The Stanford Prison Experiment

NARRATOR:
In 1971, in the basement of the psychology department of Stanford University, a mock prison
was created. It rivaled all social psychology experiments in controversy.

DR. PHILIP ZIMBARDO, Social Psychologist:

Shortly after I had finished the Stanford Prison study, Milgram embraced me and said, I’m so
happy you did this, because now you can take off some of the heat that he’s had to bear alone of
having done the most unethical study.

TEXT:
Stanford Prison Experiment, 1971

NARRATOR:
Although this experiment is over thirty years old, its enduring power has been underscored by
the events in Abu Ghraib.

TEXT:
Abu Ghraib, Iraq, 2003

KEN DAVIS, Army Reservist, Abu Ghraib:

When we got to Abu Ghraib, it was eerie. People were being told to rough up Iraqis who
wouldn’t cooperate. I mean, they’re torturing, they’re abusing detainees. You’re looking at this
situation thinking, “They’ve condoned this, but why?” And if it wouldn’t have been for those
photos, no one would have ever believed what was going on over there.

DAVE ESHELMAN, Guard – Stanford Prison Experiment:

When I first saw the pictures, immediately a sense of familiarity struck me, because I knew that I
had been there before. I had been in this type of situation. I knew what was going on in my mind.

DR. CRAIG HANEY, Social Psychologist:

The photographs were strikingly familiar to many of the photographs we had taken—many of the
photographs I had taken—in the prison study.

DAVE ESHELMAN:
We didn’t do any of the stuff you’d see in Abu Ghraib, where they’d get into a big pile or
something like that, but I certainly subjected them to all kinds of humiliations. I don’t know
where I would have stopped myself. Given enough time, we could have got there.

DR. ZIMBARDO:
When the images of abuse and torture in Abu Ghraib were revealed, immediately the military
went on the defensive, saying, “It’s a few bad apples.” When we see somebody doing bad things,
we assume they were bad people to begin with. But what we know in our study is there are a set
of social-psychological variables that can make ordinary people do things they never could have
imagined doing.

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NARRATOR:
At Abu Ghraib, ordinary people perpetrated extraordinary abuses. To understand why, it helps to
reach back to the lessons of Zimbardo’s experiment: how people respond to a cruel environment
without clear rules.

DR. CHRISTINA MASLACH, Social Psychologist:

I think that he and everybody else who came down into that situation got caught up into that
situation, and the sense that this was an experiment—that began to fade away. It became just...
life. [2:43]

PRISONER:
Fuck this experiment! And fuck Dr. Zimbardo!

DR. HANEY:
We frankly didn’t anticipate what was going to happen. We tried to really test the power of the
environment to change and transform otherwise normal people. Much as Milgram had changed
or transformed normal people in an obedient situation, we wanted to do it in a prison-like
situation.

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NARRATOR:
Over 70 men volunteered for Zimbardo’s experiment.

DR. ZIMBARDO:
They completed a battery of psychological tests. We picked two dozen, 24, who were the most
normal, the most healthy, half are going to be guards, half are going to be prisoners. It’s like
flipping a coin—heads, this one’s a guard; this one’s a prisoner. So in the beginning, there’s no
difference in the kinds of people who are in your two groups.

DAVE ESHELMAN:
When we were given our jobs as guards, we were issued a uniform, which was a plain, sort of
khaki, or lighter-colored uniform.

DR. ZIMBARDO:
And then we gave them the symbols of power—handcuffs, a whistle, a big billy club. And the
other thing we gave them were silver reflecting sunglasses.

DAVE ESHELMAN:
When you have mirrored sunglasses on, then nobody can see your eyeballs. I think that any time
you put on what is essentially a mask and you mask your identity, then it allows you to behave in
ways that you would not behave if you didn’t have the mask on.

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DR. ZIMBARDO:
To make it more realistic, I had arranged with the Palo Alto Police Department to make mock
arrests.

RICHARD YACCO, Prisoner #1037 – Stanford Prison Experiment:

When I was arrested, it was a surprise to me. I didn’t think I was going to be brought to an actual
police station. I didn’t think I was going to go through a booking process. [4:23]

DR. ZIMBARDO:
The guards then put a blindfold on them, stripped them naked, and then they put them in dresses,
smocks, with no underpants. Each had a number that replaced their name. They had to know
their number, and they could only be referred to by that number. And they had a chain on one
foot, which was put there to remind them at all times of their loss of freedom. So all of these
things produces a sense of being dehumanized.

