November 23, 2024 • 46 mins
The infamous Stanford Prison Experiment wasn't really much of an experiment as it turns out. It was more like a poorly thought out exercise conducted by a professor who didn't dot the i's and cross the t's. Listen in to this classic episode as Josh and Chuck give this experiment some harsh treatment of their own.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, everybody, Chuck here. Hope you're having a great day.
Hope you're having a great weekend. I'm thinking about you,
each one of you individually. I'm thinking about you. I
know where you live. I'm standing right behind you. Actually
I'm just kidding, but I hope you're doing well. This
one goes back to July fifth, twenty eighteen. It's a
good one. I think I picked this one because I
had just recently seen the movie on the Stanford Prison Experiment.
(00:26):
The movie is okay, it's not great, it's not bad,
it's fine. The podcast episode was pretty good from what
I remember though, But you should do both. If you've
seen the movie, listen to the show. If you listen
to the show, then give the movie a shot. It's
got Philly Crudup. He's always awesome. And it's called How
the Stanford Prison Experiment Worked. Where a friend becomes foe,
(00:48):
Bo becomes friend. What will happen in the end? Listen
in to find out. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know,
a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and
there's Charles w Chuck Bryant.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
Jerry's over there.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
So why don't you pull up a chair, kick back
and tell us about your problems. Because this is psychology stuff.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
We should just call this episode the Stanford Prison Experiment,
aka perhaps the hackiest experiment of all time. And it's
really not an experiment anyway.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
No, but it's the most famous psychology experiment ever.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
Yeah. I got kind of ticked off while I was
researching this. Yeah you should, man, because I used to
think it was cool, like, oh man, what a cool experiment.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
Yeah, everybody's evil, it's core the core.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
Yeah. Then I researched it and I was like, this
is a bunch of bs, all of it. This is
one of the worst executed experiments I've ever heard of.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
That is so funny because I while I was researching this,
I was like, I'm gonna have to keep it together
maybe at the end and I can really go off from.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
Let's go off at the beginning.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
That's great, man. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
I watched the movie today.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
Too, the twenty fifty one.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
Yeah, how was it?
Speaker 2 (02:10):
How was Billy Croud up? Because I loved him in
almost famous Uh.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
Well, I'm a fan, he's he was good, but like,
I don't know, the movie A was pretty sensationalized. As
far as the violence, Like, they showed a lot of
straight up physical violence in the movie which supposedly didn't occur, right,
like beating them with billy clubs and hog tying them
(02:35):
and like like real violence.
Speaker 2 (02:38):
Actually, these days I should say Atlanta.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
Yeah, Yollywood is what they call it.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
Oh, there you go. Perfect. That's that's perfect. That sounds
like a Norman Rita's creation.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
It might have been. And then what was I saying? Oh,
I don't feel like it came down hard enough on
this Yahoo. What was a guy's name, Zimbardo? Yeah, Zimbardo
for just crafting a really poor doing a very poor
(03:11):
job at crafting is supposedly scientific experiment.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
No, he was like the driving force behind that movie
getting made. Apparently he'd been trying to get a movie
made in America.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
He seems to be a pretty fameless self promoter decades.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
Yes, yeah, it's not a good quality in a social psychologist.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
No, so we're going to.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
See I guess we let the cat out of the bag.
But well, we shall see that. The Stanford prison experiment
one of the most famous experiments in the Annals of Psychology.
It's not an experiment at all. No, it's findings are
wide open to interpretation, and it was conducted by a
(03:51):
showman basically.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
Yeah. I mean, you know, it's a red flag when
you don't publish your findings in a medical journal. You
publish them in New York was it? New York Magazine?
Speaker 2 (04:01):
New York Times magazine?
Speaker 1 (04:03):
Hodgman's rag, Well, great rag, But that's not the place
to go publish scientific findings.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
No peer reviewed journals are. Yeah, and they circumvented that, yeah,
for very good reasons. All right, so let's let's talk
about the outline. So let's go back to the beginning, right.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
Yeah, back to the year of my birth, nineteen seventy
one and Stanford at Stanford University, which is what Palo Alto.
Speaker 2 (04:30):
Yeah, go fighting sequoias.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
What is there?
Speaker 2 (04:35):
They have like a big old sequoya on their logo.
I think it's like a and then they have a
sequoia with its fists up or is that? Oh, that's
Notre Dame I'm thinking of. I do feel like it
has sometimes Chuck's looking it up everybody, so let me stall.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
It is a tree, the Stanford Tree.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
I don't know what the mascot is, but there's definitely
a tree associated in No.
Speaker 1 (04:57):
I looked it up, the Stanford Tree.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
Oh okay, cool.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
And the first question is why is it a tree?
Speaker 2 (05:02):
Uh huh, Well, what's the answer.
Speaker 1 (05:04):
Well, I mean, I'm sure it's just because of where
it is in California. But that doesn't answer the real question,
which is why would you have a tree?
Speaker 2 (05:12):
Right Phillips Embardo sitting there like, quit stalling, get to
the heckling.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
He's still around, Yeah, he is, so all right, We're
at Stanford. It's nineteen seventy one.
Speaker 2 (05:23):
Yeah, we're actually in the basement of one of the
buildings at Stanford University, I think like Campbell Hall or
something like that. And I think August of nineteen seventy one,
there were twenty four young men, almost all of them
when I think one of them was Asian American, and
they are doing something pretty bizarre in this basement in
(05:45):
August of nineteen seventy one. They've been divided into two groups,
guards and.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
Prisoners, supposedly average kids.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
Right, and they are acting out this basically role playing
game of guards.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
Versus prisoners for fifteen bucks a day.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
In a simulated prison in the basement of this hall
at Stanford University.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
Yeah, which would be about ninety three dollars today funded
by the US Office of Naval Research. Is that right?
Speaker 2 (06:17):
So it would be ninety three bucks a day, and
it was originally gonna be two weeks. So I'm sure
some of these guys were like, heck.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
Yeah, yeah, I mean I kind of forgot what it
was like to be a college student. That'd be uh,
you know what between twelve and fourteen hundred bucks starting
off your summer.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
It'd be about thirteen thirteen hundred and two dollars if
my quick math is correct.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
Good scratch, Yeah, for a twenty one year old.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
Yeah, two weeks on summer break.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
That's right. So you were divided into two lots. Like
you said, they asked people supposedly what you wanted to be,
unless this was purely a movie creation, and they did
try and look up and try and find out the differences. Yeah,
but they supposedly asked them. In most everyone said, or
in fact everyone said prisoner. In one of the reactions
(07:06):
from who ended up being the bad guard, the guy said,
they asked him why, and he's like, because nobody likes guards, right,
It's like, why would anyone want to be a guard?
Because they thought we'll just be prisoners because they just
will lay around and smoke cigarettes.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
Right, So we'll we'll and we'll kind of unpack what
that suggests later on.
Speaker 1 (07:26):
Sure.
Speaker 2 (07:26):
Okay, so you've got these these guys and they're down
here for this experiment, and so coming at it from
the way, this is the popular interpretation of what happened
at the Stanford prison experiment. Okay, yes, you've got you've
got twelve guards and twelve prisoners.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
The prisoners had been arrested, by the way, by the
real Palo Alto police. Yeah, they weren't told when, but
like the real cops came by, arrested each one of
them for you know, a variety of crimes.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
Book them at the Palo Alto Police station, and then
transported them to the jail, the fake jail in at Stanford.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
Yeah, they call it the Stanford County Jail. And they
did a legit job. They put up signs, they had
these rooms decked out like jail cells, they had a hole.
They did a really believable job of making this seem
like a prison environment at least. Right.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
So you've got these these prisoners who've been delivered. You've
got these guards who are waiting there for them. And
as as far as Imbardo's ever said, these these guards
were told, you have to protect the prison and everything
else is up to you. The only rule is there's
no physical punishment. We're just here to observe.
Speaker 1 (08:42):
Yeah, Like, here's your uniforms, here's your sunglasses.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
Yeah. And then the prisoners were booked in with wearing smocks.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
Yeah, no shoes, no underwear, yeah, naked under the smocks.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
Chained at the ankles. And then they wore like those
stocking cap do rags. They had a panty on their
head to simulate their having their head shaved.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
Right, and you know, this is this the early seventies,
so most of them had these big afros and long
hair and stuff under these pantees.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
Right, So this is I At first, everything's pretty normal.
The guards don't quite know what to do. They're a
little timid. The prisoners apparently relished this immediately and started
like finding where the guard's boundaries were, and they started
to band together, and there was actually, I think on
(09:35):
day two they turnover. From day one to two, there
was a prisoner riot.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
Yeah. I mean they, like you said, they were sort
of laughing at first, and I think we didn't mention
too and this is we'll end up being very, very problematic,
and the first sign that he didn't do a good job.
Simbardo actually acted as the superintendent of the prison, involved
himself in his own experiment and had one of it.
He had some graduate assistants that were assisting in the program.
(10:06):
They acted as parole board, and one of them was
the warden.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
That was yeah, an undergrad. Actually were they undergrad assistant? Well,
the warden Jaffy, his last name was Jaffy. He was
an undergrad at the time, and actually he had come
up with the experiment on his own.
Speaker 1 (10:21):
Oh he was the guy.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
Huh huh. And then Zimbardo was like, this is a
really good idea. Let's do this for real. Imagine the press, right.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
So, yeah, like you said, it escalated pretty quickly. After
kind of laughing at first, these guards got into their roles,
to say the least, and really kind of started being
jerks in quick order, and after the prisoners were like, hey,
this is kind of funny, like you're being you're not
being very cool. Yeah, and they were you know, kind
(10:50):
of smacked down and you know, made to do things
like push ups and jumping jacks, and they would withhold
food and eventually they would like take their beds away
from them and stuff like. It just got worse and worse,
and there was, I think, like you said, on day two,
an uprising. They got together, threw the cots off their
beds and through the bed frames against the door and
(11:13):
wouldn't let them in.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
Right, So there was a prisoner riot. Yeah, that's pretty significant, right,
And what's equally significant is that the guards by the
second day started to show signs of like real cruelty
towards the prisoners. They started treating them very poorly. They
started engaging in basically acts of torture, like waking them
(11:34):
up randomly in the middle of the night, making them
get up, like you said, push ups, which is interpreted
as physical punishment because again, you couldn't hit them with
the rubber hose, you couldn't hit them with the baton,
you couldn't punch them. But if you make somebody do
a bunch of push ups, that's physical punishment too. Yeah,
and it was within the bounds apparently.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
Yeah. They were referred to only by their prison numbers.
