Transcription
[bees buzzing] [bees buzzing]
[Jerry Shue] In a very extreme situation, different people behaved in different ways. We want to think that everybody's capable of being bad but us. "If I'd have been there, I wouldn't have done that." But that's not what happened.
[Glenn Gee] What do you think would happen if you took a bunch of college kids, randomly assign them to be prisoners and guards, with costumes and everything, and lock them in a basement? Well, this is what happened 50 years ago.
[montage of disparate voices]
[Shue] I've only been in jail once. Stanford Prison Experiment. [chuckles]
[Cathy Lee Crosby] At Stanford University, an experiment was conducted that became a classic in the annals of social psychology.
[Newscaster] Professor Philip Zimbardo conducted a legendary experiment by randomly assigning students to the roles of prison guards and prisoners. The experiment proved so dangerous that he had to end it prematurely.
[Philip Zimbardo] We see how quickly the good boys become brutal guards.
[John Mark] Professor Zimbardo said that evil isn't just in some of us; it's in all of us.
[Doug Korpi] The control of the narrative has been Phil's.
[Zimbardo] We turn to a man who always has something up his sleeve.
[Korpi] The experiment has been used to explain real-life atrocities.
[Zimbardo] The situation he was in corrupted him.
[Shue] It disturbs me that an individual can make something the status quo for a personal benefit.
[Zimbardo] Yo, it's Phil Zimbardo.
[Thibault Le Texier] He's been telling the story for 50 years. He's believing his narrative is what really happened.
[Clay Ramsay] There are other things that happened that we should have been told.
[Le Texier] Most of the participants haven't been interviewed.
[John Loftus] Zimbardo put out a nice, simple answer, but it'd be great if somebody interviews all those people involved and just see how complex this is.
[Guard] One, two.
[Guard] Looking good, fellas.
[Guard] Three, four.
[Guard] So haven't you learned from anything?
[Prisoner] I want out! I want out! I want out right now!
[Guard] Hold this.
[Prisoner] Right now, I want out! I want out!
[whistle blows, tape rewinds]
[Dave Eshleman] You may think you know what you're dealing with, but believe me, you don't.
[Prisoner singing] ♪ Since I saw God... ♪
[birds chirping]
[Producer] Good? We'll get started.
-Yeah!
-Alright.
[Shue] What do you want to talk about?
[Producer] You.
[Chuck Burton] Nobody from the media has ever interviewed me. Are we hard to find?
[Eshleman] The interest in it never seems to fade. The only reason that I'm still talking about it is because people want to hear about it.
[Korpi] About once every decade, somebody asks me about it, and I realize, "Wow, that was kind of special." [chuckles] And I tell stories. And this thing was 50 years ago or whatever, so. Yeah.
[Producer] Yet we're still talking about it.
[Korpi] Still talking about it. Oh, no, no. I remember... Okay, it's all coming back to me now.
[bell ringing] [dog barking]
[Loftus] In the summer of 1971, I was trying to find a summer job.
[Eshleman] I saw an ad in the newspaper that they were doing a prison experiment and that they were paying $15 a day. It wasn't that bad for minimum wage-type work.
[Shue] It was $15 a day and three meals and a roof and a padded bed. And I thought, "I've just arrived."
[Burton] And that sounded good for me. I didn't have any money.
[Eshleman] I didn't know anything about prisons other than what I see in movies. I had no opinion about them other than that they must be very evil places.
[Korpi] I didn't give a [bleep]. All I cared about was a summer job.
[Ramsay] They were going to do this for two weeks in August.
[Karl Van Orsdol] It was being run by Stanford, and Zimbardo had a high reputation in the community.
[Loftus] We called him a disco psychologist.
[Van Orsdol] I applied, and I didn't really know anything about it.
[Ramsay] I figured it was going to be an imitation prison of some kind.
[Korpi] I needed to study for the Graduate Record Exam, and I thought, "Oh, my god. This is a great thing. It's a prison experiment. I'll have all this time in the cell. I'll bring my books. I'll study." I thought it was the perfect job. [chuckles]
[Van Orsdol] At Stanford University back in 1971...
[Zimbardo] We wanted to see just what happens when you put good people in a bad situation. In this case, in jail.
[Van Orsdol] We created a prison. And in that mock prison, we put a number of young men, college students from all over the country who happen to be in the San Francisco area in the summer.
[Zimbardo] We started with 100 people that called us answering an ad, and we interviewed them, gave them personality tests.
[Van Orsdol] I remember it being presented as an experiment on how individuals deal with captivity in a specific sort of prison-like situation.
[Burton] There's gonna be no threat of violence, no threat of sexual assault.
[Eshleman] They gave me a psychological profile test. One of these lengthy questionnaires. They tried to see if you got some kind of pathology or something like that.
