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The Stanford Prison Experiment

In 1971, twenty-four male students are selected to take on randomly assigned roles of prisoners and guards in a mock prison situated in the basement of the Stanford psychology building. In 1971, twenty-four male students are selected to take on randomly assigned roles of prisoners and guards in a mock prison situated in the basement of the Stanford psychology building. In 1971, twenty-four male students are selected to take on randomly assigned roles of prisoners and guards in a mock prison situated in the basement of the Stanford psychology building.

• Kyle Patrick Alvarez
• Tim Talbott
• Philip Zimbardo
• Ezra Miller
• Tye Sheridan
• Billy Crudup
• 130 User reviews
• 91 Critic reviews
• 67 Metascore
• 4 wins & 3 nominations

Top cast 38

• Daniel Culp …

• Peter Mitchell …

• Dr. Philip Zimbardo

• Dr. Christina Maslach

• Christopher Archer

• Anthony Carroll

• John Lovett

• Gavin Lee …

• Prisoner 416

• Jerry Sherman …

• Jeff Jansen …

• Jesse Fletcher

• Kyle Parker

• Paul Beattie …

• Hubbie Whitlow …
• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

• Trivia Although never mentioned in the movie, the real life experiment was funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research and was of interest to both the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps as an investigation into the causes of conflict between military guards and prisoners.
• Goofs When Dr. Zimbardo speaks with his colleague, the colleague says that he will see him at the beginning of the semester. Stanford does not have semesters; rather, it has a quarter academic calendar.

Daniel Culp : I know you're a nice guy.

Christopher Archer : So why do you hate me?

Daniel Culp : Because I know what you can become.

• Connections Featured in WatchMojo: Top 10 Creepiest Historic Events That Are Scarier than Horror Movies (2020)

User reviews 130

• malak-hasan90
• Dec 19, 2019
• How long is The Stanford Prison Experiment? Powered by Alexa
• July 17, 2015 (United States)
• United States
• Official site
• Untitled Stanford Prison Experiment Project
• Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, USA
• Coup d'Etat Films
• Sandbar Pictures
• Abandon Pictures
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• Jul 19, 2015

Technical specs

• Runtime 2 hours 2 minutes

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Stanford Prison Experiment

• Quiet Rage: The Stanford Prison Experiment

Philip G. Zimbardo

Philip Zimbardo was born on March 23, 1933 in New York City. He attended Brooklyn College where he earned a B.A. in 1954, triple majoring in psychology, sociology and anthropology. He then went on to earn his M.A. in 1955 and his Ph.D. in 1959 from Yale University, both in psychology.

He taught briefly at Yale before becoming a psychology professor at New York University, where he taught until 1967. After a year of teaching at Columbia University, he became a faculty member at Stanford University in 1968.

Philip Zimbardo is perhaps best known for the Stanford Prison Experiment, conducted in the basement of the Stanford University psychology department in 1971. The participants in the study were 24 male college students who were randomly assigned to act either as "guards" or "prisoners" in the mock prison.

The study was initially slated to last two weeks, but had to be terminated after just six days because of the extreme reactions and behaviors of the participants. The guards began displaying cruel and sadistic behavior toward the prisoners, while the prisoners became depressed and hopeless.

Since the prison experiment, Zimbardo has continued to conduct research on a variety of topics including shyness, cult behavior and heroism. In 2002, Zimbardo was elected president of the American Psychological Association. After more than 50 years of teaching, Zimbardo retired from Stanford in 2003 but gave his last "Exploring Human Nature" lecture on March 7, 2007.

Today, he continues to work as the director of an organization he founded called the Heroic Imagination Project. The organization promotes research, education and media initiatives designed to inspire ordinary people to act as heroes and agents of social change.

The Stanford Prison Experiment

Students of high school or university psychology classes are probably familiar with the Stanford Prison Experiment. Run in 1971 at the behest of the U.S. Navy, the experiment intended to investigate the cause of conflict between guards and prisoners in military correctional facilities. Dr. Philip Zimbardo and his team chose 24 male Stanford students and divvied them up into guards and prisoners. Turning the basement of one of the student halls into a makeshift prison, Zimbardo placed his subjects under surveillance and watched as the prisoners became passive and the guards exhibited authority by way of sometimes sadistic psychological torture. Zimbardo ended the experiment 6 days into its 2-week run, mostly due to the objections of his fiancée. She felt Zimbardo had become an unhealthy part of his own experiment.

A documentary about this could potentially be fascinating, as some of the actual experiment exists on film. Unfortunately, “The Stanford Prison Experiment” is a dramatization, and no matter how much it may adhere to the well-documented specifics of Zimbardo’s work, it is a massive failure. It prefers to abstract the experiment from any psychological theories or details, opting instead to merely harp on endless, repetitive scenes of prisoner abuse. One particular guard, who thinks he’s Strother Martin in “ Cool Hand Luke ,” abuses the prisoners. The prisoners take the abuse, rebelling once or twice before becoming passive. Zimbardo glares at a TV screen doing nothing while his guards break the rules of the contract everybody signed at the outset. Repeat ad nauseum.

These scenes are supposed to shock the viewer, but they did not work for me, because I just didn’t care. The film reduces the entire experiment to a Dead Teenager movie whose slasher just roughs them up. Prisoners are referred to by numbers in order to strip them of their personal identities, and the film keeps them at this level of distance. We never get to know any subject outside of brief sketches, so the victims become disposable. Despite the best efforts of the actors on both sides of the law, the film is completely clinical in its depiction, striking the same note for over 2 hours. It gets real dull, real fast.

I didn’t care because this isn’t remotely like an actual prison; it’s a bunch of privileged kids playing dress-up for $15 a day. Even a priest Zimbardo hires as a prison chaplain tells the doctor “it’s good that these privileged kids experience prison life.” The actual reasons for the experiment (and its military involvement) are never expressed in Tim Talbott ’s screenplay, so the priest’s comment almost serves as the reason for these tests. And the film takes great pains to tell us that nobody in the experiment suffered “long term psychological damage” after it was abruptly cancelled. I’m sure someone who has experienced the harsh realities of actual prison life would feel relieved that these young men weren’t scarred.

The best scene in “The Stanford Prison Experiment” deals with an actual prisoner and serves to highlight my disdain for how the film trades emotion and details for exploitative shocks. The fantastic Nelsan Ellis (last seen in “ Get On Up ”) plays Jesse, an ex-con brought in by Zimbardo’s team as an expert witness to their proceedings. At a mock parole board hearing, Jesse rips into an inmate, treating him as inhumanely as possible while verbally shredding the inmate’s explanation for why he should be paroled. After the stunned inmate is sent back to his cell, Jesse reveals that he was recreating his own parole board treatment. He tells Zimbardo that playing the role of his own tormentor “felt good, and I hated that it did.” This, in a nutshell, is what the actual experiment sought to explore, that is, the nature of even the nicest human beings to commit evil. Jesse’s revelation, and the psychological toll it takes on him, is more effective than anything else the film conjures up. If only the movie had spent more time interacting with the Strother Martin-wannabe’s own thoughts rather than trudging him out only for sadism.

The film reduces Zimbardo to some kind of megalomaniac who doesn’t know what he is doing. This makes his research seem half-assed and unethical. He watches the guards strike the prisoners (a direct violation of the rules) and the film paints him as the biggest villain of all. He challenges anyone who questions his methods and authority, and at one point, he absurdly sits in a hallway like a low-rent Charles Bronson hoping for the return of a subject who might jeopardize his research. (In the actual case, Zimbardo simply moves the prison to a location unknown by the subject.) And though his intentions are to “feminize” the prisoners by giving them “dresses” that barely hide their genitalia, “The Stanford Prison Experiment” implies that Zimbardo’s sole reason for stopping the experiment was the moment when his guards forced the inmates into a gay sex pantomime. Violence and hog-tying inmates were OK, but none of that gay stuff, the movie seems to say.

Billy Crudup deserves some kind of medal for his attempt to breathe life into his one dimensional character, as do actors like Ezra Miller and Olivia Thirlby . But they are undermined by a poor script, horror movie-style music and ripe dramatizations that exist solely to make the viewer feel superior. I despise movies like this and “ Compliance ” because they pretend to say something profound about their scenarios but are, at heart, cynically manipulative trash designed to make audiences pat themselves on the back for not being “like those people.” Had we been forced to identify with anyone, prisoner or guard, the film might have achieved the palpable discomfort of forcing us to look at ourselves. That was one of the goals of the actual Stanford Prison Experiment. This movie just wants to superficially disturb, and it’s not even successful at that.