They would never say their names. They were made to memory.
Everyone else's prison number, and like they would line them
up and tell them to repeat their numbers for like
an hour if they didn't do it fast enough, and
then in reverse order they would get punishment. They would
do the kind of the classic moves of holding one
responsible for the punishment of others.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
Yeah, that's a big one, Like.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
If you didn't make your bed good enough and no
one could go to sleep, stuff like that.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
The guards also innovated the carrots here or there too.
They actually made one cell like a good cell, Like
they put a bed in it, yeah, with like betting.
If you were in that cell, you were eligible for
like good meals, yeah, better than what the other prisoners had.
And there were room for three inmates in there at
a time. And so it instilled this sense of competition
(12:45):
and skullduggery, I guess, backstabbery among the prisoners to curry
favor with the guards, like by informing on the other ones. Yeah,
so that you could get a chance to be in
like the nice cell.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
Yeah. And I think even before that when they went
to do the when they went to stage the uprising,
I don't think there were three rooms of three, and
I think six of them. Two of the rooms participated
and one of the rooms did not. And because not
all the guys, you know, on not all the prisoners
like rebelled as much. Some of them just kind of
went along with it.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
Interestingly, some of the guards did not descend into cruelty, right.
They actually some of them did, like favors, went out
of their way to be nice to the prisoners. But
and the grabster who wrote this article points out very significantly,
they didn't stand up to the cruel guards or officially
object to their behavior. Right, they went along with it.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
But then they thought they had to.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
In their own right, in their own way, they did
what they could to retain their humanity. So there are
two huge points, and one of them, there's one among
the guards and one among the prisoners. And the one
among the prisoners comes thirty six hours after the beginning
of the of the experiment, and this prison his name,
it would later be revealed, was Douglas Corpi. He had
(14:05):
an emotional breakdown, a nervous breakdown thirty six hours after
this experiment starts. One of the prisoners it becomes so
emotionally involved in this simulated prison at the cruelty the
simulated supposedly cruelty of the guards, that he had a
nervous breakdown well and had to be had to be
(14:27):
removed from the experiment. And this is like, this is
Embardo's This is the official line for the Stanford Prison experiment, right,
it has been for decades.
Speaker 1 (14:38):
Yeah. He also said that one of them broke out
in a psychosomatic rash. There was all manner of various
levels of psychological breakdowns happening on.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
The other side. The big star among the guards was
a guy named John Wayne who you referenced earlier.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
Yeah, his name was Dave Eshelman, and he he was
the one who he was the ringleader. He's the one
that came out as the most brutal guard of them all,
and all the other guards kind of fell in line
behind him and took their cues from him.
Speaker 2 (15:10):
So this whole thing's going on, This is crazy town
in this place. In six days, six days, this thing
descends into chaos.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
Supposed to be two weeks, Yes.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
There was. There was rumors that there was going to
be a breakout, and so they moved the experiment. There
were that that guy Douglas Corpi, who had a nervous
breakdown ended up getting put into the hole this broom
closet for I think overnight, and was finally released because
the the researchers that actually stepped in and said you
(15:42):
should should probably let him out. There was it was
just utter chaos. And then eventually Phillips Zimbardo's girlfriend at
the time, a woman named Christine Maslock.
Speaker 1 (15:53):
Yeah, his wife to be. Oh she married him, huh yeah,
still married.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
So she came and just dropped in to see how
things were going and was so outraged at what she
saw that she was like, you you so far beyond
the line. You have to stop this now, like this
is this is descended into chaos. You can't do this.
These people are treating these these prisoners horribly, Like how
are you letting this go on? Went okay, fine, and
(16:21):
so the next day he canceled the experiment again after
six days, and it was scheduled to go on for
two weeks. And so he comes out tells the world
in this New York Times magazine, guys, if I took you,
if I took you Josh, and I took you Chuck
and put you as guarden prisoner in even a simulated prison,
(16:44):
and put a smock on Josh and took his underwear
off and put a stocking on his head and gave
Chuck a baton and some glasses. Chuck would beat Josh
up well, and joshuauld probably have his spirit broken and
have a nervous breakdown. It's in everybody. Evil is in everybody. Yeah,
crumbling at the first sign of adversity is in everybody.
(17:05):
We're all just pathetic weaklings. Stanford Prison experiment, and he
ran off and said I'm famous.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
All right, that's a great setup. So we'll take a
break here and come back and talk a little bit
about the more about the experiment and the realities of
it right after this. All right, So you've got John
(17:44):
Wayne in there. I don't think we mentioned that he
took on the persona of the prison boss and cool
hand Luke.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:51):
He did a fake Southern accent and everything and dove
right into this role. If you talk to Dave Eshelman today,
he will say he's very much on record of saying
I'm not some jerk, and I didn't get off on
being sadistic. He said, I wanted to do what they
paid me fifteen dollars a day to do, which was
(18:11):
to be a prison guard and to treat these guys poorly, right,
and so I create you know, he said, I did
some drama in high school and I literally acted this
part as well as I could.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
That was I felt was expected and wanted from.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
Me, right, And I put on this fake Southern accent.
And if you like ask friends and family today, they
would laugh at this because I'm really not this guy
at all, right, because he really comes off as as
a bit of a villain in this movie. For sure.
Speaker 2 (18:38):
Well, he perpetrated real cruelty on other people, and we'll
get to that later. He said he.
Speaker 1 (18:45):
Feels bad about it too, and.
Speaker 2 (18:46):
He should, yeah, because the other people actually did suffer
under this guy's leadership as the ring leader of the
mean guards, right, like they wore pink on Wednesday. It
was terrible everywhere, right, So he really should feel bad
and apparently he does. I saw that all over the
place too, that he feels bad for it. But the
(19:07):
point is is that he has said, like this didn't
happen organically, like I I wasn't. I felt encouraged to
play this role.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
Right. That's a big deal.
Speaker 2 (19:20):
Because the findings of the Stanford Prison experiment say if
you take some people and say you're a guard.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
Give him your empower, and you will turn evil.
Speaker 2 (19:28):
They will turn evil within a day. A day they
said about this guy. And this guy's like, no, I was,
just like you said, doing my job what they were
paying me fifteen bucks a day for. Yeah, let's put
that one to the side. Let's go visit with Douglas Corpi,
who was the prisoner who in thirty six short hours
of this simulated prison experiment lost his marbles and had
(19:52):
a nervous breakdown and had to go home. Right, one
of the other two pillars of the findings that people
are either evil or crumble in the face of adversity
from the Stanford prison experiment, and again this is how
this thing's been taught for like fifty years.
Speaker 1 (20:06):
Okay, Yeah, So Corpy comes out and says, I was
faking that, and I put on a big act so
I could get out of there because it sucked and
I didn't want to be there anymore. So I fake
like I was. And he like one of his quotes
was I don't have it here, But he basically said,
like any trained clinician would have been able to see
(20:27):
right through this, Like when I hear the tapes years later,
it's like, I'm not an actor. I wasn't like apparently
the John wayn guy at least had been in like
high school.
Speaker 2 (20:36):
Plays in college too, I think, yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:38):
And he was like, I was not an actor. And
it was so clear to me looking back at these
tapes that I was faking.
Speaker 2 (20:44):
It, faking a nervous breakdown.
Speaker 1 (20:45):
Yeah, faking a nervous breakdown to get out of there. Right.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
So the reason why he said later that he did
fake this nervous breakdown is because he took the job
because he thought he'd just be laying around, like you said,
smoking cigarettes, being a prisoner. Yeah, and he would get
to study for GRE. He was about to enter grad school.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
I see that.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
Well, they said, no, you can't have your books.
Speaker 1 (21:05):
Now. They didn'tive him anything, and.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
This guy was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, Wait a minute,
this is day one. He's like whoa, whoa, whoa, Like,
I need those books. I'm taking the GRE basically leaving
here after two weeks and going to take the test,
like I've got to spend this two week studying. They're like,
you can't have your books. So he quickly saw that
the only way out was to fake this nervous breakdown.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
And Billy Crudup went in and said, why is everyone
saying whoa whoa whoa? Only I can say whoa whoa
whoa whoa whoa whoa. Yeah, So we've kind of poo
pooed the two major findings from this study already.
Speaker 2 (21:39):
So that's that's a huge deal, right, because again, the
idea is that if you put people any random people.
Remember these are just average, like middle middle class white.
Speaker 1 (21:47):
Kids, which is another problem, right.
Speaker 2 (21:50):
If you put if you put any well, you know
nineteen seventy one, that means everybody, Right, that's the whole world. Right,
If you put anybody in the world in this situation,
they're going to either turn evil or lose their marbles.
So those are the two findings. That's what everybody took
it as at first. It later came out, no, this
guy was acting, this guy was faking. So what else
(22:11):
do we have? Then, Well, we have this idea that
Zimbardo insinuated himself as part of the experiment and that
actually created the findings from the Stanford prison experiment.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
So should we put a pin in that? Should we
talk about that?
Speaker 2 (22:28):
Now?
Speaker 1 (22:28):
No?
Speaker 2 (22:28):
No, I want to go. I want to go where
you want to go.
Speaker 1 (22:30):
All right, let's put a pin in that then and
talk about a little bit more about what went on
that week. They had everything from visitation like you could
write a letter to your family or girlfriend or whoever
you want to come visit you to ask for visitation rights.
And the family came in and they did. They came
in and visited for an hour, and they were in
(22:51):
some cases parents were like, I don't know about this.
This is like this seems like a really weird thing.
And Zimbardo would be like, oh no, it's totally fine,
Like you know, they're psychologists. Yeah, like they want to
be here, like ask them and the the kids. You know.
They did say that they wanted to stay, okay, which
(23:12):
is which is important.
Speaker 2 (23:14):
Okay, So what else is important is.
Speaker 1 (23:17):
Like, no one in the visiting hour. I don't think
we're like, get me out of here.
