Today, Explained - The Stanford Prison Correction

Episode Date: July 19, 2018

In 1971, a professor locked a bunch of young men in a basement to understand evil. The results were explosive. This summer, it all came crashing down. Vox’s Brian Resnick explains what’s going on with the Stanford Prison Experiment. (Transcript here.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We love hearing from our listeners here at Today Explained. Sometimes they send us stuff like this. Hi, I'm Logan here with my wife Diana in Portland, Maine, and we're big Today Explained listeners. And today's a very exciting day because Diana got me a Quip toothbrush as a wedding anniversary gift. She got it from getquip.com slash explained. And tonight we're going to open up the box and I'm going to try it out.

Brian Resnick, science reporter here at Vox. I feel like I heard a bunch about the Stanford Prison Experiment in college, and then I pretty much forgot about it. And then suddenly this summer, it's been everywhere. I see it in the news everywhere. What is this thing, Brian? What's going on? The Stanford Prison Experiment is a part of this group of studies that are trying to explain evil. It's 1971, and we're at Stanford University. And Philip Zimbardo is a researcher there. He's wondering, what is it that brings out bad behavior in people? And the working hypothesis going into the Stanford Prison Study is that it's circumstance, that some of us are

put into positions of power, and some of us are put in positions of weakness. And in those circumstances, a natural thing happens where the people in power abuse the people who are in less power. So this Stanford Prison Experiment kind of really went for this. They constructed a mock prison in the basement of Stanford's psychology building, and they recruited this group of young men. They got paid around $15 a day, and the participants were randomly sorted into different groups. Half of them became the guards of this prison responsible for keeping the prisoners in line and half of them were prisoners. So it started off with the prisoners

getting arrested, like a mock arrest. It was a real cop car. It was a real policeman. And there were real neighbors in the street who didn't know that I was, that this was a experiment. They were brought to this prison, which had no windows, they had no, like, way to keep time throughout the day. It's just like a room with a door with bars on it. You could tell it wasn't a real jail. The power differences were, like, set up from the beginning. So the prisoners were stripped, they were deloused. They had to wear stockings on their head to simulate their heads being shaven. This is one of the prisoners' uniforms, Prisoner 819. You can see it's really a dress.

Here are the chains that the guards made the prisoners wear to remind them of their status. The guards, on the other hand, were given these mirrored sunglasses. Military uniforms the guards wore, their billy club, symbols of power and authority. So this experiment starts, and the key of this experiment was supposedly that no one was explicitly told

what to do in the situation. And the first day, nothing much happened. The guards and prisoners got along. It was pretty peaceful. And then the second day, chaos. What's this experiment? What's up with Zimbardo? What's this situation? The prisoners rebelled. They took off their numbers.

They wanted out. They were really rebelling against the guards. And then the guards, from that moment on, really stepped up in their cruelty and their meanness and their severity. So there are reports from this experiment that some of the guards strip the prisoners naked. They make them do push-ups. They simulated acts of sodomy on them. It got really intense. One of the prisoners reportedly had this mental breakdown.

He began to play the role of the crazy person, but soon the role became too real. Yeah, the exact quote is like, I'm burning up inside, don't you know? I can't say that. I'm fucked up. I don't know how to explain it. I'm all fucked up inside. I want out! I want out now! What happened was that these prisoners, they became more dehumanized. They became more agitated. And then the guards, on the other hand, became more sadistic.

You know, they lived up to the situation. 819 did a bad thing. Prisoner 819 did a bad thing. Prisoner 819 did a bad thing. How long did this study last? We were going to run it for two weeks, but we had to end it after only six days. So what happens after that? So what happened is that this became like a blockbuster moment in psychology. The first reports of this experiment were published in New York Times Magazine. It was like a big moment in psychology.

And like I said, you know, coming out of the context of like, where does evil come from? Like this is, you know, coming out of the context of like, where does evil come from? Like, this is, you know, one generation after World War II. And like, you know, getting like a kind of satisfying answer in that, well, evil comes from circumstance. And this was the conclusion of this study that has been talked about for years, that if you put people in power and you strip other people of it, you get these inequalities and you get evil. This happens naturally. It's just a cruel component of humanity that we fall into these roles. This conclusion has been really influential.

It has worked its way into congressional testimony. It has been used to explain abuses in places like Abu Ghraib in Iraq. There's been documentaries, books, and this is like in every introductory psychology textbook. If you take it, Psych 101 College, you're going to learn about the Stanford Prison Experiment. So you're saying it became pretty much the best known study in psychology. Yeah, it's the most famous study in psychology.