Odie Henderson

Odie “Odienator” Henderson has spent over 33 years working in Information Technology. He runs the blogs Big Media Vandalism and Tales of Odienary Madness. Read his answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire  here .

• Keir Gilchrist as John Lovett
• Tye Sheridan as Peter Mitchell - Prisoner 819
• Ezra Miller as Daniel Culp - Prisoner '8612'
• Moisés Arias as Actor
• Billy Crudup as Dr. Philip Zimbardo
• Gaius Charles as Banks
• Thomas Mann as Prisoner 416
• Michael Angarano as Christopher Archer
• Olivia Thirlby as Christina Zimbardo
• Nelsan Ellis as Jesse Fletcher
• Johnny Simmons as Jeff Jansen
• James Wolk as Penny

Director of Photography

• Jas Shelton
• Kyle Patrick Alvarez
• Tim Talbott

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The Stanford Prison Experiment

• Participants
• Setting and Procedure

In August of 1971, psychologist Philip Zimbardo and his colleagues created an experiment to determine the impacts of being a prisoner or prison guard. The Stanford Prison Experiment, also known as the Zimbardo Prison Experiment, went on to become one of the best-known studies in psychology's history —and one of the most controversial.

This study has long been a staple in textbooks, articles, psychology classes, and even movies. Learn what it entailed, what was learned, and the criticisms that have called the experiment's scientific merits and value into question.

Purpose of the Stanford Prison Experiment

Zimbardo was a former classmate of the psychologist Stanley Milgram . Milgram is best known for his famous obedience experiment , and Zimbardo was interested in expanding upon Milgram's research. He wanted to further investigate the impact of situational variables on human behavior.

Specifically, the researchers wanted to know how participants would react when placed in a simulated prison environment. They wondered if physically and psychologically healthy people who knew they were participating in an experiment would change their behavior in a prison-like setting.

Participants in the Stanford Prison Experiment

To carry out the experiment, researchers set up a mock prison in the basement of Stanford University's psychology building. They then selected 24 undergraduate students to play the roles of both prisoners and guards.

Participants were chosen from a larger group of 70 volunteers based on having no criminal background, no psychological issues , and no significant medical conditions. Each volunteer agreed to participate in the Stanford Prison Experiment for one to two weeks in exchange for $15 a day.

Setting and Procedures

The simulated prison included three six-by-nine-foot prison cells. Each cell held three prisoners and included three cots. Other rooms across from the cells were utilized for the jail guards and warden. One tiny space was designated as the solitary confinement room, and yet another small room served as the prison yard.

The 24 volunteers were randomly assigned to either the prisoner or guard group. Prisoners were to remain in the mock prison 24 hours a day during the study. Guards were assigned to work in three-man teams for eight-hour shifts. After each shift, they were allowed to return to their homes until their next shift.

Researchers were able to observe the behavior of the prisoners and guards using hidden cameras and microphones.

Results of the Stanford Prison Experiment

So what happened in the Zimbardo experiment? While originally slated to last 14 days, it had to be stopped after just six due to what was happening to the student participants. The guards became abusive and the prisoners began to show signs of extreme stress and anxiety .

It was noted that:

• While the prisoners and guards were allowed to interact in any way they wanted, the interactions were hostile or even dehumanizing.
• The guards began to become aggressive and abusive toward the prisoners while the prisoners became passive and depressed.
• Five of the prisoners began to experience severe negative emotions , including crying and acute anxiety, and had to be released from the study early.

Even the researchers themselves began to lose sight of the reality of the situation. Zimbardo, who acted as the prison warden, overlooked the abusive behavior of the jail guards until graduate student Christina Maslach voiced objections to the conditions in the simulated prison and the morality of continuing the experiment.

One possible explanation for the results of this experiment is the idea of deindividuation , which states that being part of a large group can make us more likely to perform behaviors we would otherwise not do on our own.

Impact of the Zimbardo Prison Experiment

The experiment became famous and was widely cited in textbooks and other publications. According to Zimbardo and his colleagues, the Stanford Prison Experiment demonstrated the powerful role that the situation can play in human behavior.

Because the guards were placed in a position of power, they began to behave in ways they would not usually act in their everyday lives or other situations. The prisoners, placed in a situation where they had no real control , became submissive and depressed.

In 2011, the Stanford Alumni Magazine featured a retrospective of the Stanford Prison Experiment in honor of the experiment’s 40th anniversary. The article contained interviews with several people involved, including Zimbardo and other researchers as well as some of the participants.

In the interviews, Richard Yacco, one of the prisoners in the experiment, suggested that the experiment demonstrated the power that societal roles and expectations can play in a person's behavior.

In 2015, the experiment became the topic of a feature film titled The Stanford Prison Experiment that dramatized the events of the 1971 study.

Criticisms of the Stanford Prison Experiment

In the years since the experiment was conducted, there have been a number of critiques of the study. Some of these include:

Ethical Issues

The Stanford Prison Experiment is frequently cited as an example of unethical research. It could not be replicated by researchers today because it fails to meet the standards established by numerous ethical codes, including the Code of Ethics of the American Psychological Association .

Why was Zimbardo's experiment unethical?

Zimbardo's experiment was unethical due to a lack of fully informed consent, abuse of participants, and lack of appropriate debriefings. More recent findings suggest there were other significant ethical issues that compromise the experiment's scientific standing, including the fact that experimenters may have encouraged abusive behaviors.

Lack of Generalizability

Other critics suggest that the study lacks generalizability due to a variety of factors. The unrepresentative sample of participants (mostly white and middle-class males) makes it difficult to apply the results to a wider population.

Lack of Realism

The Zimbardo Prison Experiment is also criticized for its lack of ecological validity. Ecological validity refers to the degree of realism with which a simulated experimental setup matches the real-world situation it seeks to emulate.

While the researchers did their best to recreate a prison setting, it is simply not possible to perfectly mimic all the environmental and situational variables of prison life. Because there may have been factors related to the setting and situation that influenced how the participants behaved, it may not truly represent what might happen outside of the lab.

Recent Criticisms

More recent examination of the experiment's archives and interviews with participants have revealed major issues with the research method , design, and procedures used. Together, these call the study's validity, value, and even authenticity into question.

These reports, including examinations of the study's records and new interviews with participants, have also cast doubt on some of its key findings and assumptions.

Among the issues described:

• One participant suggested that he faked a breakdown so he could leave the experiment because he was worried about failing his classes.
• Other participants also reported altering their behavior in a way designed to "help" the experiment .
• Evidence suggests that the experimenters encouraged the guards' behavior and played a role in fostering the abusive actions of the guards.

In 2019, the journal American Psychologist published an article debunking the famed experiment. It detailed the study's lack of scientific merit and concluded that the Stanford Prison Experiment was "an incredibly flawed study that should have died an early death."

In a statement posted on the experiment's official website, Zimbardo maintains that these criticisms do not undermine the main conclusion of the study—that situational forces can alter individual actions both in positive and negative ways.

The Stanford Prison Experiment is well known both inside and outside the field of psychology . While the study has long been criticized for many reasons, more recent criticisms of the study's procedures shine a brighter light on the experiment's scientific shortcomings.

Stanford University. About the Stanford Prison Experiment .

Stanford Prison Experiment. 2. Setting up .

Sommers T. An interview with Philip Zimbardo . The Believer.

Ratnesar R. The menace within . Stanford Magazine.

Jabbar A, Muazzam A, Sadaqat S. An unveiling the ethical quandaries: A critical analysis of the Stanford Prison Experiment as a mirror of Pakistani society . J Bus Manage Res . 2024;3(1):629-638.

Horn S. Landmark Stanford Prison Experiment criticized as a sham . Prison Legal News .

Bartels JM. The Stanford Prison Experiment in introductory psychology textbooks: A content analysis .  Psychol Learn Teach . 2015;14(1):36-50. doi:10.1177/1475725714568007

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Blum B. The lifespan of a lie . Medium .

Le Texier T. Debunking the Stanford Prison Experiment . Am Psychol . 2019;74(7):823-839. doi:10.1037/amp0000401

Stanford Prison Experiment. Philip Zimbardo's response to recent criticisms of the Stanford Prison Experiment .

