, and then when you finally
look a researcher in the eye and you ask to go home, they tell you no. There was a part of this
that was a little bit of a hostage imprisonment situation. And that creates a very,
terrifying feeling of helplessness. And for a few of these guys, that anxiety and that resentment
lasted for years. They felt like they were genuinely trapped in a lawless society. They felt like
I cannot believe that at an institution like Stanford, this was allowed to take place.
But on the other hand, some of these men basically said, I was just performing. I was just performing.
Really, I didn't feel anything. I was just doing what I was told to do. And people,
are really torn between whether they are telling the truth or whether they are just saying that
because some part of their humanity, their personality, their sense of self was revealed to them
and they didn't like it. It's a lot easier to say I was just playing the role that was assigned
to me. I knew it was fake the whole time rather than, oh no, like I really fell under the trance
and what this revealed about me was something that I didn't really like.
So there's an example of this that I think is important.
That is the example of this man called Douglas Corpi.
So in the original recordings of the study,
his reaction was probably one of the most famous.
He was captured screaming.
He was having an hysterical breakdown on the audio tapes.
Those audio tapes went like the equivalent of viral back in 1970.
A lot of people heard them.
Years later, though, he said,
no, I was fine. I wasn't having a psychotic break. I was just playing pretend. He essentially said,
you know, I was a college kid. My exams were coming up. I kind of realized that, oh, I probably
can't be here for two weeks. I need to study. But because the researchers wouldn't let him leave,
he realized his only ticket out was to put on a massive performance. He literally said, like,
I just needed to make sure that the clinicians believed that I was going crazy so I could get
out of there. That's a tricky thing because that does show what people will do when they are in a
situation they don't want to be in. They will perform and act the way that we want them to. But it also
kind of undercuts, I don't know, it's complicated because then the fact that he knew he was acting
means that we probably know that the guards maybe did also feel and know that they were
acting a little bit. So how much of the behavior was real versus performed?
how much of it as well was, again, the social desirability effect.
Before and after, I'm acting this way to make somebody happy, i.e. the researchers.
And then afterwards, I'm telling a certain narrative of how I felt in the experiment
so that I can keep up the facade of the reality I want to believe.
That being, no, I didn't go crazy, I'm actually totally fine, or no, I'm not actually evil.
I was just performing because it was an experiment.
So would we get the same results today?
Maybe not. I think that's what everybody is interested in watching when this Netflix series comes out.
Like, these people know they're being filmed. Are we going to see the same reactions?
I also think this study, the original, had 24 male college students as a participants.
They were the same age. They were, I'm pretty sure all of them or the majority of them were white.
They were relatively affluent. And there was no control group. There was no control group.
So people say, and I think this is a fair point. We look at the Stanford Prison Experiment.
we think it says something deeper about humanity.
In some respect, it does, but it really just says something deeper about that part of humanity.
One of the big challenges that people bring up is why and how would this study change if women were involved.
The whole reason the study ended was because a woman walked in and was like, this is ridiculous.
This is crazy.
Like, what are you doing?
So if we were to do a similar study with all women, would we see the same results?
If we were to do a similar study with people who weren't in college or people who were older or people who were from different backgrounds, would we see the same things?
People have tried and it's been very difficult to replicate the original findings of Zimbardo study, primarily as well because nobody wants us to do that again.
So the ethics, hurdles that need to be crossed over are just too high for somebody to do this study exactly as it was done in the past once more.
For Zimbardo, the legacy of this study was basically his entire legacy.
He continued to write about it, he continued to speak about it, he continued to give the study as an example of the widespread availability or presence of evil and institutional behavior.
he didn't ever really acknowledge that he had maybe done the wrong thing.
He would write these long articles and these long rebuttals that in the end,
yes, his experiment may or may not have harmed people, but it was worth it.
It was worth it because we learnt so much.
It was worth it because that is a study that could never be done again.
Nobody would allow it.
So thank God we did it at least once and we tried it and we saw what we could find.
some people have argued that you know maybe he's right maybe a study like that had to be done in order for
psychology and in order for these scientific communities to be like we can't just do any experiment we
want to do we need to have rules we need to have guidelines you know we needed experiments like
this one and like the obedient studies to veer us back onto a safe nice path i don't know i feel like maybe we
didn't. But whatever you think of the study, it does have a huge cultural legacy. Firstly, it led to a
great deal of prison reform discussions. As I said, one of the men involved is now a huge prison
reform advocate, probably because he saw with his own two eyes how toxic this could become.
And it massively popularized the concept of situational power and the idea that ordinary people
placed in a powerful institution or situation can behave in ways that we never would have predicted.
When we think about dictators, billionaires, tech AI geniuses who these days seem like hell bent on destroying the world and being powerful and being important.