It transcends psychology. It becomes something you know just from being a human. Yeah, but the story Philip Zimbardo has been telling about this experiment for decades isn't the whole truth. Remember when I said that the key to this experiment was that no one was given instructions of what to do? This was the natural thing that happens to humans when some people are put in power and some people are put in not? Well, some tapes from the behind the scenes of the experiment really, really, really undercut that critical element.

In the recording, you can hear the warden, who is a research assistant, somebody working with Dr. Zimbardo, really chastising one of the guards for not being assertive enough. And if you listen to this tape, you know, it's not just like a one-off comment, like, oh, yeah, you really weren't participating. It was, I believe the quote from the warden was, the guards have to know that every guard is going to be what we call a tough guard. And the warden like really pressed this. And then he went on to say like, it's really important for the workings of the experiment, because experiment because um because this you know whether or not we can make this thing seem like a prison which is the aim of the thing um depends largely on the guards behavior what was really happening here like so you know if one guard was coerced into being meaner, more aggressive, was this line that this whole experiment was naturalistic?

Is this something that we should believe? Or is it something more like the experimenters created this social pressure on the guards to push them to be meaner, to be more cruel? And then there's some other inconsistencies too. Like there was this great expose Ben Bloom wrote about. He talked to one of the guards and the guard said, I took the whole thing as an improv activity. Like he was like acting the whole time. He also talked to the prisoner that had that mental breakdown that I told you about. Like I had fire in my head. that prisoner has said that he was faking it, that he wanted to study for the GRE, and he was like kind of sick of the experiment and just wanted to get out.

Overall, the main conclusion that we can take from these revelations is that it's not like these events didn't happen. It's not like there wasn't a little prison uprising. It's not like these guards didn't show acts of cruelty. It's that this assumption that they did it because of a naturalistic human tendency that when there's an imbalance of power, you become cruel. Like that conclusion, you cannot draw that conclusion from this study. How has Zimbardo reacted to all this? Has he admitted that he was just telling a great story? I doubt it. So I called him up. Brian, Brian. I really pressed him on like whether it's okay as a researcher for people to re-evaluate your work. And, you know, he said, yes, of course it is. But then he kept calling them attacks.

I think the ones against me, certainly by Ben Bloom, are malice. I mean, you don't say a study is a lie. That's an attack on me personally. That's on my honesty. Now, some of the other critiques are different. So I'm saying, for me, you know, are different. So I'm saying for me, against me, I certainly see if they qualify as attacks on my honesty, on my authenticity, and on the validity of the study.

I'm telling you, every fucking thing that Ben Bloom said is a lie. It's false. So this one audio clip of the guard being coached, he said it was just one time, just one guard. And Jaffe picks on this guy because he is doing nothing. He's sitting on the sideline, you know, doing nothing, watching. He's got to earn his keep as a guard. But even that is, you know, kind of evidence against his conclusion that, you know, this was naturalistic. If you have to, like, berate one guard for not doing things,

like, the message can be spread across to the other guards that it's important to the experiment that you behave in the way the experiment wants you to. Okay, let's say regardless of whether guards are coached or not, regardless of whether people... Okay, you keep saying... Ryan, I'm going to stop you. No, no, no. You're not going to finish. When you say guards, it implies all guards. And it was one guard.

And I don't, if you, I'm telling you, if you say that again, I don't want to talk to you ever again. Because, you know, you're being thick-headed about this. He was really resistant to the academic criticism. Like, I asked him, like, you know, so what's the scientific value of the Stanford Prison Experiment? It's a very powerful demonstration of a psychological phenomenon that has had relevance not only for Abu Ghraib, but for many other situations. If you want to say, is it a scientifically valid conclusion, I'd say it doesn't have to be scientifically valid. It means it's a conclusion drawn from this powerful, unique demonstration. And that strikes me as, you know, it can be argued like as a scientist, I think you need to be open

to the reinterpretation of your conclusions. And it's hard, you know, because we put ourselves into our work and it's hard to separate yourself from your work sometimes. And that's important because psychology is going through like a little painful period of introspection right now where a lot of these classic studies are being reinterpreted. And how people react to those reinterpretations is really important. There are two ways to respond. And one is to move forward and to incorporate new evidence and to be collaborative. And the other way is to be, well, a little more stubborn. I will stand by that conclusion for the rest of my life, no matter what anyone says, regardless of what any critics say.