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

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Philip Zimbardo defends the Stanford Prison Experiment, his most famous work

What’s the scientific value of the Stanford Prison Experiment? Zimbardo responds to the new allegations against his work.

by Brian Resnick

For decades, the story of the famous Stanford Prison Experiment has gone like this: Stanford professor Philip Zimbardo assigned paid volunteers to be either inmates or guards in a simulated prison in the basement of the school‘s psychology building. Very quickly, the guards became cruel, and the prisoners more submissive and depressed. The situation grew chaotic, and the experiment, meant to last two weeks, had to be ended after five days.

The lesson drawn from the research was that situations can bring out the worst in people. That, in the absence of firm instructions of how to act, we’ll act in accordance to the roles we’re assigned. The tale, which was made into a feature film , has been a lens through which we can understand human-rights violations, like American soldier’s maltreatment of inmates at the Abu Ghraib in Iraq in the early 2000s.

This month, the scientific validity of the experiment was boldly challenged. In a thoroughly reported exposé on Medium, journalist Ben Blum found compelling evidence that the experiment wasn’t as naturalistic and un-manipulated by the experimenters as we’ve been told.

A recording from the experiment reveals that the “warden,” a research assistant, told a reluctant guard that “the guards have to know that every guard is going to be what we call a ‘tough guard.’” The warden implored the guard to act tough because “we hope will come out of the study is a very serious recommendation for [criminal justice] reform.” The implication being that if the guard didn’t play the part, the study would fail.

Additionally, one of the “prisoners” in the study told Blum that he was “acting” during a what was observed to be a mental breakdown.

These new findings don’t mean that everything that happened in the experiment was theater. The “prisoners” really did rebel at one point, and the “guards” were cruel. But the new evidence suggests that the main conclusion of the experiment — the one that has been republished in psychology textbooks for years — doesn’t necessarily hold up. Zimbardo stated over and over the behavior seen in the experiment was the result of their own minds conforming to a situation. The new evidence suggests there was a lot more going on.

I wrote a piece highlighting Blum’s exposé and putting the prison experiment in the larger context of psychology’s replication crisis. Our headline stated “we just learned it [the Stanford Prison Experiment] was a fraud.”

Fraud is a moral judgment. And Zimbardo, now a professor emeritus, wrote to Vox, unhappy with this characterization of his study. (You can Zimbardo’s full written response to the criticisms here .)

So I called Zimbardo up to ask about the evidence in Blum’s piece. I also wanted to know: As a scientist, what do you do when the narrative of your most famous work changes dramatically and spirals out of your own control?

The conversation was tense. At one point, Zimbardo threatened to hang up.

Zimbardo believes Blum (and Vox) got the story wrong. He says only one guard was prodded to act tougher. (We did not discuss Blum’s evidence that the “prisoners” in the experiment were held against their will, despite pleas to leave.)

After talking with him, the results of the prison experiment still seem unscientific and untrustworthy. It’s an interesting demonstration, but should enduring lessons in psychology be based off of it? I doubt it.

Here’s our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity.

Brian Resnick

Here’s my understanding of the criticisms that have come to light recently about the Stanford Prison Experiment.

For years, the conclusion that has been drawn from the study was that circumstances can bring out the worst in people or encourage bad behavior. And when some people are given power, and some people are stripped of it, that fosters ugly behavior.

What’s comes to light — what I got out of that Ben Blum’s report — was that it might not have all been the circumstance. That these guards that you employed were possibly coached in some ways.

There’s audio. And for me, it sounded pretty compelling that the warden in your experiment, who I understand was an experimental collaborator — was calling out a guard for not being tough enough. [The warden told the guard, “The guards have to know that every guard is going to be what we call a ‘tough guard.’” Listen to the tape here .]

So does that not invalidate the conclusion?

Philip Zimbardo

Not at all!

And why not?

Because he’s talking to one guard who was doing nothing. These are people we’ve hired who are doing it for a salary, $15 a day, to play the role of guard. And Jaffe [the warden] picks on this guy because he is doing nothing. He’s sitting on the sideline, doing nothing, watching. He’s gotta earn his keep as a guard.

The point is telling a guard to be tough does not mean telling a guard to be mean, to be cruel, to be sadistic, which many of the guards became of their own volition playing the role of what they thought was a prison guard. So I reject your assumption entirely.

Here’s the description of the experiment as written on your website: It says “the guards made up their own set of rules which they carried into effect.” In another paper , you wrote that the guards’ behavior was left up “to each subject’s prior societal learning of the meaning of prisons.”

But here’s a different possibility: Do you think it is possible that some of these guards were acting to please you, to please the study, and to do something good for science?

Even without telling the guards to explicitly do something, they might have gotten the impression that it was important for them to play these roles. And they were compelled to because of your authority.

Some of them might, but I think most of them didn’t.

For many of them, it was simply a way to make $15 a day during a two-week summer break between summer school and the start of classes in September. It was nothing more than that. It was not wanting to help science.

Some of them were increasingly mean, cruel, and sadistic way beyond any definition of tough. Some of them were guards who simply enforced the rules. And some of them were “good guards” who never did anything abusive to the prisoners. So it’s not that the situation brought a single quality in the guard. It’s a mix.

The criticism that you’re raising, that Blum raised, that others are raising, is that we told the guards to do what they ended up doing. And therefore, [the results were due to] obedience to authority, and it’s not the evolution of cruel behavior in the situation of a prison-like environment.

And I reject that.

Is it possible that some of the “prisoners” in your experiment were acting, playing along?

Zero? How can you say zero?

Okay, I can’t say.

I mean, the point was they locked themselves in their cells, they ripped off their numbers, they’re yelling and cursing at the guards. So, yeah, they could be acting. But why would they be acting. ... What would they get out of that?

Blum quoted one of the prisoners, Douglas Korpi, who had a breakdown. Korpi told Blum that he was acting. That he was in the midsts of studying for the GREs and just really wanted to get out of the experiment. Korpi told Blum, “Anybody who is a clinician would know that I was faking.”

Brian, Brian, I’m telling you every fucking thing that Ben Blum said is a lie; it’s false.

Nothing Korpi said to Ben Blum has any truth, zero. Look at Quiet Rage [a documentary about the prison experiment], look at where he says, “I was overcome in that situation. I broke down, I lost control of myself.”

Retrospectively now, he’s ashamed of having broken down. So he says he “was studying the Graduate Record Exam, I was faking it, I wanted to show I could get out and liberate my colleagues,” etc, etc.

So he is the least reliable source of any information about the study, except he documents the power of the situation to get somebody who’s psychologically normal, 36 hours before, who in an experiment, knowing it’s an experiment, has an emotional “breakdown,” and had to be released.

Let’s say: Regardless of whether guards were coached or not...

Brian, I’m gonna stop you.

Can I finish the question?

A guard, a single guard, okay? When you say guards you’re slipping back into your assumption, you’re slipping back to be like Blum. A guard was coached to be tough, and end of sentence there.

[Note: As a reminder, the tape of the experiment quoted the Jaffe, the “warden,” who played a critical role in leading the experiment, as saying, “The guards have to know that every guard is going to be what we call a ‘tough guard.’” Also, as Blum discovered in the Stanford archives, Jaffe wrote in his notes , “I was given the responsibility of trying to elicit ‘tough-guard’ behavior.” Which, again, raises suspicions that the experiment wasn’t as naturalistic as the experimenters implied.]

What I want to ask is: What is the case that this experiment should be seen as anything more than an anecdote? I don’t think anyone denies its historical value. It’s an interesting demonstration. Ideas that generated from it are worthwhile to follow up on and to study more carefully. Do you think the experiment itself has a definitive scientific value? If so, what is it?

It depends what you mean by scientific value. From the beginning, I have always said it’s a demonstration. The only thing that makes it an experiment is the random assignment to prisoners and guards, that’s the independent variable. There is no control group. There’s no comparison group. So it doesn’t fit the standards of what it means to be “an experiment.” It’s a very powerful demonstration of a psychological phenomenon, and it has had relevance.

So, yes, if you want to call it anecdote, that’s one way to demean it. If you want to say, “Is it a scientifically valid conclusion?” I say ... it doesn’t have to be scientifically valid. It means it’s a conclusion drawn from this powerful, unique demonstration.