Speaker 2 (23:20):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
They are like, no, this is all part of the
part of the act essentially, all right. They had parole
hearings inside the course of a week. Somehow they said
that if they they could be released, if they would
forfeit the money. And this is after I don't know
how many of the six days, but they could not
get paid if and be paroled if they went in
(23:43):
front of the parole board. They went in front of
the parole board, some of them did, and most of
the prisoners said that they would give up their money
in fact, and the parole members, like like I said,
they were the graduate assistants. Even had one former prisoner,
this guy that like was a fifteen year quentin yeah inmate,
fifteen or seventeen year inmate on the board that I
(24:04):
guess Zimbardo. I want to call him Zamboni.
Speaker 2 (24:08):
So he actually was a friend of Jaffy's, the guy
who originally actually that's where he came as an undergrad.
So he brought him in on it.
Speaker 1 (24:16):
Right, So he was on the parole board, and he
was kind of one of the ones, at least in
the film version that was kind of saying like, no,
this is like how it is, like, you should keep
it going, right, But I don't know how much of
that was dramatized.
Speaker 2 (24:28):
I don't either. That's a That's one of the problems
with this is, you know, so much of the documentation
has been not released over the years, and when it
does get released, it contradicts the official line, and it's
very tough to separate truth from fiction, especially when you
introduce a Hollywood movie into the whole thing, just to
just to drive those nails in the coffin too. Yeah,
(24:49):
and so reality.
Speaker 1 (24:50):
In fact, there's been a lot of in the year
since a lot of complaints that a lot of these
you know, kids were screaming, I want to go home,
I want to go home. And for his heart, Zimbardo said,
in the contract it says I want to exit the experiment,
as the official line to say, and they could have
gone home. And he was like, but you hear no
(25:11):
one ever said I want to exit the experiment. They
would say I want my mommy, or I'm going crazy,
or my god, please stop this, please stop this, right,
but they never said those exact words, this safe phrase, say, yeah,
the safe phrase. But it turns out that's bunk two.
Speaker 2 (25:25):
Right, Yeah, it turns out that if you look at
the contract that they had that he's referencing that say
the rules and everything in the agreement, there's no safe
word to be mentioned. Certainly doesn't say if you say
I want to quit the experiment, you get released from
the experiment.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
So he's just flat out lying about that.
Speaker 2 (25:42):
Then that's from what I understand. Yes, and what.
Speaker 1 (25:44):
Article was this that you sent?
Speaker 2 (25:46):
There's a really good takedown in medium called the The
Lifespan of a Lie.
Speaker 1 (25:53):
Yeah, it's a good one, and.
Speaker 2 (25:55):
It's based on that titles based on a I think
a documentary by a documentary or book by a yeah,
French filmmaker which who titled his version The Birth of
a Lie. And it's basically about how the Stanford prison
experiment was just basically it was bunk from the get go,
(26:16):
which we'll kind of pick that apart in a little bit,
and that just fascinatingly has been perpetuated over again basically
fifty years. It just entered the cultural zeitgeist and just
stayed like an infection.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
All Right. Some other things that happened to make it realistic.
They brought in a lawyer when parents asked for one,
and played along like it was real. They brought in
a chaplain who came in to speak to prisoners and
he played along with it too. They basically did everything
that you would think would happen in a real prison
(26:54):
on a slightly scaled down level.
Speaker 2 (26:56):
Right, But the upshot of all of This is Zimbardo saying, like,
do you see what's going on here? Everybody? Yeah, Like,
I just put some guys in, like nine guys in
at a time, or twelve guys as guards, twelve guys
as prisoners, and their parents came for visiting hours, a
lawyer came. That's how real the simulated prison became in
(27:18):
people's minds. Just imagine what a real prison's like. Right, So,
and he was saying they could have left at any
time if they just said the safeword, and no one
ever said the safeboard. There is some evidence that these
people were basically kept there against their will, especially after
Douglas Corpy basically faked his emotional breakdown and then was
(27:41):
thrown into a broom closet and retaliation for it, that
he should have very very clearly should have been left
or allowed to leave, and to even be led to
think that you couldn't leave, which is apparently the idea
that spread throughout the prisoners. That would be like keeping
someone against their will.
Speaker 1 (28:02):
Yeah, and he did leave, but was supposed to agreed
to come back, supposedly to like play a different role
as a prisoner who like maybe escaped and came back,
I think, but didn't come back, right.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
And I think five people were released early before the
whole experiment was called off. All prisoners. No guards left
the experiment, which is telling.
Speaker 1 (28:25):
Yes, well, and they were working in shifts though, which
is important.
Speaker 2 (28:27):
Okay, that is a big one too. But if you
consider that no one asked to be a guard, they
all asked to be prisoners, but then none of the
guards left the experiment, right to me, that's interesting on
its face, right, There's something to that, But the whole
thing just kind of falling apart after Zimbardo's girlfriend at
(28:50):
the time came the idea that up to this point,
these people had engaged in this fantasy and thought that
they couldn't leave, and they really could. That's controversial in
and of itself, because again there's evidence that they were
led to believe they couldn't leave, and that's different. That
changes things entirely.
Speaker 1 (29:12):
Yeah, so you.
Speaker 2 (29:13):
Want to take another break and then pick this part
some more.
Speaker 1 (29:16):
Yeah, let's do it. Kind of fun, all right, the
(29:40):
final takedown.
Speaker 2 (29:41):
I'm waiting for. I'm waiting for Phillips Embardo to release
a book about like our Jackhammer episode.
Speaker 1 (29:48):
That's fine, I would read it all right, so where
are we here. Basically, we're at the point where he
has endo the experiment and now we're dealing with the
fallout since nineteen seventy one and how this should be viewed.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
One of the big things that came out of that
French book, The Birth of a Lie, is the filmmaker
unearthed a recording that was I don't know where he
found it, but they he found it and released the
transcript of it that clearly has if not Zimbardo, at
(30:24):
least Jaffy, definitely Jaffy coaching the guards. Yeah, to be
more brutal, Right, be a tough guard. Just think of
how the pigs do it, and do it like that,
I think is what the quote was, right, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (30:38):
When the whole idea of this thing is to try
and prove that without any influence.
Speaker 2 (30:43):
Yes, this is what happens. Right, So there's a couple
of things that happened. Methodologically, there's a lot of things
that happened. The moment they started coaching those guards. Number one,
they took any organicness out of their behavior. They were
then doing what they thought they were expected to do.
Like John Wayne, Yeah, for sure, just went over the top,
is what it was. And then number two, they made
(31:04):
them co experimenters. Like the whole thing was supposed to
be guards and prisoners, and we're going to watch as
test subjects or participants. And when you coach the guards,
you're they're co experimenters. Now, now the experiments entirely on
the on the prisoners, which you can say, okay, well,
then those findings still worked. Well, that gets thrown out
(31:25):
when you base the whole thing on a guy who
is faking, right, But but you you make the guards
co experimenters, and you just completely take out any objectivity
from this experiment. That's problem one with the methodology.
Speaker 1 (31:38):
Well, and the fact we already mentioned that one of
the researchers was a warden and zim want to call
them Sambrano, that's fine, go ahead. Zimbardo Zamboni himself was
the superintendent, like the minute he decided to do that,
Like I looked up. I think he's like in his
late thirties when he did this. How did he not
(31:58):
like was he that bad and doing his job? How
did he not know? Like wait a minute, this will
taint the experiment.
Speaker 2 (32:04):
Do you want to talk about why the people think
that he was so yeah, okay, so he was a
he wasn't I think still is a social activist for sure.
And he had decided, and I can't really disagree with him,
that prisons were brutal places where brutality lived, and that
they were inherently brutal. And so if you take somebody
(32:27):
and put them into this place, you're doing a real
disservice to humanity by throwing somebody in a brutal place
that you know is brutal.
Speaker 1 (32:33):
So his aim was to get reformed to happen.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
Yes, from the outset.
Speaker 1 (32:38):
Well, I mean, I can't fault that, but you can't
call it a scientific experiment either.
Speaker 2 (32:42):
No, And it actually supposedly backfired as well, because one
interpretation of his findings is that it's all or nothing
with prisons. Prisons are inherently brutal or you can't have them.
So either you have prisons and you have brutal prisons,
or you have no prisons. And so, faced with that
(33:02):
choice and with rising crime rates in the seventies, a
lot of people doubled down on getting tough and made
prisons even worse and built more prisons and said to yes,
we're not even going to try to like, reform you anymore.
We're just going to send you to these brutal places
that are inherently brutal and there's nothing we can do
about it. So it would have it would have backfired
(33:23):
in that sense, but in the idea that he was
doing something with the best interests of his fellow people
at heart. Again, like you said, it's tough to fault
him for that. He just really really gave social psychology
a black eye.
Speaker 1 (33:40):
Yeah. So one of the other things he did wrong,
and this one I just can't figure out either, is
he didn't have a control group and one of his
this guy wasn't in the experiment, but one of his
colleagues came by one day and was like, you know,
what's your.
Speaker 2 (33:55):
Control what's your independent variable?
Speaker 1 (33:57):
Yeah, and he was like what, Yeah, He's like, I
don't have one.
Speaker 2 (34:01):
So if you run an experiment of any sort, Grabster
uses a great analogy where if you're trying to figure
out what the effects of radiation are on tomatoes, you
pick a bunch of tomatoes, you wagh them, you check
them for color, you make sure that they're identical to
another set of tomatoes, So you have two sets of
(34:21):
basically identical tomatoes. One you radiate, one you do not,
and after a set amount of time you go back
and see what the differences are, and then you can
say probably that when you radiate tomatoes, these are the effects,
and the effects are the differences between the two. Same
thing with the prison experiment.
Speaker 1 (34:38):
Yeah, what would you have here? Two different cell blocks
and one that literally isn't coached and completely left alone.
Speaker 2 (34:45):
That's what I would have done, for sure.
Speaker 1 (34:47):
And then one where you're saying, hey, be brutal, and yeah,
we'll see if everyone falls into these roles exactly.
Speaker 2 (34:52):
That would have been great. And actually some researchers in
two thousand and one, oh yeah, they did. They did
exactly that. They basically ran the experiment with just that
control group you suggested. It was called the BBC Prison Study.
Speaker 1 (35:05):
Yeah, Haslom and Reiker.
Speaker 2 (35:07):
Yeah, and basically they did the same thing. They they
did not do any coaching, they didn't do any intervention.
They did the thing exactly like you're supposed to, or
like Zimbardo should have from the outset, and they found
that again they made the control group to the original
Stanford prison experiment, they found that the exact opposite happened.