That conclusion is a generic conclusion about this whole body of research, that human behavior is more under the influence of social, situational, environmental variables than we have thought of before, than we have considered before. How can you, Brian, not accept that? Before Logan opened up the toothbrush his wife Diana had bought for him from getquip.com slash explained as an anniversary gift, he asked her, why a toothbrush? As a dude who really, really hates brushing his teeth, potentially the space-age nature and very cool- cool sounding features of the quip toothbrush might actually get you more excited about brushing your teeth for two minutes and therefore more kissable adorable right oh wow so it comes in this crazy silver bag looks like astronaut ice cream it does it looks like astronaut food on the back is a quip and a little hello there welcome to quip any questions oh wow

our dog marlo's coming down she's interested wants to check out what's going on and here it is the toothbrush comes in this uh interesting uh container here it's it's clear it looks almost like it's a snow globe uh What do you think of this? Yeah. So is the Stanford Prison Experiment the only study that's been thrown into question lately, or is it part of a series? So you might have heard of something called the replication crisis. Nope.

No. Where have you been? This the replication crisis. Nope. No. Where have you been? This is like big news in social science. There's this other thing going on. Read Vox. We write about this a lot. For the past few years, psychologists and social scientists have realized that a lot of their standard practices in collecting data and running experiments are actually recipes to yield false positives. So there's a lot of different stories in this replication crisis.

But basically, there's a movement now to go back to these classic studies and to find out, like, OK, are they true or not? Do their conclusions still hold up? And in science, replication is a cornerstone. Like, if you do an experiment right here between the two of us and we find, like, I'm drinking a cup of coffee now and you're not. I got water. You got water. And the experiment finds that, like, my heart rate is going to be elevated

because I have a cup of coffee. That should be replicable. Like, every time I drink a cup of coffee because I have a cup of coffee. That should be replicable. Like every time I drink a cup of coffee or you drink a cup of coffee, like your heart rate should elevate. And the control person, you know, their heart rate shouldn't be elevated. Okay. You have to repeat an observation multiple times to believe it. Got it.

A common problem in the past has been that studies have been done on 50 college students like Harvard. You know, that's not very representative. And also that small sample size, it turns out like is actually a really, really good recipe to land on a false positive. Can you give me an example? Have you heard of ego depletion? Tell me more. In psychology, we use a term to describe how people don't always think through their decision making in a rational and linear way when placed under situations of stress.

We call it ego or cognitive depletion. So ego depletion is this idea that willpower is finite. Like President Obama famously didn't choose his own suits because he was worried that he would deplete his willpower store for the day to make decisions. Who chose his suits? I think he just had a few suits and didn't make it complicated. Got it. So this is like one of those classic psychological studies that really have invaded pop culture and all that, you know, like our pop understanding of psychology.

And it turns out like once you bring like very many labs to do a test on ego depletion, they find out they can't find it. When you like have like really big numbers of participants, when you have these tests being done at multiple sites around the world, that if you find ego depletion in one study, you should find it in another and another and another if this is like a true thing about human psychology. And it turns out that's not

looking great. So that's one idea. So we've got the Stanford prison experiment and ego depletion. What else is being called into question lately? Any other big ones? Something called the marshmallow test, which is basically this test of delaying gratification. You put a marshmallow out in front of a little kid. You say like, if you can wait 15 minutes, you'll get two. And if the kid takes the marshmallow early, it's a sign that they're not so good at sitting still. And what we found in many studies is that kids who are able to self-regulate to delay gratification by the time they're four or five or six years old have a much better chance of doing well at school, have a much better chance of thriving well at school, have a much better chance of

thriving as adolescents and moving on in life. But recently, there was a reevaluation of that and a much larger sample, a much more diverse data set that they can control better for things like family background and cognitive ability. You find out that once you start controlling for things, that this effect kind of disappears. Interesting. The idea has been the story of the marshmallow test has been like if you could just teach kids patience, they will become better adults. And these new results suggest like, no, you actually probably need to act further upstream. So if you've been seeing just like an avalanche of stories on like, okay, ego depletion, the

marshmallow effect or something called the facial feedback hypothesis was just like, if you put a pencil in your mouth, it activates your smile muscles and you become happier. That doesn't look like it's real either. So a lot of these stories in this replication crisis, and very similar to the prison experiment in that when you look more closely at data, when you bring more rigorous methods to these questions, the story that we tell from the conclusion starts to look different. But to be clear here, a lot of these experiments you're talking about, the ego depletion, the marshmallow, it's sort of shoddy science, whereas the Stanford prison experiment seems a lot more like it was deception.