Would you agree, as a scientist, that an early demonstration of an idea is bound to be reinterpreted in time, bound to be reevaluated?

Oh, they should. The essence of science is you don’t believe anything until it has a) been replicated, or b) been critically evaluated, as the study is being done now. I’m hoping a positive consequence of all of this is a better, fuller appreciation of what happened in the Stanford prison study.

Let me just add one thing: There are many, many classic studies that are now all under attack. ... by psychologists from a very different domain. It’s curious.

I’ve talked to a lot of researchers who are interested in replication, and reevaluating past work. They want to correct the record. I think they’re scared about what happens to the credibility of science if they don’t scrutinize the classics.

And I wonder from your point of view, as a scientist, do you need to be okay with losing control of the narrative of your work as it gets reevaluated?

Of course. The moment, the moment any of it was published, the moment any of this was put online, which I did as soon as I could, I lost. ... You lose control of it. Once it’s out there it’s not in your head anymore. Once it’s out in any public forum, then, of course, I lost control of “the narrative.”

Is it a study with flaws? I was the first to admit that many, many years ago.

A study like the prison experiment might just be too big and complicated, with too many inputs, too many variables, to really nail down or understand a single, simple conclusion from it.

The single conclusion is a broad line: Human behavior, for many people, is much more under the influence of social situational variables than we had ever thought of before.

I will stand by that conclusion for the rest of my life, no matter what anyone says.

I’m just unsure if we have the evidence to say if it’s true or not.

There are other researchers who are trying to drill down more into understanding what turns bad behavior on and off. And I’m sure you’re not a fan of him, but Alexander Haslam — [a psychologist who has tried to replicate the prison experiment study, and an academic critic of Zimbardo’s conclusions]

Oh, God! ... no, no, no.

You don’t want to talk about him.

Yeah, okay, No, I don’t want to talk about [him] at all.

Well, the gist of what he and his colleagues are arguing is this: Social identity is a really powerful motivator. And it’s perhaps more influential than situational factors. And perhaps the guards in your experiment became cruel because your warden used his authority to foster a social identity within them. [Here’s a new paper with their latest arguments. ]

I reject that. No, no. That’s their shtick, that’s what they’re pushing.

You don’t assume good faith on their part?

I’m not saying good faith. That’s what their claim to fame is the importance of social identity.

Of course people have social identity. But, there’s also something called situational identity. In a particular situation, you begin to play a role. You are the boss, you are the foreman, you are the drill sergeant, you are the fraternity hazing master. And in that role, which is not the usual you, you begin to do something which is role-bound. ... This is what anybody in this role does. And your behavior then changes.

Is there experimental evidence outside the prison experiment that supports that view?

The view that situation can make a difference?

Yeah. There are plenty of examples in history and current events, but is that something we know as a fact, as an experimental fact?

I don’t know off the top of my head. ...

I’ve always said it’s an interaction. I’m an interactionist. What I’ve said, if you read any of my textbooks, it’s always an interaction between what people bring into a situation, which means genetics and personality, and what the situation brings out in you, which is a social/psychological power of some situations over others. And I will stand by that, my whole career depends on that.

It’s not like I’m mindlessly promoting the situation is dominating everybody.

What would you fear might happen if people stop believing in the integrity of the Stanford Prison Experiment?

The fear is they will lose an important conclusion about the nature of human behavior as being, to some extent, situationally influenced.

You’re afraid they’ll lose an important conclusion even though the study is just a demonstration?

You demonstrate gravity by throwing a ball up and seeing if it comes down. I think you’re insisting on a traditional view of what is scientific, what is a scientific experiment, what is a scientifically validated conclusion. And I am saying from the beginning the Stanford Prison Experiment is a unique and powerful demonstration of how social/situational variables can influence the behavior of some people, some of the time. That’s a very modest conclusion.

All of this controversy is happening now because you gave your notes and tapes from the prison experiment to the Stanford archives. That transparency is commendable. Do you regret it?

No, I don’t regret it. The reason I did it is to make it available for researchers, for anybody, and people have gone through it.

So again, the last thing in the world I need is for people to doubt my honesty, my professional credibility. That’s an attack on me personally, and that I reject and I’m arguing it’s absolutely wrong.

Is it okay if we just move on from the Stanford Prison Experiment? Like you said, it’s a demonstration. Maybe we need to ground our understanding of acts of evil in something a little bit more scientific, to be honest.

At this point, I don’t want anyone to reject that basic conclusion that I’ve said several times in this interview. I don’t want that to be rejected. I would love for there to be better, more scientific evaluation of this conclusion, rather than a bunch of bloggers saying, “We’re gonna shoot it down.”

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Stanford Prison Experiment

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Stanford Prison Experiment , a social psychology study in which college students became prisoners or guards in a simulated prison environment . The experiment, funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research, took place at Stanford University in August 1971. It was intended to measure the effect of role-playing, labeling, and social expectations on behaviour over a period of two weeks. However, mistreatment of prisoners escalated so alarmingly that principal investigator Philip G. Zimbardo terminated the experiment after only six days.

More than 70 young men responded to an advertisement about a “psychological study of prison life,” and experimenters selected 24 applicants who were judged to be physically and mentally healthy. The paid subjects—they received $15 a day—were divided randomly into equal numbers of guards and prisoners. Guards were ordered not to physically abuse prisoners and were issued mirrored sunglasses that prevented any eye contact. Prisoners were “arrested” by actual police and handed over to the experimenters in a mock prison in the basement of a campus building. Prisoners were then subjected to indignities that were intended to simulate the environment of a real-life prison. In keeping with Zimbardo’s intention to create very quickly an “atmosphere of oppression,” each prisoner was made to wear a “dress” as a uniform and to carry a chain padlocked around one ankle. All participants were observed and videotaped by the experimenters.

On only the second day the prisoners staged a rebellion. Guards then worked out a system of rewards and punishments to manage the prisoners. Within the first four days, three prisoners had become so traumatized that they were released. Over the course of the experiment, some of the guards became cruel and tyrannical, while a number of the prisoners became depressed and disoriented. However, only after an outside observer came upon the scene and registered shock did Zimbardo conclude the experiment, less than a week after it had started.

The Stanford Prison Experiment immediately came under attack on methodological and ethical grounds. Zimbardo admitted that during the experiment he had sometimes felt more like a prison superintendent than a research psychologist. Later on, he claimed that the experiment’s “social forces and environmental contingencies” had led the guards to behave badly. However, others claimed that the original advertisement attracted people who were predisposed to authoritarianism . The most conspicuous challenge to the Stanford findings came decades later in the form of the BBC Prison Study, a differently organized experiment documented in a British Broadcasting Corporation series called The Experiment (2002). The BBC’s mock prisoners turned out to be more assertive than Zimbardo’s. The British experimenters called the Stanford experiment “a study of what happens when a powerful authority figure (Zimbardo) imposes tyranny.”

The Stanford Prison Experiment became widely known outside academia . It was the acknowledged inspiration for Das Experiment (2001), a German movie that was remade in the United States as the direct-to-video film The Experiment (2010). The Stanford Prison Experiment (2015) was created with Zimbardo’s active participation; the dramatic film more closely followed actual events.

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Participants in the infamous 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment reflect on how that study changed their lives

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Stanford University’s alumni magazine has a fascinating article in its July/August issue about the infamous 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment , a psychological study of prison life that went horribly wrong.

The study has, of course, been the subject of several books and documentaries. It has also been referred to frequently during the past decade in the wake of disclosures of abuses by U.S. military and intelligence personnel at prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. But to mark the study’s 40 th anniversary, Stanford alum (and Bloomberg Businessweek deputy editor) Romesh Ratnesar went back to several of the experiment’s key participants and asked them for their recollections of what happened during those six days in the basement of the Stanford psychology building and how it changed their lives. If you’re unfamiliar with the study, this article would be a good place to begin.

The experiment was led by professor Philip Zimbardo , then in his late 30s. He and his team recruited 24 male students, who were randomly divided into two groups: prisoners and guards. The students were told they would be paid $15 a day and that the experiment would run for two weeks.

It lasted only six days.

As Ratnesar explains, “no one knew what, exactly, they were getting into. Forty years later, the Stanford Prison Experiment remains among the most notable — and notorious — research projects ever carried out at the University. For six days, half the study’s participants endured cruel and dehumanizing abuse at the hands of their peers. At various times, they were taunted, stripped naked, deprived of sleep and forced to use plastic buckets as toilets. Some of them rebelled violently; others became hysterical or withdrew into despair. As the situation descended into chaos, the researchers stood by and watched — until one of their colleagues finally spoke out.”