(35:27):
The prisoners stayed banded together, the guards were totally in
disarray and disorganized. The brutality never emerged, and there wasn't
any violence from Yeah, I understand.
Speaker 1 (35:38):
And this is where it gets really scummy, if you
asked me. Zimbardo found out about this, and supposedly Haslman
Riker said they discovered he was privately writing editors to
keep them from getting published and claiming that they were fraudulent.
Speaker 2 (35:54):
Yeah, in the journal that they released their findings, and
he wrote an appendage to their article and said, these
are they just don't even listen to these guys. I'm
Phillips Embardo man. So yeah, I thought that was pretty
scummy too if he did that, So you've got methodologically,
there's even more problems too. If in the original newspaper advertisement, chuck,
(36:20):
he said, prison experiment, the prison experiment, everybody sign up.
Speaker 1 (36:25):
Yeah, that was a problem in of itself. They shouldn't
have known what they were doing.
Speaker 2 (36:28):
No, exactly until they showed up, right, So you're gonna
get a big wide swath of people, and then once
they find out what the experiment is, maybe they'll say
no thanks or whatever. But this was like attracting. A
two thousand and seven follow up study found narcissistic, hostile,
overly aggressive authoritarian types like flies to honey.
Speaker 1 (36:51):
Yeah, or the opposite.
Speaker 2 (36:53):
Well, that seems to be the case in this case.
Speaker 1 (36:55):
Yeah, which was in fact one of them was a
liberal activist who kind of purposely in there because he
thought maybe these findings could be used one day for
prison reform.
Speaker 2 (37:06):
Well, I think also most of what I got from
Jaffy coaching the people to say, like, think about what
the pigs would do, and then do that, because we
really got to show them how brutal prisons are. I
think everybody who showed up basically was against prisons. But
whether you're against prisons or forum, you were automatically tainted
(37:27):
before you even showed up for the interview. Yeah, because
they wrote prison experiment in the ad. So from the
outset there was bias. There was no control group. It
attracted a bias cross section of people.
Speaker 1 (37:39):
Zimbardo participated, he was.
Speaker 2 (37:42):
A participant, and that actually chuck led to the second
set of findings that Zimbardo had influenced this and become
a participant himself. And here's the current interpretation of all
of it. Okay, this seems to be the current dojure
interpretation of the Stanford prison experiment, not that people are
(38:06):
inherently cruel and inherently will just crumble in the face
of authority, although that might still stand, but that people
will be are capable of cruelty if they're recruited by
an authority. Figure the second set, and there's actually been
three sets of interpretations. The second set was that Zimbardo
(38:28):
inserted himself and that it actually demonstrated what's called situationist theory.
Speaker 1 (38:33):
Yeah, and that's basically that external circumstances are the drivers
of human behavior.
Speaker 2 (38:39):
Right. So the point was not that people are inherently
cruel on an individual level, but.
Speaker 1 (38:44):
The situation that they're put in. They will quickly find
those roles if.
Speaker 2 (38:49):
There's a power structure above them that has normalized this
and is expecting them to fulfill those roles. And this
really tied in with you know this nineteen seventy one,
people were still really trying to figure out what the
heck could just happen with the Nazis. It was only
like twenty five twenty six years before. Yeah, so this
(39:09):
idea that this banality of evil, this made perfect sense
in that respect. Right, there was a bureaucracy that had
normalized evil and you were just following orders, right. That
was the second interpretation of the Stanford prison experiment.
Speaker 1 (39:24):
Yeah. Well, and not just the Nazis, but everything like
the Vietnam War, which was I mean, this was nineteen
seventy one, right, and like the Miley massacre, and you know,
I was just following orders. Like this tied in this
has his fingers in a lot of relevant politics.
Speaker 2 (39:41):
Of the day, right, So apparently it also tied in
really well to Attica, and Zimbardo must have just couldn't
believe is his good fortune that there was a there's
lightius prison riot in American history. Happened like a couple
of weeks after he made the news in the New
York Times magazine with this journal arter or this article
that he wrote. Right, Yeah, but that actually played into
(40:02):
it too, because apparently, following orders, a lot of guards
just fired blindly into the tear gas smoke of this
prison riot and killed tons of unarmed prisoners and hostages.
So so Zimbard's like, Okay, that's fine, however we're going
to interpret this. I'm cool with that. But the third one.
(40:23):
I'm not quite sure that he would be cool with
the current.
Speaker 1 (40:26):
One, which is bad science, I think.
Speaker 2 (40:29):
So what I saw is that a lot of social
psychologists said, we've known this as bad science all along,
but the findings were really interesting and worthwhile, so we
didn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. The third
one is that Zimbardo inserted himself. And this what this
this study really showed was that people will engage in
(40:51):
acts of cruelty if there is a figure of authority
recruiting them to what they think is a righteous cause.
And in this case, it was Zimbardo making the guards
co experimenters by coaching them to be cruel right, and
in the name of prison reform. Ultimately, when they showed
the world what happens when you put normal people in
(41:13):
a prison situation.
Speaker 1 (41:14):
Yeah, which is what the John Wayne guy very much
has said all his life since then, is that this
is what they I thought they wanted was for me
to be a bad guard, right, so we could prove
ultimately that prisons need reform.
Speaker 2 (41:29):
And that is why he's still complicit, because he's still
engaged in these acts of genuine cruelty against the prisoners
in the study, and that's why he should still feel
bad and still does feel bad. But he did it
because he was recruited in the name of this righteous
caused by somebody who was in authority.
Speaker 1 (41:47):
So is this being taught this way in classes now?
Speaker 2 (41:50):
I think that they, especially once it came out that
Zimbardo and at the very least his warden, a co experimenter,
was coaching them to do this, and that the organic
cruelty is just totally out the window. I think they
don't know what to do with it right now. They're
trying to figure it out, like how to get these
findings across or what to make of them.
Speaker 1 (42:11):
Because one of these quotes from the article you sent
the guy said, I don't think it's scientific fraud in
the typical sense. It was never considered to be scientific.
It's typically represented in classrooms as a demonstration, not an experiment,
and as a notorious case of ethical malfeasance. So that's
almost a fourth takeaway is that it's an example of
(42:32):
how to not do a study correctly, right, which is interesting.
Speaker 2 (42:37):
Oh yeah, I mean methodologically inserting yourself, like lying about
the findings later on, or misinterpreting the results, or using
spin it's yeah, there's a lot here, but it.
Speaker 1 (42:48):
Was approved by the Stanford Human Rights Subjects Review Committee
at the time. Those were Zimbardo's experiments who he presented
this to, and they're you know, he still says that
it was ethical.
Speaker 2 (43:01):
Well, it was at the time under the guidelines, it
was ethical, but then after they changed the guidelines.
Speaker 1 (43:06):
You couldn't do this today, no, or at least not
with like he did it.
Speaker 2 (43:10):
So, I did you remember the very brief psychology is
not serious?
Speaker 1 (43:15):
I watched that.
Speaker 2 (43:16):
I did one on the Stanford prison experiment.
Speaker 1 (43:18):
Yeah, I watched that today.
Speaker 2 (43:19):
Did you what did you think it was good? Thanks?
Speaker 1 (43:21):
Man? Cute little background?
Speaker 2 (43:22):
Yeah, I thought so too. And let's see you got
anything else.
Speaker 1 (43:27):
No, I mean, boy, I thought we were pretty scathing, but.
Speaker 2 (43:30):
We were This is like vaping level scathing. This is
way worse than vaping. I'm sure the vapors are like going.
They were really hard on that guy.
Speaker 1 (43:37):
Yeah. The movie, uh, you know, the documentary is probably
a little more accurate. But the movie wasn't bad. Yeah,
I mean it's not great, yeah, but it was okay.
It felt like a movie the.
Speaker 2 (43:48):
Week, gotcha it's an airplane movie.
Speaker 1 (43:52):
Yeah, watch it on your next flight. That's my recommendation.
Speaker 2 (43:54):
Thanks buddy. Well, if you want to know more about
the Stanford prison experiment, type those words in the search
bar at houstuffworks dot com and it'll bring up this
grabster article. Since I said grabster, it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (44:10):
I'm gonna call this beautiful landscaping. Hey, guys, I spent
the last two years fixing up the yard in our
house in Point Pleasant, Pennsylvania.
Speaker 2 (44:19):
Oh that sounds like a pleasant place.
Speaker 1 (44:20):
Yeah it is. My husband actually introduced me your show
a few years back, and thank god he did, because
I've literally listened to you for hours and hours while
working in the yard.
Speaker 2 (44:28):
Nice.
Speaker 1 (44:29):
It was a huge undertaking. I have a more flexible
work schedule than he does, so I volunteered to absorb
most of the responsibility, although he did a lot of
heavy looking to I enjoyed the show so much I
stopped allowing myself to listen to it. To it any
other time. You were only allowed during yard work. This
made me much more ready to get outside and get
into it. You guys were with me while I carried
literally tons of redstone uphill and buckets hauling rocks for
(44:52):
a firing landing, planeted pecky sandra ferns and hostas in
the soil I've ever had to work with, and just
clearing away overgrowth.
Speaker 2 (45:03):
Which it sounds like Tanya Harding training for the Olympics.
Speaker 1 (45:06):
And that one montage which it turned out included a
fair amount of poison ivy. During it on I learned
about tiny adorable little creature called it's artigrade, the business
of head trains plants, the hookworm her favorite episode, and
some haunting information I cannot unher, such as you provided
in the bull fighting and drowning episodes. You're always very entertaining,
(45:26):
full of information. Even when I think it's boring, you
make it fun. There were times you had me loling
in my backyard alone and covered in dirt and sweat
like a crazy person. Attached her some pictures of the progress,
all from your climate controlled studio, that is from Sharon Prashinsky.
And Sharon, you did a great job. That is one
(45:48):
beautiful yard you got going. Yeah, for sure, it is lovely.
Speaker 2 (45:51):
It is nice work. We're glad we could be there
with you to help you get up that hill.
Speaker 1 (45:56):
Yeah, and down the hill and then back up the
hill and back down the hill.
Speaker 2 (45:59):
That's right, and then back up again. If you want
to get in touch with this so let us know
how we've helped you out. We love hearing that kind
of stuff. If you're Phillips Lombardo, we expect to hear
from your lawyer. And in the meantime, you can hang
out with us at our home on the web, Stuff
Youshould Do dot com, where you can find all of
our social links, and you can also send us an
email to Stuff podcast at HowStuffWorks dot com.