[Video footage; inaudible]

DR. ZIMBARDO:
On the first day, I said, “This is not going to work.” I mean, the guards felt awkward giving
orders. They’d say, “Line up” and “Repeat your numbers” and the prisoners would start giggling.

GUARD:
Hey, I don’t want anybody laughing! Three, two, one!

DR. ZIMBARDO:
And then a very interesting thing happened. Dave Eshelman, who the prisoners named John
Wayne, like he was a Wild West cowboy, he begins to be more extreme.

DAVE ESHELMAN:
I decided that I would become the worst, most intimidating, cruel prison guard that I could
possibly be.

GUARD:
In the future, you do work when you’re told.

PRISONER:
Thank you, Mr. Correctional Officer.

GUARD:
Say it again.

PRISONER:
Thank you, Mr. Correctional Officer.

GUARD:
Say bless you, Mr. Correctional Officer.

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DAVE ESHELMAN:
I was sort of fascinated myself that people were believing the act, and I was trying to see how far
I could take it before somebody would say, “Okay, that’s enough, stop.”

RICHARD YACCO:
We did have to do things like push-ups, we would have to sing things, but in the beginning we
protested some of the actions, we did things to irritate the guards. [5:55]

PRISONER:
If I’ve got to be in here, I’m not going to put up with any of your shit.

DR. HANEY:
So the guards’ authority was challenged right off the bat. And the guards had to decide how they
were going to handle that. And they had to decide it without our input. I mean, again, this was
not a Milgram study in which we were standing over them telling them what to do. And they
began to see the prisoners’ behavior as kind of an affront to their authority. And they began to
push back.

DAVE ESHELMAN:
We would ramp up the general harassment, just sort of crank it up a bit. Nobody was telling me I
shouldn’t be doing this. The professor is the authority here. You know, he’s the prison warden.
He’s not stopping me.

PRISONER:
This is unbelievable! They took our clothes.

GUARD:
Hands off the door. [inaudible]

DR. HANEY:
There was the first evening a kind of rebellion that took place.

DR. ZIMBARDO:
The prisoners rebelled. They barricaded themselves in their cells and said, “We refuse to come
out.” They took off their numbers. They didn’t want to be de-individuated. They started cursing
the guards to their face. And the key, the key turning point, was that the guards began to think of
them as dangerous prisoners. And so the guards formulated a plan to use the fire extinguishers.
Took the doors down, dragged the prisoners out, stripped them naked, and essentially broke the
rebellion in a purely physical way.

TEXT:
Day 2

[Video footage of a guard using a fire extinguisher]

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DR. HANEY:
From that point on, the study was as remarkable a series of events as I have ever seen. It was a
real laboratory for Zimbardo and I to watch human nature transformed in a very rapid way in the
face of a very powerful situation. [7:33]

DR. ZIMBARDO:
People really suffered. I mean, guards did terrible things to the prisoners. They punished them by
putting them in solitary confinement, which was a small closet. You could squat, or stand, but
you couldn’t sit. And it was dark, and dank, actually.

[Video footage; inaudible]

DR. MASLACH:
Every hour of every day, there’s a teeny little bit more of an increment. And they’re stepping up,
taunting the prisoners. They’re stepping up the counts on letting them sleep. They’re stepping up
—I don’t think from minute to the next the people who are in it see the change and see the
difference.

GUARD:
You’ve got a nice friend. He’s going to see to it that you don’t get blankets tonight.

DR. ZIMBARDO:
And then the next key thing happened besides the rebellion. Prisoner 8612. He was the first one
to have an emotional breakdown.

PRISONER:
[inaudible] what happens, I don’t know, I’ve got to go. To a doctor, anything. I mean, Jesus
Christ, I’m burning up inside, don’t you know? I’m fucked up. I don’t know how to explain it,
I’m all fucked up inside! I want out! I want out now!

DAVE ESHELMAN:
At the time if you had questioned me about the effect I was having, I would say, “Well, they
must be a wimp. They’re weak, or they’re faking.” Because I wouldn’t have believed that what I
was doing could have caused somebody to have a nervous breakdown. It was just us sort of
getting our jollies with it. You know, let’s be like puppeteers here. Let’s make these people do
things.

GUARD:
What if I told you to get down on that floor… and fuck the floor? What would you do then?