Yes. The Stanford prison experiment is an example of what happens when you withhold information. But in some of these other examples, something similar is happening too. If you only publish results where like, oh, we found this statistically significant result, and then you forget about all those times where it didn't happen, that is deception. And that used to be standard practice in a lot of social science where you could just ignore results that didn't happen, that is deception. And that used to be standard practice in a lot of social science where you could just ignore results that didn't work or there's a lot of incentives in academia to just publish, publish, publish. And that's how you get jobs and that's how you get tenure and that's how you get grant money. And I think a lot of scientists realized they might

have thought of it was like a lesser evil just to quietly push away things that didn't work and don't report them. But now there's a big movement. It's called open science. It's really trying to bring a lot more transparency and to make sure like science has a stronger footing going forward. Why is all this happening right now? Why is it that science is being re-evaluated right now, or psychology is being re-evaluated right now? In 2015, the journal Science published this huge research effort. 270 scientists around the world tried to replicate 100 psychological experiments that were published in top journals, and only 40% of the studies held up.

And how are scientists reacting to this upheaval? Some better than others. Like in my interview with Zimbardo, he called all these replication attempts attacks. Sounds like he's had some ego depletion. Yes, yes. And then there are others who basically publish like, this is the experimental plan I'm doing, and they're making their other data open for people to evaluate. They're posting early versions of their articles

so the public can weigh in on them before they get into the academic journals. So there's a lot of scientists that are really excited to be a part of this revival of psychology, to put it on a shore fitting. Is psychology particularly at risk here because you're studying human behavior, human conditions, as opposed to rocks, magma? The problem with psychology is you're trying to understand the human mind from inside the human mind, and there's just so many traps that get laid by

that. Psychology is messy, but it's an important science. Hey, man, I didn't say it was. No, no, no. I really and it's and it tends to be like a good gateway into science because as people, we're really interested in ourselves and psychology is the science of ourselves. And I think to commend psychology and social science more broadly, they are out front on these issues. So replication is not only a problem in social science. And I think they've been particularly transparent about their efforts at reform. What about you as a journalist of science? Has this affected the way you think about scientific studies that you write about every week?

Absolutely. We think about that a lot here at the science team at Vox. The newest study is not necessarily the truest. And I think what I've grown a lot more comfortable with is just when scientists don't know the answer to the question, like that's fascinating. Like it's fascinating like that we're, like, the origins of human evil. I did a silly story a few years ago on, like, whether rats have feelings. And scientists have been trying to figure out if, like, rats have, like, empathetic emotions for decades. And, like, we're getting there.

But when you see, like, a breaking study in the news that, you know, like— Scientists now saying that. That's a good local newscaster impression. Like if you're eating grapes are going to lower your chances of diabetes, you know. Yeah. One study is never going to tell you a whole story. In science, like the answer of I don't know is more common than a lot of science journalists like to admit. And that's cool.

Cool. Brian Resnick, thank you so much. Thank you. Brian, Brian. Resnick is a science reporter at Vox. I'm Sean Ramos from This Is Today Explained. Irene Noguchi is the executive producer of the show. Bridget McCarthy is the editor. Noam Hasenfeld produces the show and Luke Vanderplug produces too. Afim Shapiro is the engineer and the replicated breakmaster Cylinder makes music for us. Catherine Wheeler and Bree Seeley are the summertime interns. Paige Flager pitched in this week and Julie Bogan rocks social

media for us. You can follow along on Twitter at today underscore explained. Today Explained is produced in association with Stitcher and we're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. So I'm brushing right now. It's going pretty well. After using the brush his wife Diana bought for him at getquip.com slash explained as an anniversary gift, Logan heads downstairs to talk about the experience. Yeah, I thought the pulses were pretty cool. They go on every 30 seconds, so you know when to change quadrants in your mouth.

And yeah, overall, my mouth feels clean. It feels great. I feel like I just, you know, had a bunch of chewing gum. Give me a kiss. All right. Yowza. Logan and Diana lived happily ever after in Portland, Maine, with their dog, Marlo, their quip toothbrush, and their son, Jonah, who didn't make it into the ads.

They listened to Today Explained every day, Monday through Friday. They had already rated it on Apple Podcasts. They also got their news from the political gab fest. Hosted by Emily Bazelon from the New York Times Magazine, David Plotz of Atlas Obscura, and John Dickerson of CBS This Morning and The Atlantic. Funny, real, super smart people who practically invented the political podcast.

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