Speaker 1 (46:23):
Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hi, everybody, Chuck here. Hope you're having a great day.
Hope you're having a great weekend. I'm thinking about you,
each one of you individually. I'm thinking about you. I
know where you live. I'm standing right behind you. Actually
I'm just kidding, but I hope you're doing well. This
one goes back to July fifth, twenty eighteen. It's a
good one. I think I picked this one because I
had just recently seen the movie on the Stanford Prison Experiment.
(00:26):
The movie is okay, it's not great, it's not bad,
it's fine. The podcast episode was pretty good from what
I remember though, But you should do both. If you've
seen the movie, listen to the show. If you listen
to the show, then give the movie a shot. It's
got Philly Crudup. He's always awesome. And it's called How
the Stanford Prison Experiment Worked. Where a friend becomes foe,
(00:48):
Bo becomes friend. What will happen in the end? Listen
in to find out. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know,
a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and
there's Charles w Chuck Bryant.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
Jerry's over there.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
So why don't you pull up a chair, kick back
and tell us about your problems. Because this is psychology stuff.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
We should just call this episode the Stanford Prison Experiment,
aka perhaps the hackiest experiment of all time. And it's
really not an experiment anyway.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
No, but it's the most famous psychology experiment ever.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
Yeah. I got kind of ticked off while I was
researching this. Yeah you should, man, because I used to
think it was cool, like, oh man, what a cool experiment.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
Yeah, everybody's evil, it's core the core.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
Yeah. Then I researched it and I was like, this
is a bunch of bs, all of it. This is
one of the worst executed experiments I've ever heard of.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
That is so funny because I while I was researching this,
I was like, I'm gonna have to keep it together
maybe at the end and I can really go off from.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
Let's go off at the beginning.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
That's great, man. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
I watched the movie today.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
Too, the twenty fifty one.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
Yeah, how was it?
Speaker 2 (02:10):
How was Billy Croud up? Because I loved him in
almost famous Uh.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
Well, I'm a fan, he's he was good, but like,
I don't know, the movie A was pretty sensationalized. As
far as the violence, Like, they showed a lot of
straight up physical violence in the movie which supposedly didn't occur, right,
like beating them with billy clubs and hog tying them
(02:35):
and like like real violence.
Speaker 2 (02:38):
Actually, these days I should say Atlanta.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
Yeah, Yollywood is what they call it.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
Oh, there you go. Perfect. That's that's perfect. That sounds
like a Norman Rita's creation.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
It might have been. And then what was I saying? Oh,
I don't feel like it came down hard enough on
this Yahoo. What was a guy's name, Zimbardo? Yeah, Zimbardo
for just crafting a really poor doing a very poor
(03:11):
job at crafting is supposedly scientific experiment.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
No, he was like the driving force behind that movie
getting made. Apparently he'd been trying to get a movie
made in America.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
He seems to be a pretty fameless self promoter decades.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
Yes, yeah, it's not a good quality in a social psychologist.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
No, so we're going to.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
See I guess we let the cat out of the bag.
But well, we shall see that. The Stanford prison experiment
one of the most famous experiments in the Annals of Psychology.
It's not an experiment at all. No, it's findings are
wide open to interpretation, and it was conducted by a
(03:51):
showman basically.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
Yeah. I mean, you know, it's a red flag when
you don't publish your findings in a medical journal. You
publish them in New York was it? New York Magazine?
Speaker 2 (04:01):
New York Times magazine?
Speaker 1 (04:03):
Hodgman's rag, Well, great rag, But that's not the place
to go publish scientific findings.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
No peer reviewed journals are. Yeah, and they circumvented that, yeah,
for very good reasons. All right, so let's let's talk
about the outline. So let's go back to the beginning, right.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
Yeah, back to the year of my birth, nineteen seventy
one and Stanford at Stanford University, which is what Palo Alto.
Speaker 2 (04:30):
Yeah, go fighting sequoias.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
What is there?
Speaker 2 (04:35):
They have like a big old sequoya on their logo.
I think it's like a and then they have a
sequoia with its fists up or is that? Oh, that's
Notre Dame I'm thinking of. I do feel like it
has sometimes Chuck's looking it up everybody, so let me stall.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
It is a tree, the Stanford Tree.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
I don't know what the mascot is, but there's definitely
a tree associated in No.
Speaker 1 (04:57):
I looked it up, the Stanford Tree.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
Oh okay, cool.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
And the first question is why is it a tree?
Speaker 2 (05:02):
Uh huh, Well, what's the answer.
Speaker 1 (05:04):
Well, I mean, I'm sure it's just because of where
it is in California. But that doesn't answer the real question,
which is why would you have a tree?
Speaker 2 (05:12):
Right Phillips Embardo sitting there like, quit stalling, get to
the heckling.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
He's still around, Yeah, he is, so all right, We're
at Stanford. It's nineteen seventy one.
Speaker 2 (05:23):
Yeah, we're actually in the basement of one of the
buildings at Stanford University, I think like Campbell Hall or
something like that. And I think August of nineteen seventy one,
there were twenty four young men, almost all of them
when I think one of them was Asian American, and
they are doing something pretty bizarre in this basement in
(05:45):
August of nineteen seventy one. They've been divided into two groups,
guards and.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
Prisoners, supposedly average kids.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
Right, and they are acting out this basically role playing
game of guards.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
Versus prisoners for fifteen bucks a day.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
In a simulated prison in the basement of this hall
at Stanford University.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
Yeah, which would be about ninety three dollars today funded
by the US Office of Naval Research. Is that right?
Speaker 2 (06:17):
So it would be ninety three bucks a day, and
it was originally gonna be two weeks. So I'm sure
some of these guys were like, heck.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
Yeah, yeah, I mean I kind of forgot what it
was like to be a college student. That'd be uh,
you know what between twelve and fourteen hundred bucks starting
off your summer.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
It'd be about thirteen thirteen hundred and two dollars if
my quick math is correct.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
Good scratch, Yeah, for a twenty one year old.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
Yeah, two weeks on summer break.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
That's right. So you were divided into two lots. Like
you said, they asked people supposedly what you wanted to be,
unless this was purely a movie creation, and they did
try and look up and try and find out the differences. Yeah,
but they supposedly asked them. In most everyone said, or
in fact everyone said prisoner. In one of the reactions
(07:06):
from who ended up being the bad guard, the guy said,
they asked him why, and he's like, because nobody likes guards, right,
It's like, why would anyone want to be a guard?
Because they thought we'll just be prisoners because they just
will lay around and smoke cigarettes.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
Right, So we'll we'll and we'll kind of unpack what
that suggests later on.
Speaker 1 (07:26):
Sure.
Speaker 2 (07:26):
Okay, so you've got these these guys and they're down
here for this experiment, and so coming at it from
the way, this is the popular interpretation of what happened
at the Stanford prison experiment. Okay, yes, you've got you've
got twelve guards and twelve prisoners.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
The prisoners had been arrested, by the way, by the
real Palo Alto police. Yeah, they weren't told when, but
like the real cops came by, arrested each one of
them for you know, a variety of crimes.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
Book them at the Palo Alto Police station, and then
transported them to the jail, the fake jail in at Stanford.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
Yeah, they call it the Stanford County Jail. And they
did a legit job. They put up signs, they had
these rooms decked out like jail cells, they had a hole.
They did a really believable job of making this seem
like a prison environment at least. Right.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
So you've got these these prisoners who've been delivered. You've
got these guards who are waiting there for them. And
as as far as Imbardo's ever said, these these guards
were told, you have to protect the prison and everything
else is up to you. The only rule is there's
no physical punishment. We're just here to observe.
Speaker 1 (08:42):
Yeah, Like, here's your uniforms, here's your sunglasses.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
Yeah. And then the prisoners were booked in with wearing smocks.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
Yeah, no shoes, no underwear, yeah, naked under the smocks.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
Chained at the ankles. And then they wore like those
stocking cap do rags. They had a panty on their
head to simulate their having their head shaved.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
Right, and you know, this is this the early seventies,
so most of them had these big afros and long
hair and stuff under these pantees.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
Right, So this is I At first, everything's pretty normal.
The guards don't quite know what to do. They're a
little timid. The prisoners apparently relished this immediately and started
like finding where the guard's boundaries were, and they started
to band together, and there was actually, I think on
(09:35):
day two they turnover. From day one to two, there
was a prisoner riot.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
Yeah. I mean they, like you said, they were sort
of laughing at first, and I think we didn't mention
too and this is we'll end up being very, very problematic,
and the first sign that he didn't do a good job.
Simbardo actually acted as the superintendent of the prison, involved
himself in his own experiment and had one of it.
He had some graduate assistants that were assisting in the program.
(10:06):
They acted as parole board, and one of them was
the warden.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
That was yeah, an undergrad. Actually were they undergrad assistant? Well,
the warden Jaffy, his last name was Jaffy. He was
an undergrad at the time, and actually he had come
up with the experiment on his own.
Speaker 1 (10:21):
Oh he was the guy.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
Huh huh. And then Zimbardo was like, this is a
really good idea. Let's do this for real. Imagine the press, right.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
So, yeah, like you said, it escalated pretty quickly. After
kind of laughing at first, these guards got into their roles,
to say the least, and really kind of started being
jerks in quick order, and after the prisoners were like, hey,
this is kind of funny, like you're being you're not
being very cool. Yeah, and they were you know, kind
(10:50):
of smacked down and you know, made to do things
like push ups and jumping jacks, and they would withhold
food and eventually they would like take their beds away
from them and stuff like. It just got worse and worse,
and there was, I think, like you said, on day two,
an uprising. They got together, threw the cots off their
beds and through the bed frames against the door and
(11:13):
wouldn't let them in.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
Right, So there was a prisoner riot. Yeah, that's pretty significant, right,
And what's equally significant is that the guards by the
second day started to show signs of like real cruelty
towards the prisoners. They started treating them very poorly. They
started engaging in basically acts of torture, like waking them
(11:34):
up randomly in the middle of the night, making them
get up, like you said, push ups, which is interpreted
as physical punishment because again, you couldn't hit them with
the rubber hose, you couldn't hit them with the baton,
you couldn't punch them. But if you make somebody do
a bunch of push ups, that's physical punishment too. Yeah,
and it was within the bounds apparently.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
Yeah. They were referred to only by their prison numbers.