In addition to Zimbardo, Ratnesar interviewed a graduate student who assisted with the study, two of the student “guards,” one of the “prisoners” (who led a “prison revolt” during the experiment), and the female psychologist who became appalled when she saw what was going on and ultimately persuaded Zimbardo to halt the experiment.

Here’s a reflection about the experiment from the graduate student, Craig Haney , who is now a psychology professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz, an authority on the psychological effects of incarceration, and an advocate for prison reform:

I … realized how quickly we get used to things that are shocking one day and a week later become matter-of-fact. During the study, when we decided to move prisoners to different parts of the prison, we realized that they were going to see where they were and be reminded they’re not in a prison — they’re just in the psych building at Stanford. We didn’t want that to happen.

So we put paper bags over their heads. The first time I saw that, it was shocking. By the next day we’re putting bags on their heads and not thinking about it. That happens all the time in real correctional facilities. You get used to it. I do a lot of work in solitary-confinement units, on the psychological effects of supermax prisons. In places like that, when prisoners undergo the so-called therapy counseling, they are kept in actual cages. I constantly remind myself never to get used to seeing the cages.

And here is Zimbardo’s recollection of the moment he realized the truth of what was happening in the experiment — that it was out of control:

We had arranged for everyone involved — the prisoners, guards and staff — to be interviewed on Friday by other faculty members and graduate students who had not been involved in the study. Christina Maslach, who had just finished her PhD, came down the night before. She’s standing outside the guard quarters and watches the guards line up the prisoners for the 10 o’clock toilet run. The prisoners come out, and the guards put bags over their heads, chain their feet together and make them put their hands on each other’s shoulders, like a chain gang. They’re yelling and cursing at them. Christina starts tearing up. She said, “I can’t look at this.”

I ran after her and we had this argument outside Jordan Hall. She said, “It’s terrible what you’re doing to these boys. How can you see what I saw and not care about the suffering?” But I didn’t see what she saw. And I suddenly began to feel ashamed. This is when I realized I had been transformed by the prison study to become the prison administrator. At that point I said, “You’re right. We’ve got to end the study.”

Maslach was dating Zimbardo at the time, and soon became his wife. Interestingly, it was that relationship, she told Ratnesar, that enabled her to speak out. She said she wasn’t sure that she would have had the courage to confront Zimbardo if they had been only work colleagues.

The experiment generated immediate controversy. Although a 1973 review by the American Psychological Association found that the experiment hadn’t breached existing ethical standards, those standards were later revised to ensure against any similar kinds of behavioral studies.

You can read all the interviews, and see photos of the participants (including some taken during the experiment itself) at Stanford Magazine’s website .

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• Personality

Twilight of the Stanford Prison Experiment

The infamous experiment was even more deeply flawed than previously suspected..

Posted September 27, 2019 | Reviewed by Devon Frye

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The infamous Stanford Prison experiment (SPE), conducted in 1971—in which Philip Zimbardo recruited young men to become either "prisoners" or "guards" in a mock prison, with disastrous results—has long drawn criticism for its sloppy methodology and the exaggerated conclusions about the psychology of evil that Zimbardo drew from it.

In the subsequent decades, Zimbardo has repeatedly claimed that the SPE illustrated the “power of the situation” in driving good people to behave in cruel and dehumanizing ways. However, critics of the SPE have long suspected that Zimbardo’s analysis was far from the truth.

In 2018, archival data about the SPE was made available online, which permitted a much more thorough investigation than has previously been possible of what really happened during this experiment. An analysis of this data by Le Texier (2019) shows that Zimbardo misrepresented his findings and that his conclusions about the “power of the situation” are untenable.

Zimbardo claimed that his experiment demonstrated that “individual behavior is largely under the control of social forces and environmental contingencies, things that occur, rather than some vague notions of personality traits, character, willpower , or other empirically unvalidated constructs” (cited by LeTexier, 2019). He even went so far as to claim that the SPE extended the work of Milgram, whose famous obedience experiments showed that people could be induced to deliver electric shocks to someone against their will at the behest of an authority figure.

Zimbardo actually claimed that the SPE showed that an authority figure was not even necessary to induce people to behave badly. Simply “having participants embedded in a social context where the power resided in the situation” was enough, as participants in his experiment supposedly adopted the roles they were assigned and acted accordingly. According to Zimbardo, aggression by those assigned to be guards was “emitted simply as a ‘natural’ consequence of being in the uniform of a ‘Guard’ and asserting the power inherent in that role” (Le Texier, 2019).

However, LeTexier’s analysis shows that Zimbardo had actually decided in advance what conclusions he wanted to demonstrate. For example, on only the second day of the experiment, he put out a press release stating that prisons dehumanize their inmates and therefore need to be reformed. Moreover, contrary to his repeated claims that participants in the experiment assigned to the role of guards were not told how to treat the prisoners and were free to make up their own rules, the archival data clearly show that the guards were told in advance what was expected of them, how they were to mistreat the prisoners, and were given a detailed list of rules to follow to ensure that prisoners were humiliated and dehumanized.

Furthermore, Zimbardo and his research team were highly assertive in ensuring that participants acted as “tough guards,” contrary to Zimbardo’s claims that they just fall naturally into their roles. For example, in the orientation session for guards on the first day of the experiment, Zimbardo’s assistant David Jaffe, who acted as a prison warden, even read out a list handwritten by Zimbardo entitled: “Processing in—Dehumanizing experience,” that included instructions like, “Ordered around. Arbitrariness. Guards never use names, only number. Never request, order.” This contradicts Zimbardo’s claims that dehumanizing behavior like calling the prisoners by their numbers rather than their names was something the guards came up with themselves. Additionally, after the experiment, some of the guards stated that either Zimbardo or Jaffe had directed them to act in specific ways at various times during the study.

Not surprisingly, some of the guards did mistreat the prisoners. Indeed, one guard, nicknamed “John Wayne” by the prisoners went out of his way to do so. More interesting though, is that some of the guards resisted mistreating the prisoners, despite being under considerable pressure to do so. For example, the archive contains an audio recording of a formal meeting between Warden Jaffe and a guard, John Mark, who had been unwilling to treat the prisoners harshly (Haslam, Reicher, & Van Bavel, 2019). [1]

During the meeting, Jaffe repeatedly remonstrates with Mark, telling him that for the experiment to “work,” they need all the guards “to be what we call a tough guard.” Jaffe makes clear that the aim of the experiment is to simulate a prison in which all the guards are tough, so they can study how this affects the prisoners, and without the guards’ cooperation , “the experiment falls apart.” This interaction makes clear that the experimenters were actively attempting to persuade the participants to behave in a certain way by convincing them that mistreating the prisoners had a valid scientific purpose. Despite this, Guard Mark did not seem very convinced by Jaffe’s arguments, as he did not accept the stereotype of the tough guard and did not see himself getting into this kind of role.

In their analysis of the archival data, Haslam et al. (2019) have argued that this shows that, contrary to Zimbardo’s role-based account of how participants behaved, it is actually quite difficult to induce people to mistreat others and that whether the guards mistreated the prisoners or not depended to a great extent on whether they were persuaded to follow the leadership of the experimenters—specifically, their appeals to the scientific importance of the experiment.

Hence, their behavior was not an automatic response to the “power of the situation” but was to some extent a reflection of their own values and desires. While some guards, like “John Wayne,” enthusiastically embraced this leadership, others, like John Mark, chose to actively resist it. This accords with the argument I made in a previous article critiquing the SPE that, far from showing that situational forces outweigh or overpower individual factors, such as personality , how people behave is a function of both environmental demands and individual characteristics of the person.

One thing I find striking about the SPE is that the experimenters worked very hard to produce a predetermined result, to push people to behave a specific way, and yet they were only partially successful. Similarly, in Milgram’s obedience experiments, even when participants were under considerable pressure to obey the experimenter’s commands to continue shocking the learner against his will, about a third or more of participants refused to do so. Hence, even strong situations are not quite as powerful as certain social psychologists have asserted.