DR. ZIMBARDO:
The guards now began to escalate their use of power. Some of them had prisoners clean out toilet
bowls with their bare hands. They now taunt, humiliate, degrade the prisoners in front of each
other, and they exert arbitrary control over the prisoners. They keep thinking of more and more
unusual things to do. And very soon after the fourth day, things begin to turn sexual.

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GUARD:
You be the Bride of Frankenstein and you be Frankenstein. I want you to walk over here like
Frankenstein and say that you love [prisoner] 2093.

DAVE ESHELMAN:
If you want to fully, sort of, humiliate somebody, then you want to get them in those things
where their biggest fears are, and lot of us have a lot of sexual hangups, and so that was part of
that effort to humiliate them even further. [9:48]

[Video footage; inaudible]

PRISONER:
I love you, 2093. I love you, 2093.

GUARD:
You get down and do ten pushups.

HANEY:
The guards knew that had the coin come up heads rather than tails, they would have had the
dress on, rather than the uniform, and they knew that. So they certainly knew that the prisoners
who were being mistreated had done nothing wrong to deserve the mistreatment. And yet, the
roles themselves were so powerful, and the environment itself was so powerful, that they ended
up punishing those prisoners as though they had done something wrong.

PRISONERS:
Prisoner 819 did a bad thing. Prisoner 819 did a bad thing.

RICHARD YACCO:
We were told to chant something about how he was a bad prisoner. And at the time I went along
with it. I’m thinking, what does this matter? We don’t believe this, but we can go along and
chant it.

PRISONERS:
Because of what Prisoner 819 did, my cell is a mess. Because of what Prisoner 819 did, my cell
is a mess.

DR. ZIMBARDO:
That night he had a breakdown. Every day after that, another prisoner broke down in a similar
way. Broke down—I mean, extreme stress reaction. And we released another one on Tuesday,
Wednesday, Thursday.

DR. HANEY:
Nobody who was in that study could deny that the prisoner breakdowns were genuine. They
were scary to see, they were upsetting to us, they were unexpected, but they were very clearly the
real thing. At some level we understood that something was happening that we were no longer in
control of, it was damaging people, we didn’t quite have a grasp on what to do about it. One of

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the mistakes we made was that we hadn’t built in time to step back and to look at what was
happening, and call it what it was, which was mistreatment. We were caught up in the events that
were taking place.

GUARD:
You can keep your blankets and [Prisoner] 416 can stay in another day. We’ve got three against
one. Keep your blankets. 416, you’re going to be in there for a while. So just get used to it.

NARRATOR:
On the fifth day of the study, Zimbardo invited his girlfriend, recent psychology graduate
Christina Maslach, to visit the mock prison. [11:57]

DR. MASLACH:
I had heard bits and pieces from Phil about what was going on. And then when I was down there
that evening, it was really kind of a, wow. The thing that really got to me was when some of the
guards took the prisoners down the hall into the men’s room.

DR. ZIMBARDO:
She looks out and sees a line of prisoners with paper bags over their heads, each one holding
another one’s shoulder.

DR. MASLACH:
And they’re leading them down the hall. And Phil comes over and, like, “Look, look, my God,
look at that!” And I looked up, and something about it just—again, it was the dehumanizing,
demeaning kind of treatment, I just, I couldn’t watch it.

DR. ZIMBARDO:
And she said, “It’s terrible what you’re doing to those boys.” And she got tears in her eyes. And I
said, “What?” And she runs out. And I’m furious. I’m saying, “You know, look”—I run outside,
we have this big argument. I’m saying, “Look, this is dynamics of human behavior. Look, it’s
fascinating, and the power of the situation, all this.” So I’m giving her all the psychological
basis, and “What kind of psychologist are you, you don’t appreciate this.” And she said...

DR. MASLACH:
“I don’t understand. You’re a stranger to me. I don’t understand this. How could you not see
what I see? I mean, you know, you’re a caring, compassionate person, I know you from all the
other things, something must be going wrong here.”

DR. ZIMBARDO:
And then the next thing she said, which had an equally big impact, was, “You know, I’m not sure
I want to have anything to do with you. If this is the real you...” And that was like a slap in the
face, because what she was saying is, “You’ve changed. You know, the power of the situation
has transformed you from the person I thought I knew to this person that I don’t know.” And at
that moment, I said, “Wow, you’re right. We’ve got to end it.”

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NARRATOR:
After only six days, Dr. Zimbardo shut down his experiment. [13:40]

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