They would never say their names. They were made to memory.
Everyone else's prison number, and like they would line them
up and tell them to repeat their numbers for like
an hour if they didn't do it fast enough, and
then in reverse order they would get punishment. They would
do the kind of the classic moves of holding one
responsible for the punishment of others.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
Yeah, that's a big one, Like.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
If you didn't make your bed good enough and no
one could go to sleep, stuff like that.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
The guards also innovated the carrots here or there too.
They actually made one cell like a good cell, Like
they put a bed in it, yeah, with like betting.
If you were in that cell, you were eligible for
like good meals, yeah, better than what the other prisoners had.
And there were room for three inmates in there at
a time. And so it instilled this sense of competition
(12:45):
and skullduggery, I guess, backstabbery among the prisoners to curry
favor with the guards, like by informing on the other ones. Yeah,
so that you could get a chance to be in
like the nice cell.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
Yeah. And I think even before that when they went
to do the when they went to stage the uprising,
I don't think there were three rooms of three, and
I think six of them. Two of the rooms participated
and one of the rooms did not. And because not
all the guys, you know, on not all the prisoners
like rebelled as much. Some of them just kind of
went along with it.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
Interestingly, some of the guards did not descend into cruelty, right.
They actually some of them did, like favors, went out
of their way to be nice to the prisoners. But
and the grabster who wrote this article points out very significantly,
they didn't stand up to the cruel guards or officially
object to their behavior. Right, they went along with it.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
But then they thought they had to.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
In their own right, in their own way, they did
what they could to retain their humanity. So there are
two huge points, and one of them, there's one among
the guards and one among the prisoners. And the one
among the prisoners comes thirty six hours after the beginning
of the of the experiment, and this prison his name,
it would later be revealed, was Douglas Corpi. He had
(14:05):
an emotional breakdown, a nervous breakdown thirty six hours after
this experiment starts. One of the prisoners it becomes so
emotionally involved in this simulated prison at the cruelty the
simulated supposedly cruelty of the guards, that he had a
nervous breakdown well and had to be had to be
(14:27):
removed from the experiment. And this is like, this is
Embardo's This is the official line for the Stanford Prison experiment, right,
it has been for decades.
Speaker 1 (14:38):
Yeah. He also said that one of them broke out
in a psychosomatic rash. There was all manner of various
levels of psychological breakdowns happening on.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
The other side. The big star among the guards was
a guy named John Wayne who you referenced earlier.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
Yeah, his name was Dave Eshelman, and he he was
the one who he was the ringleader. He's the one
that came out as the most brutal guard of them all,
and all the other guards kind of fell in line
behind him and took their cues from him.
Speaker 2 (15:10):
So this whole thing's going on, This is crazy town
in this place. In six days, six days, this thing
descends into chaos.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
Supposed to be two weeks, Yes.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
There was. There was rumors that there was going to
be a breakout, and so they moved the experiment. There
were that that guy Douglas Corpi, who had a nervous
breakdown ended up getting put into the hole this broom
closet for I think overnight, and was finally released because
the the researchers that actually stepped in and said you
(15:42):
should should probably let him out. There was it was
just utter chaos. And then eventually Phillips Zimbardo's girlfriend at
the time, a woman named Christine Maslock.
Speaker 1 (15:53):
Yeah, his wife to be. Oh she married him, huh yeah,
still married.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
So she came and just dropped in to see how
things were going and was so outraged at what she
saw that she was like, you you so far beyond
the line. You have to stop this now, like this
is this is descended into chaos. You can't do this.
These people are treating these these prisoners horribly, Like how
are you letting this go on? Went okay, fine, and
(16:21):
so the next day he canceled the experiment again after
six days, and it was scheduled to go on for
two weeks. And so he comes out tells the world
in this New York Times magazine, guys, if I took you,
if I took you Josh, and I took you Chuck
and put you as guarden prisoner in even a simulated prison,
(16:44):
and put a smock on Josh and took his underwear
off and put a stocking on his head and gave
Chuck a baton and some glasses. Chuck would beat Josh
up well, and joshuauld probably have his spirit broken and
have a nervous breakdown. It's in everybody. Evil is in everybody. Yeah,
crumbling at the first sign of adversity is in everybody.
(17:05):
We're all just pathetic weaklings. Stanford Prison experiment, and he
ran off and said I'm famous.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
All right, that's a great setup. So we'll take a
break here and come back and talk a little bit
about the more about the experiment and the realities of
it right after this. All right, So you've got John
(17:44):
Wayne in there. I don't think we mentioned that he
took on the persona of the prison boss and cool
hand Luke.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:51):
He did a fake Southern accent and everything and dove
right into this role. If you talk to Dave Eshelman today,
he will say he's very much on record of saying
I'm not some jerk, and I didn't get off on
being sadistic. He said, I wanted to do what they
paid me fifteen dollars a day to do, which was
(18:11):
to be a prison guard and to treat these guys poorly, right,
and so I create you know, he said, I did
some drama in high school and I literally acted this
part as well as I could.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
That was I felt was expected and wanted from.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
Me, right, And I put on this fake Southern accent.
And if you like ask friends and family today, they
would laugh at this because I'm really not this guy
at all, right, because he really comes off as as
a bit of a villain in this movie. For sure.
Speaker 2 (18:38):
Well, he perpetrated real cruelty on other people, and we'll
get to that later. He said he.
Speaker 1 (18:45):
Feels bad about it too, and.
Speaker 2 (18:46):
He should, yeah, because the other people actually did suffer
under this guy's leadership as the ring leader of the
mean guards, right, like they wore pink on Wednesday. It
was terrible everywhere, right, So he really should feel bad
and apparently he does. I saw that all over the
place too, that he feels bad for it. But the
(19:07):
point is is that he has said, like this didn't
happen organically, like I I wasn't. I felt encouraged to
play this role.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
Right. That's a big deal.
Speaker 2 (19:20):
Because the findings of the Stanford Prison experiment say if
you take some people and say you're a guard.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
Give him your empower, and you will turn evil.
Speaker 2 (19:28):
They will turn evil within a day. A day they
said about this guy. And this guy's like, no, I was,
just like you said, doing my job what they were
paying me fifteen bucks a day for. Yeah, let's put
that one to the side. Let's go visit with Douglas Corpi,
who was the prisoner who in thirty six short hours
of this simulated prison experiment lost his marbles and had
(19:52):
a nervous breakdown and had to go home. Right, one
of the other two pillars of the findings that people
are either evil or crumble in the face of adversity
from the Stanford prison experiment, and again this is how
this thing's been taught for like fifty years.
Speaker 1 (20:06):
Okay, Yeah, So Corpy comes out and says, I was
faking that, and I put on a big act so
I could get out of there because it sucked and
I didn't want to be there anymore. So I fake
like I was. And he like one of his quotes
was I don't have it here, But he basically said,
like any trained clinician would have been able to see
(20:27):
right through this, Like when I hear the tapes years later,
it's like, I'm not an actor. I wasn't like apparently
the John wayn guy at least had been in like
high school.
Speaker 2 (20:36):
Plays in college too, I think, yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:38):
And he was like, I was not an actor. And
it was so clear to me looking back at these
tapes that I was faking.
Speaker 2 (20:44):
It, faking a nervous breakdown.
Speaker 1 (20:45):
Yeah, faking a nervous breakdown to get out of there. Right.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
So the reason why he said later that he did
fake this nervous breakdown is because he took the job
because he thought he'd just be laying around, like you said,
smoking cigarettes, being a prisoner. Yeah, and he would get
to study for GRE. He was about to enter grad school.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
I see that.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
Well, they said, no, you can't have your books.
Speaker 1 (21:05):
Now. They didn'tive him anything, and.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
This guy was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, Wait a minute,
this is day one. He's like whoa, whoa, whoa, Like,
I need those books. I'm taking the GRE basically leaving
here after two weeks and going to take the test,
like I've got to spend this two week studying. They're like,
you can't have your books. So he quickly saw that
the only way out was to fake this nervous breakdown.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
And Billy Crudup went in and said, why is everyone
saying whoa whoa whoa? Only I can say whoa whoa
whoa whoa whoa whoa. Yeah, So we've kind of poo
pooed the two major findings from this study already.
Speaker 2 (21:39):
So that's that's a huge deal, right, because again, the
idea is that if you put people any random people.
Remember these are just average, like middle middle class white.
Speaker 1 (21:47):
Kids, which is another problem, right.
Speaker 2 (21:50):
If you put if you put any well, you know
nineteen seventy one, that means everybody, Right, that's the whole world. Right,
If you put anybody in the world in this situation,
they're going to either turn evil or lose their marbles.
So those are the two findings. That's what everybody took
it as at first. It later came out, no, this
guy was acting, this guy was faking. So what else
(22:11):
do we have? Then, Well, we have this idea that
Zimbardo insinuated himself as part of the experiment and that
actually created the findings from the Stanford prison experiment.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
So should we put a pin in that? Should we
talk about that?
Speaker 2 (22:28):
Now?
Speaker 1 (22:28):
No?
Speaker 2 (22:28):
No, I want to go. I want to go where
you want to go.
Speaker 1 (22:30):
All right, let's put a pin in that then and
talk about a little bit more about what went on
that week. They had everything from visitation like you could
write a letter to your family or girlfriend or whoever
you want to come visit you to ask for visitation rights.
And the family came in and they did. They came
in and visited for an hour, and they were in
(22:51):
some cases parents were like, I don't know about this.
This is like this seems like a really weird thing.
And Zimbardo would be like, oh no, it's totally fine,
Like you know, they're psychologists. Yeah, like they want to
be here, like ask them and the the kids. You know.
They did say that they wanted to stay, okay, which
(23:12):
is which is important.
Speaker 2 (23:14):
Okay, So what else is important is.
Speaker 1 (23:17):
Like, no one in the visiting hour. I don't think
we're like, get me out of here.
Speaker 2 (23:20):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
They are like, no, this is all part of the
part of the act essentially, all right. They had parole
hearings inside the course of a week. Somehow they said
that if they they could be released, if they would
forfeit the money. And this is after I don't know
how many of the six days, but they could not
get paid if and be paroled if they went in
(23:43):
front of the parole board. They went in front of
the parole board, some of them did, and most of
the prisoners said that they would give up their money
in fact, and the parole members, like like I said,
they were the graduate assistants. Even had one former prisoner,
this guy that like was a fifteen year quentin yeah inmate,
fifteen or seventeen year inmate on the board that I
(24:04):
guess Zimbardo. I want to call him Zamboni.