In a previous article , I discussed the psychology of “moral rebels”: people who resist situational pressure to behave in ways that go against their moral values. The study I discussed in that article (Sonnentag & McDaniel, 2013) suggested that highly moral individuals may regard morality as more central to their identity than less moral individuals, and this "trait integration" may give them the courage of their convictions that allows them to resist pressure to go against their own values. This is worth considering when discussing the psychology of evil.

Much of Zimbardo’s discourse on this subject has amounted to absolving people of responsibility for their own choices. For example, he has often drawn parallels between prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib and what happened in the SPE, stating , “I believed our soldiers were good apples that someone had put into a very bad barrel in that prison dungeon.” In other words, it’s not the person, but the situation that is responsible. On the contrary, a close examination of the SPE shows that it takes a lot more than simply putting on a uniform to make someone act badly. In fact, even when assertively pressured to mistreat others, it is still possible to resist if one is willing to do so.

Considering moral rebels as an example suggests that supposedly “empirically unvalidated constructs” like character may actually make an important difference. It could be that people who are very clear about their moral values may be more able to resist attempts to persuade them to behave in inhumane ways, even if these are justified by appeals to some alleged higher purpose.

[1] The tape can be accessed online here ; the interview starts at 8:38 minutes. A written transcript is available here .

Haslam, S. A., Reicher, S. D., & Van Bavel, J. J. (2019). Rethinking the nature of cruelty: The role of identity leadership in the Stanford Prison Experiment. The American Psychologist. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000443

Le Texier, T. (2019). Debunking the Stanford Prison Experiment. The American Psychologist. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000401

Sonnentag, T. L., & McDaniel, B. L. (2013). Doing the Right Thing in the Face of Social Pressure: Moral Rebels and Their Role Models Have Heightened Levels of Moral Trait Integration. Self and Identity, 12(4), 432–446. https://doi.org/10.1080/15298868.2012.691639

Scott McGreal is a psychology researcher with a particular interest in individual differences, especially in personality and intelligence.

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Stanford Prison Experiment

In 2015, The Stanford Prison Experiment was released in theaters. The movie detailed an infamous 1971 experiment in which 24 college students were “put in prison.” While the “experiment” was supposed to last for two weeks, it was terminated after just six days due to the psychological effects it was having on both the “guards” and “prisoners.”

So what actually happened during the Stanford Prison Experiment? Why is it so infamous? Does the movie get everything right, or is it just a dramatization? Find out for yourself. 

What Was the Stanford Prison Experiment?

After Stanley Milgram’s experiment rocked the world of psychology, many people were left with questions about obedience, power dynamics, and the abuse of power. Philip Zimbardo, a professor at Stanford, wanted to explore these questions further. With a grant from the Navy, Zimbardo set up the Stanford Prison Experiment.

Could a person’s role influence their behavior? This is the question Philip Zimbardo wanted to answer.

How Was the Stanford Prison Experiment Conducted?

Zimbardo and his team interviewed 70 applicants at Stanford who were willing to participate in the study for 14 days and receive $15 a day. They wanted to make sure that they chose the brightest and most mentally sound participants. After narrowing their applicants down to 24, the researchers flipped a coin and assigned the roles. Half of the participants would be prisoners and half would be guards. 

The researchers then set up a basement at Stanford to look like a real prison. They were very serious about treating the experiment like a simulation. Prisoners were “arrested” in public and taken into the prison. (They were even booked, fingerprinted, and strip searched.) 

Zimbardo’s team also gave prisoners numbers that they were meant to use instead of their real name. They claimed that it would help give the prisoners a sense of anonymity and help the experiment. 

Guards had pretty much free reign on how they could treat the prisoner, although they had two main rules:

• Guards could not hit the prisoners
• Guards could not put prisoners in solitary confinement (“the hole”) for more than an hour

Zimbardo played the role of prison superintendent. His graduate students and research partners also played roles as members of the “parole board” and the prison warden. 

Prisoners were tasked with certain activities like writing a letter home to their “visitors” and making a case to the parole board about why they should be let off. Guards also subjected the prisoners to “counts” in which they forced the prisoners to do jumping jacks, push-ups, and degrading tasks. 

How Long Did the Stanford Prison Experiment Last? 

It did not take long for the guards to abuse their power. Within one day, a guard hit one of the prisoners with his nightstick.

On the second day, the prisoners tried to rebel and their beds were taken away. To punish the prisoners, the guards shot a fire extinguisher into the cell. Guards used physical and psychological abuse, including sleep deprivation, to punish and intimidate the prisoners throughout the study.

The prisoners were forced to wear dressings and stocking caps the whole time. At some points, guards would put bags over the prisoners’ heads. Since the study has ended, it has been compared to actions at the Abu Ghraib detention center - Zimbardo has written about the case and its parallels to the prison experiment since. 

Why Did It Get Shut Down? 

Very quickly, the guards started to abuse their power. The prisoners started to spiral. On the third day, Prisoner #8612 started to cry and scream uncontrollably. He threatened to harm himself and call a lawyer. To avoid potential psychological damage or a lawsuit, he was let go. Two other prisoners were let go in the next two days. One had refused to eat. 

On the fifth day, Zimbardo’s girlfriend (and former student) came to visit the experiment. Zimbardo and his team had been monitoring the experiment, and playing their roles in it, 24/7. When she saw the horrors of what was going on in the prison, she asked Zimbardo to end the “experiment” immediately. She even threatened to break up with him. 

On the sixth day, Zimbardo ended the experiment. 

Stanford Prison Experiment Movie 

In 2015, a movie about the Stanford Prison Experiment was released on Netflix. The movie is no longer streaming on Netflix, but you can order the DVD version if you want to watch it. Although all movies based on true events are seen through a specific point of view, critics say that this is a very accurate portrayal of what happened during the experiment. 

Why Was the Stanford Prison Experiment Unethical?

This experiment showed the world just how quickly people can abuse power when it’s given to them. But it remains as one of the most controversial experiments in the world of social psychology . There are a few reasons why. 

The first obvious one is the psychological abuse that the prisoners endured during the study. Is it ethical to put human subjects through that kind of distress and trauma, so much so that many couldn’t endure the experiment? 

(Zimbardo claims that none of the participants have suffered long-term psychological consequences from their participation.) 

Was The Stanford Prison Experiment Fake?

In more recent years, critics have also come forward to say that the results were not as “natural” as Zimbardo and his team may want you to think. Transcripts and audio recordings from the Stanford Prison Experiment show that Zimbardo’s team “coached” guards. They told them to be “tough” for the sake of the experiment. 

Even the prisoners may have been “faking” their responses. Prisoner #8612, who is most well-known for his blood-curdling “I’m burning up inside!” has come forward to say that his time in the Stanford County Jail was more of an “improv exercise.” Many critics have likened the experiment to a drama rather than a legitimate psychology experiment. 

Carlo Prescott, the experiment’s prison consultant, has also come forward to say that the experiment’s more cruel treatments were not naturally thought up and executed by the guards alone. He wrote the following in an op-ed:

“Ideas such as bags being placed over the heads of prisoners, inmates being bound together with chains and buckets being used in place of toilets in their cells were all experiences of mine at the old "Spanish Jail" section of San Quentin and which I dutifully shared with the Stanford Prison Experiment braintrust months before the experiment started. To allege that all these carefully tested, psychologically solid, upper-middle-class Caucasian "guards" dreamed this up on their own is absurd.” 

The Lasting Effect of the Stanford Prison Experiment 

The Stanford Prison Experiment seems to have raised more questions than it answered. Where should psychologists draw the line when it comes to subjecting participants to distress? How easily can psychologists blur the lines of “experiment” vs. “simulation” or “drama?” And if the Stanford Prison Experiment didn’t exactly answer its original questions about power dynamics and obedience , what similar experiments can? How can the Stanford Prison experiment be improved? 

These are just some of the questions that psychologists face today. Maybe your work can help to figure out the answers!

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Sundance Film Review: ‘The Stanford Prison Experiment’

Billy Crudup plays psychologist Philip Zimbardo in this by turns gripping, tedious and deliberately discomfiting re-creation of a notorious 1971 prison simulation.

