If you took psychology courses in college, you probably remember the “Stanford prison experiment,” which monitored the behavior of 18 students assigned to play the roles of guards or inmates in a pretend penitentiary for a week. Stanford University psychologist Philip Zimbardo’s 1971 study supposedly demonstrated that decent, ordinary individuals are apt to cruelly mistreat people when given authority over them, even when that authority is imaginary.
The Stanford Prison Experiment: Unlocking the Truth, a three-part National Geographic documentary, casts doubt on that gloss by interviewing academics and former subjects who say Zimbardo misrepresented his methodology and the implications of his results. Although Zimbardo claimed he gave very little direction to the “guards,” for example, recordings show that he and his colleagues encouraged harsh treatment of the “prisoners.”
The documentary suggests the so-called experiment is better understood as an improv game in which the subjects acted in ways they thought Zimbardo expected. Yet after torture at the Abu Ghraib military prison in Iraq came to light decades later, Zimbardo, a relentless self-promoter, glibly argued in media appearances and in his book The Lucifer Effect that his research anticipated such abuses by showing “how good people turn evil.”
Director Juliette Eisner gives Zimbardo (who died last October, after the documentary was completed) ample opportunity for rebuttal. To some extent, his answers reinforce the impression of slipperiness. But his defenses also highlight an ambiguity at the heart of his experiment: Were the subjects just play-acting, as some now claim, or is that description a self-deceiving rationalization for mortifying behavior?
In the end, Zimbardo loses patience with Eisner’s inquiry, declining to answer follow-up questions on the grounds that he has already thoroughly refuted his critics’ arguments. Viewers can judge for themselves whether that is true.
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