Speaker 2 (24:08):
So he actually was a friend of Jaffy's, the guy
who originally actually that's where he came as an undergrad.
So he brought him in on it.
Speaker 1 (24:16):
Right, So he was on the parole board, and he
was kind of one of the ones, at least in
the film version that was kind of saying like, no,
this is like how it is, like, you should keep
it going, right, But I don't know how much of
that was dramatized.
Speaker 2 (24:28):
I don't either. That's a That's one of the problems
with this is, you know, so much of the documentation
has been not released over the years, and when it
does get released, it contradicts the official line, and it's
very tough to separate truth from fiction, especially when you
introduce a Hollywood movie into the whole thing, just to
just to drive those nails in the coffin too. Yeah,
(24:49):
and so reality.
Speaker 1 (24:50):
In fact, there's been a lot of in the year
since a lot of complaints that a lot of these
you know, kids were screaming, I want to go home,
I want to go home. And for his heart, Zimbardo said,
in the contract it says I want to exit the experiment,
as the official line to say, and they could have
gone home. And he was like, but you hear no
(25:11):
one ever said I want to exit the experiment. They
would say I want my mommy, or I'm going crazy,
or my god, please stop this, please stop this, right,
but they never said those exact words, this safe phrase, say, yeah,
the safe phrase. But it turns out that's bunk two.
Speaker 2 (25:25):
Right, Yeah, it turns out that if you look at
the contract that they had that he's referencing that say
the rules and everything in the agreement, there's no safe
word to be mentioned. Certainly doesn't say if you say
I want to quit the experiment, you get released from
the experiment.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
So he's just flat out lying about that.
Speaker 2 (25:42):
Then that's from what I understand. Yes, and what.
Speaker 1 (25:44):
Article was this that you sent?
Speaker 2 (25:46):
There's a really good takedown in medium called the The
Lifespan of a Lie.
Speaker 1 (25:53):
Yeah, it's a good one, and.
Speaker 2 (25:55):
It's based on that titles based on a I think
a documentary by a documentary or book by a yeah,
French filmmaker which who titled his version The Birth of
a Lie. And it's basically about how the Stanford prison
experiment was just basically it was bunk from the get go,
(26:16):
which we'll kind of pick that apart in a little bit,
and that just fascinatingly has been perpetuated over again basically
fifty years. It just entered the cultural zeitgeist and just
stayed like an infection.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
All Right. Some other things that happened to make it realistic.
They brought in a lawyer when parents asked for one,
and played along like it was real. They brought in
a chaplain who came in to speak to prisoners and
he played along with it too. They basically did everything
that you would think would happen in a real prison
(26:54):
on a slightly scaled down level.
Speaker 2 (26:56):
Right, But the upshot of all of This is Zimbardo saying, like,
do you see what's going on here? Everybody? Yeah, Like,
I just put some guys in, like nine guys in
at a time, or twelve guys as guards, twelve guys
as prisoners, and their parents came for visiting hours, a
lawyer came. That's how real the simulated prison became in
(27:18):
people's minds. Just imagine what a real prison's like. Right, So,
and he was saying they could have left at any
time if they just said the safeword, and no one
ever said the safeboard. There is some evidence that these
people were basically kept there against their will, especially after
Douglas Corpy basically faked his emotional breakdown and then was
(27:41):
thrown into a broom closet and retaliation for it, that
he should have very very clearly should have been left
or allowed to leave, and to even be led to
think that you couldn't leave, which is apparently the idea
that spread throughout the prisoners. That would be like keeping
someone against their will.
Speaker 1 (28:02):
Yeah, and he did leave, but was supposed to agreed
to come back, supposedly to like play a different role
as a prisoner who like maybe escaped and came back,
I think, but didn't come back, right.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
And I think five people were released early before the
whole experiment was called off. All prisoners. No guards left
the experiment, which is telling.
Speaker 1 (28:25):
Yes, well, and they were working in shifts though, which
is important.
Speaker 2 (28:27):
Okay, that is a big one too. But if you
consider that no one asked to be a guard, they
all asked to be prisoners, but then none of the
guards left the experiment, right to me, that's interesting on
its face, right, There's something to that, But the whole
thing just kind of falling apart after Zimbardo's girlfriend at
(28:50):
the time came the idea that up to this point,
these people had engaged in this fantasy and thought that
they couldn't leave, and they really could. That's controversial in
and of itself, because again there's evidence that they were
led to believe they couldn't leave, and that's different. That
changes things entirely.
Speaker 1 (29:12):
Yeah, so you.
Speaker 2 (29:13):
Want to take another break and then pick this part
some more.
Speaker 1 (29:16):
Yeah, let's do it. Kind of fun, all right, the
(29:40):
final takedown.
Speaker 2 (29:41):
I'm waiting for. I'm waiting for Phillips Embardo to release
a book about like our Jackhammer episode.
Speaker 1 (29:48):
That's fine, I would read it all right, so where
are we here. Basically, we're at the point where he
has endo the experiment and now we're dealing with the
fallout since nineteen seventy one and how this should be viewed.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
One of the big things that came out of that
French book, The Birth of a Lie, is the filmmaker
unearthed a recording that was I don't know where he
found it, but they he found it and released the
transcript of it that clearly has if not Zimbardo, at
(30:24):
least Jaffy, definitely Jaffy coaching the guards. Yeah, to be
more brutal, Right, be a tough guard. Just think of
how the pigs do it, and do it like that,
I think is what the quote was, right, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (30:38):
When the whole idea of this thing is to try
and prove that without any influence.
Speaker 2 (30:43):
Yes, this is what happens. Right, So there's a couple
of things that happened. Methodologically, there's a lot of things
that happened. The moment they started coaching those guards. Number one,
they took any organicness out of their behavior. They were
then doing what they thought they were expected to do.
Like John Wayne, Yeah, for sure, just went over the top,
is what it was. And then number two, they made
(31:04):
them co experimenters. Like the whole thing was supposed to
be guards and prisoners, and we're going to watch as
test subjects or participants. And when you coach the guards,
you're they're co experimenters. Now, now the experiments entirely on
the on the prisoners, which you can say, okay, well,
then those findings still worked. Well, that gets thrown out
(31:25):
when you base the whole thing on a guy who
is faking, right, But but you you make the guards
co experimenters, and you just completely take out any objectivity
from this experiment. That's problem one with the methodology.
Speaker 1 (31:38):
Well, and the fact we already mentioned that one of
the researchers was a warden and zim want to call
them Sambrano, that's fine, go ahead. Zimbardo Zamboni himself was
the superintendent, like the minute he decided to do that,
Like I looked up. I think he's like in his
late thirties when he did this. How did he not
(31:58):
like was he that bad and doing his job? How
did he not know? Like wait a minute, this will
taint the experiment.
Speaker 2 (32:04):
Do you want to talk about why the people think
that he was so yeah, okay, so he was a
he wasn't I think still is a social activist for sure.
And he had decided, and I can't really disagree with him,
that prisons were brutal places where brutality lived, and that
they were inherently brutal. And so if you take somebody
(32:27):
and put them into this place, you're doing a real
disservice to humanity by throwing somebody in a brutal place
that you know is brutal.
Speaker 1 (32:33):
So his aim was to get reformed to happen.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
Yes, from the outset.
Speaker 1 (32:38):
Well, I mean, I can't fault that, but you can't
call it a scientific experiment either.
Speaker 2 (32:42):
No, And it actually supposedly backfired as well, because one
interpretation of his findings is that it's all or nothing
with prisons. Prisons are inherently brutal or you can't have them.
So either you have prisons and you have brutal prisons,
or you have no prisons. And so, faced with that
(33:02):
choice and with rising crime rates in the seventies, a
lot of people doubled down on getting tough and made
prisons even worse and built more prisons and said to yes,
we're not even going to try to like, reform you anymore.
We're just going to send you to these brutal places
that are inherently brutal and there's nothing we can do
about it. So it would have it would have backfired
(33:23):
in that sense, but in the idea that he was
doing something with the best interests of his fellow people
at heart. Again, like you said, it's tough to fault
him for that. He just really really gave social psychology
a black eye.
Speaker 1 (33:40):
Yeah. So one of the other things he did wrong,
and this one I just can't figure out either, is
he didn't have a control group and one of his
this guy wasn't in the experiment, but one of his
colleagues came by one day and was like, you know,
what's your.
Speaker 2 (33:55):
Control what's your independent variable?
Speaker 1 (33:57):
Yeah, and he was like what, Yeah, He's like, I
don't have one.
Speaker 2 (34:01):
So if you run an experiment of any sort, Grabster
uses a great analogy where if you're trying to figure
out what the effects of radiation are on tomatoes, you
pick a bunch of tomatoes, you wagh them, you check
them for color, you make sure that they're identical to
another set of tomatoes, So you have two sets of
(34:21):
basically identical tomatoes. One you radiate, one you do not,
and after a set amount of time you go back
and see what the differences are, and then you can
say probably that when you radiate tomatoes, these are the effects,
and the effects are the differences between the two. Same
thing with the prison experiment.
Speaker 1 (34:38):
Yeah, what would you have here? Two different cell blocks
and one that literally isn't coached and completely left alone.
Speaker 2 (34:45):
That's what I would have done, for sure.
Speaker 1 (34:47):
And then one where you're saying, hey, be brutal, and yeah,
we'll see if everyone falls into these roles exactly.
Speaker 2 (34:52):
That would have been great. And actually some researchers in
two thousand and one, oh yeah, they did. They did
exactly that. They basically ran the experiment with just that
control group you suggested. It was called the BBC Prison Study.
Speaker 1 (35:05):
Yeah, Haslom and Reiker.
Speaker 2 (35:07):
Yeah, and basically they did the same thing. They they
did not do any coaching, they didn't do any intervention.
They did the thing exactly like you're supposed to, or
like Zimbardo should have from the outset, and they found
that again they made the control group to the original
Stanford prison experiment, they found that the exact opposite happened.
(35:27):
The prisoners stayed banded together, the guards were totally in
disarray and disorganized. The brutality never emerged, and there wasn't
any violence from Yeah, I understand.