By Justin Chang

Justin Chang

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An elaborate behavioral simulation spirals shockingly out of control — and to a lesser degree, so does the movie — in “ The Stanford Prison Experiment ,” a grimly staged dramatic reconstruction of Philip Zimbardo’s notorious 1971 scientific inquiry into the psychology of power and the human capacity for inflicting and accepting abuse. In an ambitious step up from his intimate character studies “Easier With Practice” and “C.O.G.,” director Kyle Patrick Alvarez commits to a fully immersive procedural approach that potently conveys the study’s lengthy duration and claustrophobic intensity, making for a viewing experience that is by turns gripping, tedious and deliberately discomfiting. But for all its bludgeoning effectiveness, the film also manages to be at once heavy-handed in some respects and annoyingly vague in others; although sure to have its defenders, it’s probably too strong a dose of foul medicine to catch on significantly with the public.

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Perhaps performing their own sort of audience case study, the directors of the 2015 Sundance Film Festival have programmed a pair of pictures centered around the galvanizing work of two leading social psychologists: Stanley Milgram, the subject of Michael Almereyda’s provocatively form-busting biopic “Experimenter,” and Zimbardo, the not-quite-subject of Alvarez’s more conventional and confrontational third feature. While both scientists have drawn no shortage of criticism for performing controversial experiments that would almost certainly never be allowed today, history has largely vindicated the disturbing relevance of their discoveries about a person’s willingness to inflict pain, whether they’re merely following orders (the 1960s Milgram study) or acting out their designated roles (the Zimbardo experiment). And in the post-Abu Ghraib era — or indeed, any contemporary reality where a uniform and a weapon confer authority — the instructiveness of both films and the studies that inspired them should scarcely be underestimated.

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Adapted from Zimbardo’s 2007 book “The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil,” which revisited the discoveries of his famous experiment almost 40 years later, Tim Talbott’s screenplay wastes no time on character backstories or other contextual niceties, opening with the August 1971 auditioning process conducted by Stanford psychology professor Zimbardo ( Billy Crudup ) and his team of researchers. Eighteen male students are screened and selected to play either guards or inmates in the “Stanford County Jail,” the site of a two-week observational study for which they will receive $15 a day. The decision to throw the viewer right in is a shrewd one: We know nothing about these young men (not even their names), making each one that much more chilling a blank slate.

Initially, at least, they all seem like bright, good-humored guys, their laid-back speech and ’70s attire bespeaking a greater affinity with the era’s countercultural ethos than with any sort of fascist tendencies; when asked whether they would prefer to play guards or prisoners, nearly all of them choose the latter. But the power of an artificially imposed scenario, or something so simple as a change of wardrobe, turns out to be more suggestive than even Zimbardo imagines. On day one, the guards, wearing uniforms and intimidating shades, round up their prisoners in a series of mock arrests and lock them in the basement of Stanford’s Jordan Hall — a tight, airless hallway where a few empty classrooms have been converted into cells. There, they order the prisoners to strip naked, spray them with disinfectant, and force them into beige smocks and stocking caps. Even during these early and relatively benign preliminaries, something in the atmosphere has decisively shifted.

Among the guards’ strict orders: Prisoners must remain almost entirely silent, eat at designated mealtimes, and address every guard as “Mr. Correctional Officer.” Failure to obey will, of course, result in punishment. Perhaps the experiment’s most important ground rule is that participants are forbidden from physically assaulting each other, though that doesn’t stop the guards from barking orders at the top of their lungs, or slamming their nightsticks against the walls and cell bars (every loud crack registers with visceral force in the excellent sound design) in response to even the slightest infraction. And it doesn’t take long for the half-naked prisoners to protest when they’re regularly trotted out of their cells for any number of humiliating activities, or roused in the middle of the night for exhausting group exercises. Two of the more rebellious inmates, known only as No. 8612 (Ezra Miller) and No. 819 (Tye Sheridan), attempt to fight back and establish solidarity with their fellow inmates, and are forced to spend long periods of time in a dark closet referred to as “the hole” as a consequence.

“Aren’t these guys taking this a bit too seriously?” one guy asks at one point. It’s a question that rebounds uncomfortably not only on the prisoners, but also on Zimbardo and his collaborators, who watch on ever-present surveillance cameras as their simulation disintegrates, over just a few days, into a circus of degradation and a possibly enormous liability. The less controlled the experiment, of course, the more potentially revealing it becomes, underlining the notion that the study of behavior is worthless unless it can push into the more extreme gray zones of human experience.

Alvarez proves highly attentive to the tricky legal, ethical and scientific minefield that Zimbardo must navigate as various prisoners try to either escape or make their case before a faux parole board, at which point all parties involved seem to enter into an almost surreal realm of situational make-believe. That’s especially true of Jesse Fletcher (the excellent Nelsan Ellis, “Get On Up”), an ex-con who spent 17 years in San Quentin and is brought in to help enforce and legitimize the experiment. It’s also true of Zimbardo, who stubbornly presses on with the experiment and brooks no dissent from anyone — not even Christina Maslach (Olivia Thirlby), a much younger student-turned-love interest, whose words of protest fall on deaf ears.

Strictly on a technical level, Alvarez’s filmmaking is largely faultless here. D.p. Jas Shelton’s use of widescreen expertly captures the tense group dynamics at play and the often-violent choreography of bodies within the frame, and his camera manages to find dynamic angles on the action while crucially conveying the suffocating sense of a locked-in environment. (Anytime the film moves outside the mock-prison setting, sparely appointed by production designer Gary Barbosa, the sense of relief is almost physically palpable.) And Andrew Hewitt’s score, by turns churning and ominous, adds a necessary jolt of momentum that keeps the proceedings from becoming as clinical as the context might demand.

At a certain point, however, the combination of relentless forward drive and gruesomely fastidious detail, while audacious and admirable in theory, begins to pay dwindling returns in a picture that feels rather longer than its 122-minute running time. Not unlike the study from which it derives its title, “The Stanford Prison Experiment” is an endurance test by design; to say that it’s often hell to sit through may be more of an objective observation than a legitimate complaint. The problem is not that this film is upsetting (it should be), but that it ultimately seems more interested in, and skilled at, dispensing regular shocks than fresh insights.

Alvarez himself has demonstrated a certain playful, almost experimental mindset toward his previous male protagonists (the relationally stunted hero of “Easier With Practice,” the young man torn between homosexuality and Christianity in “C.O.G.”), placing them in a series of increasingly uncomfortable scenarios, and monitoring their emotional progress with a detachment that didn’t necessarily preclude affection. He elicits excellent performances here from a sprawling ensemble with no shortage of standouts: Miller, unsurprisingly, shows a terrifying level of commitment to his role as one of the experiment’s most vocal protestors, while Michael Angarano is ferocious as the lead guard, who plays his designated role with far more sadistic abandon than anyone anticipated. And Chris Sheffield is quietly moving as a gentle prisoner whose principled attempt to hold onto one last shred of his identity becomes a powerfully understated act of defiance.

In the end, however, the picture seems stranded between two irreconcilable impulses: to individuate its characters, but also to treat them as abstract representatives of an all-too-corruptible humanity. Nowhere is this more apparent than with the depiction of Zimbardo himself, who became as dangerously caught up in the experiment as anyone else involved; yet in the aftermath of the whole affair (which was cut short after just six days), he crucially subjected all participants, himself included, to hours of psychological debriefing and a necessary moral reckoning.

The closing titles extol Zimbardo as a landmark figure in psychology — an interpretation that’s almost entirely at odds with Crudup’s performance, which presents the scientist as a nearly cardboard villain: callous, arrogant and almost criminally reckless, a one-man study in authoritarianism run amok. “We have become part of this experiment, whether we like it or not,” one of his collaborators opines, needlessly articulating a point that, like too much in “The Stanford Prison Experiment,” will have long become obvious to anyone who’s been paying attention.

Reviewed at Sundance Film Festival (competing), Jan. 26, 2015. Running time: 122 MIN.