And, you know, everybody says they were once these nice, innocent kids, they never would have heard of fly.
Is this what's happening?
Is there a level of power that no human should ever have access to no matter what, because it will turn them into a bit of a beast?
Or are some people just born bad?
were these people always going to be like that, regardless of the money or the power that they had access to.
It's a big debate.
And that's why I think people continue to be fascinated by this study because of what it says about us and the lingering question we all have,
which is, what would I have done?
What would I have done?
Really, if I was in that study, we all think that we'd be able to stand up and say,
this is really wrong.
Let's stop this right now.
We all think that we wouldn't succumb to like the power trip.
but I'm sure many of those men thought that as well
and a lot of those guys would have thought
that never would be me
how could Naziism happen
how could people do such evil things
and then it seems as if they were doing evil things
even if they pretend or they say they were acting
the situation still created
that reaction of needing to act
personally this might sound controversial
but if we could do a way with
all of the ethical concerns, I would like to see this study done on women. Really, I would.
I think it would have happened very, very differently. It's never going to happen. But if there was
another, like, but if they did, I think it would be really interesting to see whether this is,
everyone could be, everyone who was in this situation could act this way, or whether it is
men specifically of a certain age and a certain demographic who will act this way and of a certain
ambition level should I say if we had a bunch of like women or a bunch of people who perhaps
weren't that hell bent on being successful or being a good student like would we see the same thing
I don't know I guess we'll never know I would I would love to see it are we watching that
Netflix show, if it ever happens very closely because I think, yeah, I think it will, I don't know,
I think it will bring about a lot of conclusions that were left open-ended by this study, like
the performance element, the social desirability element, and the gendered element as well.
That is all I have time for.
Thank you for listening.
If you liked this debunking psychology episode and you like episodes that have a bit more
history to them, we have a whole Spotify playlist of these kinds of episodes for you
binge. There's episodes on personality tests, Freud, Stockholm syndrome, dopamine, narcissism.
There's just so much there. Honestly, I always, I get to that, I get to like five and I forget
all the other ones we've done. But I will leave a link in the description. I would very much
recommend you check it out. Thank you to our researcher Libby for her assistance with this episode.
Make sure that you are following us on Instagram at that psychology podcast if you want more content
like this. Or you can follow us on Substack. And if you
you haven't yet, press subscribe, press follow whatever you are listening. And please leave us a
five-star review if you learn even one thing from today's episode or if you feel cool to do so.
And until next time, be safe, be kind, be gentle to yourself. We will talk very, very soon.
Lisa, tell them about our new show. We have a new podcast. It's called Don't Lie to Me.
I'm Lexi Youanu. We're two best friends, 22 years apart, but so close at heart. And I'm Lisa DiGulio,
the old one, which means we have wildly different references, occasionally different opinions,
and at this point in my 50s, I've lived it all.
Now in my 30s, being the founder of new shoes, good taste is my business.
Listen on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, this is Kylie Breakman.
Angela Geratana.
Jeremy Colhane. Patrick McDonald.
And we're the hosts of the Artists on Artists on Artists Podcast.
The Improvised Character Comedy Podcasts were each week a new panel of artists
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Join us for a panel of Eurovision participants.
And we do a little Halloween sometimes.
Does the Pope dress up?
He winks on Halloween.
He gets right up next to the microphone.
I hear you can almost hear the eyelashes hit each other.
You never seen Italy so quiet
as when the Pope gets up to wink on Halloween.
Listen to Artists on Artists on Artists
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The True Crime Comedy Podcasts all about robbery, fraud, and those who practice it.
Each week I bring on an amazing guest.
Ooh, I scammed them.
What?
I can talk to you for an hour.
You're a generational yapper like me.
That's why I had to make yapping a job.
And now you can catch full episodes of my show on YouTube.
Start listening to Scam Goddess on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
So by age 11 or so, at least 70% have a phone.
I'm Dr. Joy, and this is Therapy for Black Girls.
We spend our surviving middle school run getting into what's happening inside your kids' brain,
the group chat, and their friendships, and what you can do about it.
Your child is not doing this on purpose.
That's the kind of perspective we've been pulling from the psychologists
and psychiatrists who studied this for a living.
Listen to Therapy for Black Girls on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
Is there an epidemic against literature?
More specifically, Black Literature.
I'm Jack Quist-Peace Thomas,
and on this season of the Black Litts podcast,
we're outside asking why.
They don't want a whole bunch of little Ella Bakers,
Michael Maxes and Martin with the Kings running around.
And when you look at a lot of different cultures,
they're like, we need to know where you came from.
And considering this is Black Reading Month,
the only real question is,
what are you reading next?
Listen to Black Lit from the Black Effect Podcast Network
on our iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
This is an IHeart podcast, guaranteed human.