Speaker 1 (35:38):
And this is where it gets really scummy, if you
asked me. Zimbardo found out about this, and supposedly Haslman
Riker said they discovered he was privately writing editors to
keep them from getting published and claiming that they were fraudulent.
Speaker 2 (35:54):
Yeah, in the journal that they released their findings, and
he wrote an appendage to their article and said, these
are they just don't even listen to these guys. I'm
Phillips Embardo man. So yeah, I thought that was pretty
scummy too if he did that, So you've got methodologically,
there's even more problems too. If in the original newspaper advertisement, chuck,
(36:20):
he said, prison experiment, the prison experiment, everybody sign up.
Speaker 1 (36:25):
Yeah, that was a problem in of itself. They shouldn't
have known what they were doing.
Speaker 2 (36:28):
No, exactly until they showed up, right, So you're gonna
get a big wide swath of people, and then once
they find out what the experiment is, maybe they'll say
no thanks or whatever. But this was like attracting. A
two thousand and seven follow up study found narcissistic, hostile,
overly aggressive authoritarian types like flies to honey.
Speaker 1 (36:51):
Yeah, or the opposite.
Speaker 2 (36:53):
Well, that seems to be the case in this case.
Speaker 1 (36:55):
Yeah, which was in fact one of them was a
liberal activist who kind of purposely in there because he
thought maybe these findings could be used one day for
prison reform.
Speaker 2 (37:06):
Well, I think also most of what I got from
Jaffy coaching the people to say, like, think about what
the pigs would do, and then do that, because we
really got to show them how brutal prisons are. I
think everybody who showed up basically was against prisons. But
whether you're against prisons or forum, you were automatically tainted
(37:27):
before you even showed up for the interview. Yeah, because
they wrote prison experiment in the ad. So from the
outset there was bias. There was no control group. It
attracted a bias cross section of people.
Speaker 1 (37:39):
Zimbardo participated, he was.
Speaker 2 (37:42):
A participant, and that actually chuck led to the second
set of findings that Zimbardo had influenced this and become
a participant himself. And here's the current interpretation of all
of it. Okay, this seems to be the current dojure
interpretation of the Stanford prison experiment, not that people are
(38:06):
inherently cruel and inherently will just crumble in the face
of authority, although that might still stand, but that people
will be are capable of cruelty if they're recruited by
an authority. Figure the second set, and there's actually been
three sets of interpretations. The second set was that Zimbardo
(38:28):
inserted himself and that it actually demonstrated what's called situationist theory.
Speaker 1 (38:33):
Yeah, and that's basically that external circumstances are the drivers
of human behavior.
Speaker 2 (38:39):
Right. So the point was not that people are inherently
cruel on an individual level, but.
Speaker 1 (38:44):
The situation that they're put in. They will quickly find
those roles if.
Speaker 2 (38:49):
There's a power structure above them that has normalized this
and is expecting them to fulfill those roles. And this
really tied in with you know this nineteen seventy one,
people were still really trying to figure out what the
heck could just happen with the Nazis. It was only
like twenty five twenty six years before. Yeah, so this
(39:09):
idea that this banality of evil, this made perfect sense
in that respect. Right, there was a bureaucracy that had
normalized evil and you were just following orders, right. That
was the second interpretation of the Stanford prison experiment.
Speaker 1 (39:24):
Yeah. Well, and not just the Nazis, but everything like
the Vietnam War, which was I mean, this was nineteen
seventy one, right, and like the Miley massacre, and you know,
I was just following orders. Like this tied in this
has his fingers in a lot of relevant politics.
Speaker 2 (39:41):
Of the day, right, So apparently it also tied in
really well to Attica, and Zimbardo must have just couldn't
believe is his good fortune that there was a there's
lightius prison riot in American history. Happened like a couple
of weeks after he made the news in the New
York Times magazine with this journal arter or this article
that he wrote. Right, Yeah, but that actually played into
(40:02):
it too, because apparently, following orders, a lot of guards
just fired blindly into the tear gas smoke of this
prison riot and killed tons of unarmed prisoners and hostages.
So so Zimbard's like, Okay, that's fine, however we're going
to interpret this. I'm cool with that. But the third one.
(40:23):
I'm not quite sure that he would be cool with
the current.
Speaker 1 (40:26):
One, which is bad science, I think.
Speaker 2 (40:29):
So what I saw is that a lot of social
psychologists said, we've known this as bad science all along,
but the findings were really interesting and worthwhile, so we
didn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. The third
one is that Zimbardo inserted himself. And this what this
this study really showed was that people will engage in
(40:51):
acts of cruelty if there is a figure of authority
recruiting them to what they think is a righteous cause.
And in this case, it was Zimbardo making the guards
co experimenters by coaching them to be cruel right, and
in the name of prison reform. Ultimately, when they showed
the world what happens when you put normal people in
(41:13):
a prison situation.
Speaker 1 (41:14):
Yeah, which is what the John Wayne guy very much
has said all his life since then, is that this
is what they I thought they wanted was for me
to be a bad guard, right, so we could prove
ultimately that prisons need reform.
Speaker 2 (41:29):
And that is why he's still complicit, because he's still
engaged in these acts of genuine cruelty against the prisoners
in the study, and that's why he should still feel
bad and still does feel bad. But he did it
because he was recruited in the name of this righteous
caused by somebody who was in authority.
Speaker 1 (41:47):
So is this being taught this way in classes now?
Speaker 2 (41:50):
I think that they, especially once it came out that
Zimbardo and at the very least his warden, a co experimenter,
was coaching them to do this, and that the organic
cruelty is just totally out the window. I think they
don't know what to do with it right now. They're
trying to figure it out, like how to get these
findings across or what to make of them.
Speaker 1 (42:11):
Because one of these quotes from the article you sent
the guy said, I don't think it's scientific fraud in
the typical sense. It was never considered to be scientific.
It's typically represented in classrooms as a demonstration, not an experiment,
and as a notorious case of ethical malfeasance. So that's
almost a fourth takeaway is that it's an example of
(42:32):
how to not do a study correctly, right, which is interesting.
Speaker 2 (42:37):
Oh yeah, I mean methodologically inserting yourself, like lying about
the findings later on, or misinterpreting the results, or using
spin it's yeah, there's a lot here, but it.
Speaker 1 (42:48):
Was approved by the Stanford Human Rights Subjects Review Committee
at the time. Those were Zimbardo's experiments who he presented
this to, and they're you know, he still says that
it was ethical.
Speaker 2 (43:01):
Well, it was at the time under the guidelines, it
was ethical, but then after they changed the guidelines.
Speaker 1 (43:06):
You couldn't do this today, no, or at least not
with like he did it.
Speaker 2 (43:10):
So, I did you remember the very brief psychology is
not serious?
Speaker 1 (43:15):
I watched that.
Speaker 2 (43:16):
I did one on the Stanford prison experiment.
Speaker 1 (43:18):
Yeah, I watched that today.
Speaker 2 (43:19):
Did you what did you think it was good? Thanks?
Speaker 1 (43:21):
Man? Cute little background?
Speaker 2 (43:22):
Yeah, I thought so too. And let's see you got
anything else.
Speaker 1 (43:27):
No, I mean, boy, I thought we were pretty scathing, but.
Speaker 2 (43:30):
We were This is like vaping level scathing. This is
way worse than vaping. I'm sure the vapors are like going.
They were really hard on that guy.
Speaker 1 (43:37):
Yeah. The movie, uh, you know, the documentary is probably
a little more accurate. But the movie wasn't bad. Yeah,
I mean it's not great, yeah, but it was okay.
It felt like a movie the.
Speaker 2 (43:48):
Week, gotcha it's an airplane movie.
Speaker 1 (43:52):
Yeah, watch it on your next flight. That's my recommendation.
Speaker 2 (43:54):
Thanks buddy. Well, if you want to know more about
the Stanford prison experiment, type those words in the search
bar at houstuffworks dot com and it'll bring up this
grabster article. Since I said grabster, it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (44:10):
I'm gonna call this beautiful landscaping. Hey, guys, I spent
the last two years fixing up the yard in our
house in Point Pleasant, Pennsylvania.
Speaker 2 (44:19):
Oh that sounds like a pleasant place.
Speaker 1 (44:20):
Yeah it is. My husband actually introduced me your show
a few years back, and thank god he did, because
I've literally listened to you for hours and hours while
working in the yard.
Speaker 2 (44:28):
Nice.
Speaker 1 (44:29):
It was a huge undertaking. I have a more flexible
work schedule than he does, so I volunteered to absorb
most of the responsibility, although he did a lot of
heavy looking to I enjoyed the show so much I
stopped allowing myself to listen to it. To it any
other time. You were only allowed during yard work. This
made me much more ready to get outside and get
into it. You guys were with me while I carried
literally tons of redstone uphill and buckets hauling rocks for
(44:52):
a firing landing, planeted pecky sandra ferns and hostas in
the soil I've ever had to work with, and just
clearing away overgrowth.
Speaker 2 (45:03):
Which it sounds like Tanya Harding training for the Olympics.
Speaker 1 (45:06):
And that one montage which it turned out included a
fair amount of poison ivy. During it on I learned
about tiny adorable little creature called it's artigrade, the business
of head trains plants, the hookworm her favorite episode, and
some haunting information I cannot unher, such as you provided
in the bull fighting and drowning episodes. You're always very entertaining,
(45:26):
full of information. Even when I think it's boring, you
make it fun. There were times you had me loling
in my backyard alone and covered in dirt and sweat
like a crazy person. Attached her some pictures of the progress,
all from your climate controlled studio, that is from Sharon Prashinsky.
And Sharon, you did a great job. That is one
(45:48):
beautiful yard you got going. Yeah, for sure, it is lovely.
Speaker 2 (45:51):
It is nice work. We're glad we could be there
with you to help you get up that hill.
Speaker 1 (45:56):
Yeah, and down the hill and then back up the
hill and back down the hill.
Speaker 2 (45:59):
That's right, and then back up again. If you want
to get in touch with this so let us know
how we've helped you out. We love hearing that kind
of stuff. If you're Phillips Lombardo, we expect to hear
from your lawyer. And in the meantime, you can hang
out with us at our home on the web, Stuff
Youshould Do dot com, where you can find all of
our social links, and you can also send us an
email to Stuff podcast at HowStuffWorks dot com.
Speaker 1 (46:23):
Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
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