• Production: A Sandbar Pictures & Abandon Features presentation in association with Coup d’Etat Films, Vineyard Point Prods. (International sales: UTA, Los Angeles.) Produced by Brent Emery, Lizzie Friedman, Karen Lauder, Greg Little, Lauren Bratman. Executive producers, Katie Leary, Bob Leary, Brian Geraghty. Co-producer, Rachel Lauder. Co-executive producers, Michael Paesano, Eric Alini.
• Crew: Directed by Kyle Patrick Alvarez. Screenplay, Tim Talbott, based on the book “The Lucifer Effect” by Philip Zimbardo. Camera (color), Jas Shelton; editor, Fernando Collins; music, Andrew Hewitt; production designer, Gary Barbosa; art director, Andres Cubillan; set decorator, Sandra Skora; costume designer, Lisa Tomczeszyn; sound, Reza Moosavi; supervising sound editor/re-recording mixer, Martyn Zub; stunt coordinator, Lou Simon; associate producers, Laurence Duccheschi, Chris Heltzel, Adam Shazar; assistant director, Jacques Terblanche; casting, Angela Demo, Barbara McCarthy.
• With: Billy Crudup, Michael Angarano, Moises Arias, Nicholas Braun, Gaius Charles, Keir Gilchrist, Ki Hong Lee, Thomas Mann, Ezra Miller, Logan Miller, Tye Sheridan, Johnny Simmons, James Wolk, Olivia Thirlby, Nelsan Ellis, Matt Bennett, Jesse Carere, Brett Davern, James Frecheville, Miles Heizer, Jack Kilmer, Callan McAuliffe, Benedict Samuel, Chris Sheffield, Harrison Thomas.

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The guy behind the Stanford prison experiment claims video games and porn are destroying men.

Photo by Nebojsa Bobic /Shutterstock

In 1971, the psychologist Philip Zimbardo spearheaded the Stanford prison experiment to show how the hierarchy of the penitentiary system could turn otherwise reasonable men into monsters. Now, Zimbardo has identified a new threat to mankind: the Internet. Excessive video game use and porn consumption, Zimbardo says, is turning modern young men into limp, loveless losers. It’s a theory he’s pushed with increasing urgency over the past several years. In 2011, Zimbardo delivered a TED talk titled “ The Demise of Guys? ” The next year, he penned an e-book based on the talk titled The Demise of Guys , no more question mark. And this month, Zimbardo released his full-length tract: Man (Dis)connected: How Technology Has Sabotaged What It Means to Be Male, and What Can Be Done .

Man (Dis)connected (written by Zimbardo with a co-author, Nikita Coulombe) proffers a host of explanations for this crisis of masculinity—too many female teachers, too few father figures, too much soda—but it reserves its most damning critique for video games and porn. The Independent calls the work a “study” that takes an “in-depth look into the lives of 20,000 young men and their relationships with video games and pornography.” It’s not, and it doesn’t.

Zimbardo told the BBC last week that “almost every statement we make is evidence-based,” but that depends on what you mean by “evidence.” The research that underpins the book doesn’t come from a peer-reviewed study. It comes from a survey that Zimbardo posted online alongside his 2011 TED talk. It amassed 20,000 responses in two months, but not just from “young men”: Only 39.8 percent of respondents were under the age of 25, and about one-quarter of all respondents were female. Many of them had just watched a video where the psychologist administering the survey told them that young men have been “digitally rewired” to fail at life and love and that if radical social changes didn’t happen soon, humans would be reduced to “banana slugs.”

The survey itself is … not good. In an appendix, the authors note that the survey originally defined “excessive” gaming and porn consumption as “2 or more hours per day,” but that they “later” changed the definition to “4 or more hours a week of gaming or 2 or more hours per week of porn use.” That’s a radical difference, and the swap is not explained. Some questions were so vague that they seemed designed to promote Zimbardo’s thesis. One asked respondents whether they believed in a “strong relationship between excessive video game playing and/or porn watching” and a “lack of interest in pursuing or maintaining a romantic relationship/social isolation.” But we have no idea which of the two definitions of “excessive” the respondents were using, and feeling socially isolated is a different experience from losing all interest in relationships. Things got similarly squishy when it came time to report the results. At one point, the authors write that “a lot of young men in our own 20,000-person survey said that porn distorted their idea of a healthy sexual relationship.” How many is “a lot”? We’re never told.

Worse, the survey questions focused on respondents’ opinions, not on their actual experiences. It didn’t ask young men about how their own lives are affected by porn and video games—it could have asked about the amount of time they spend playing games every day and the number of social interactions they have per week, then studied how those numbers matched up. Instead, it asked respondents to opine on the behavior of young men in general . The survey wasn’t designed to illuminate truths about the lives of young men; it was designed to confirm people’s assumptions about them. Some of the quotes culled from the survey—Zimbardo also invited respondents to write extemporaneously on the topic—sound more like homework assignments than diary entries: “I think the on-demand pleasure, gratification, control and stress release of pornography and video games reduces our patience, makes us hold ourselves to unrealistic expectations and cripples us socially,” one high-school boy said, as if in response to an essay prompt.

Some of the anecdotal evidence produced by the survey is distressing. “I play video games and watch pornography on a regular basis,” one respondent said. “I’ve hated the tiresome aspect of having to make the effort to appease the opposite sex. It’s expensive, confusing and rarely successful.” That sounds like a boy crying out for help. But an anecdote is not a trend. In the book’s introduction, Zimbardo writes, “You don’t have to look too far to see what we’re talking about; everyone knows a young man who is struggling.” (Sure. I’m also acquainted with a struggling young woman, a struggling old man, and a struggling middle-aged dog.) Sometimes, even the anecdotes have to be stretched past the point of recognition to fit the thesis. The book asserts that young men are suffering from “a growing feeling of penis envy” contracted from watching too much porn. “This can be seen in public locker rooms,” the authors write, “where many young men refuse to disrobe, undressing in the showers and covering themselves when they come out.”

Other lines don’t even rise to the level of an anecdote. They’re just non sequiturs. Young men today “seem to be emulating successful media celebrities and personalities such as David Beckham, the swimmer Michael Phelps, and entrepreneur Mark Zuckerberg,” the authors write. “New emasculating terms such as ‘man-child’ and ‘moodle’ (man-poodle) have emerged,” they say. And a “good portion of men” exhibit “a deep preference for male company and bonding over association or partnership with women.” The evidence? The plots of My Fair Lady and She’s All That . Zimbardo’s most creative invention is perhaps the claim that porn is making young men impotent. “When the male sexual enhancement drug Viagra was first promoted, its advertisers featured white-haired older men,” the book claims. “Now consider that more men under 30 years old are being prescribed Viagra than ever to ensure adequate sexual performance.” But Viagra commercials still feature silver foxes . As for the vague claim that more young men are taking Viagra “than ever”: Zimbardo’s source is a 2008 Daily Mail story that reports, “[H]ealth experts say ever-younger men are increasingly turning to Viagra in a bid to keep up with modern women inspired by the strong female characters in films such as Sex And The City , starring Sarah Jessica Parker.”

Just like lazy investigations into youth “hookup culture” that interview only young women , Man (Dis)connected suffers by focusing on only the suffering of young men. As the New Scientist ’s Chris Baraniuk put it , “Because we don’t get under their skin, women’s lives look positively rosy by contrast.” The past also ends up looking pretty swell. Zimbardo’s argument requires him to isolate a period in time when young men started to go downhill, and he picks the 1977 debut of Star Wars as the beginning of the end. That’s convenient for Zimbardo, who was in his mid-40s by that time. He gets to say that he was raised back when men were men. In those days, “when teenage boys got together they would play sports, ride their bicycles, drive around aimlessly, and play cards,” the authors write. “They drank and smoked and nearly died running around with BB guns and building rafts to float down rivers that would fill up after heavy rains.” Even if that were true, it says nothing of how these men treated women. The book just assumes that in the good old days, men enjoyed strong relationships and even stronger erections. There are interesting questions to be asked about what my colleague Hanna Rosin calls the “End of Men ,” but truthfully investigating how some young men could perform better at school or craft healthier relationships requires us to be honest about what a boy’s life really used to be like.

Exploring the pitfalls of pre-Internet male culture would be a thesis-destroying endeavor. Instead, the book just ignores the question. “A lot of young men in the Westernized world have developed a Madonna-Whore complex,” the authors write. (Pretty sure that was coined before Star Wars .) One young woman who filled out the survey said of male pornography use, “[T]he older generations never had to deal with this, they don’t understand that young men need to be educated about sex as an act that is enjoyable to both parties.” That attitude assumes that at every other point in American history young men were raised to prioritize female sexual pleasure. Find evidence of that , and then we can begin to entertain the idea that the Internet is to blame.

This article is part of Future Tense, a collaboration among  Arizona State University , New America , and  Slate . Future Tense explores the ways emerging technologies affect society, policy, and culture. To read more, visit the  Future Tense blog  and the  Future Tense home page . You can also  follow us on Twitter .