[Loftus] They ask you your background and had you ever been in jail, 'cause they didn't want anybody that had actually been in jail.
[Korpi] And I remember signing a contract. You couldn't leave unless you had a good cause, like something physical.
[Burton] Out of the 125 people, the smaller group of people that they felt were the most psychologically stable, which I thought was hilarious, 'cause I didn't feel very psychologically stable.
[Zimbardo] We picked two dozen, and then we flipped a coin and said, "These guys are guards and these guys are prisoners."
[Phil Donahue] What were your instructions to the guards?
[Zimbardo] We simply said maintain law and order, don't let the prisoners escape, and the control of the prison is up to you.
[Burton] This was the '70s. We were all rebellious, young, drug-using, anti-war, long-haired kids. Everybody involved in this could imagine being a prisoner. Not one person could put themselves into the mindset of being a guard.
[Shue] I was glad to hear that I would be a prisoner. I figured that would be a passive role.
[Korpi] I imagined that I would have time to study, so I imagined myself being a prisoner.
[Van Orsdol] I didn't sort of volunteer to be a guard.
[Eshleman] I said I would have preferred to be a prisoner, but I was chosen instead to be a guard. I was a little disappointed, but it was still $15 a day, so, hey, you know, let's do it.
[Loftus] They sent us guards out to a surplus store and we were supposed to pick out uniforms.
[Van Orsdol] I had the khaki uniform that we were issued.
[Eshleman] We were issued a night stick, mirrored sunglasses, a uniform.
[Burton] That was so contrary to the identity that probably any of us young men had ever thought of as like authoritarian, rough, mean. Having reflecting sunglasses and a uniform, carrying a club was just like, you know, "What is that?" Hehh, wah! I mean.
[Zimbardo] We only wanted to have normal, healthy, average American youth.
[Donahue] Yeah.
[Zimbardo] When we began, there was no difference between the people who were gonna play guards and the people who were gonna play prisoners.
♪ ♪
[Korpi] On Sunday morning, I'm waiting in my home, and this cop car comes up. And a guy is in the street with a huge camera. And a cop comes to my door and he says, "We're arresting you." So I can't imagine what the neighbors were thinking.
[Shue] They had the police handcuff me and take me downstairs.
[Korpi] There's a camera filming Doug who's got his hand on the top of the car. And they're frisking him. They're putting him in handcuffs.
[camera shutter clicks]
[Korpi] They put me in the back of the cop car. They drove off, and this guy is filming the whole thing. And I really wanted to tell the neighbors, "This is just an experiment!"
[siren]
[Shue] The next thing I remember is the cops fingerprinting us at the police station.
[Van Orsdol] I remember being a little shocked at the level of authenticity. It was a real event in a way in these prisoners' lives.
[camera shutter clicking]
[Zimbardo] We tried to create an environment which was a functional simulation of what happens in prison.
[Shue] As you can see in the footage, when the police dropped us off, we were blindfolded at that point. We didn't know where we were, and we just wound up in this hallway. I just remember being told to strip.
[Guard] Socks off, too.
[Shue] And stand with my hands against the wall, and they sprayed me.
[Eshleman] We would make them wear these very simple, scratchy smocks.
[Loftus] A smock with their number on it.
[Eshleman] It kind of went down to mid-thigh, and they didn't let them wear their underwear.
[Loftus] They would be wearing a nylon stock over their head to simulate having shaved heads.
[Korpi] They put like chains, just on one foot, and lock.
[Shue] It was part of their plan to dehumanize us.
[Van Orsdol] They became an object in a system as opposed to an individual.
[Korpi] There were three prison cells, and each of the cells was the size of a small bedroom with a couple of mattresses. And they had windows on the doors with bars on them so that you can come by and take a look in there and see what was going on.
[Loftus] There was a camera at the end of the hall. There was a false wall and a hole in it. And if there's anybody in the hall, it was recording behavior.
[Gee] From your cell, one couldn't see the entire hallway. All I can do is hear the noise.
[Mark] At first, everything about it was uncomfortable, except probably the sunglasses 'cause I did like to wear sunglasses. Especially if your eyes are red from getting high, that was helpful.
[Burton] First day, there was that feeling of awkwardness to kind of get us into our roles. But that feeling disappeared very quickly with all the stuff that was happening.
[Eshleman] I took a leadership role, deliberately. Somebody must have been spending a lot of money to have this experiment put on, and they were trying to show the bad effects of prison, but nothing was happening. I said, "Okay, here's what we're gonna do." I was making the plans.
[whistle blows]
[Guard] Morning, girls!
[Guard] Open the cell.
[indistinct shouting]
[Eshleman] We would get them out of their cells, line them up in the hallway.
[Eshleman] And I would take them through drills.
[Prisoners] One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine.
[Eshleman] I shouted in their faces quite a bit.
[Korpi] One of the guards, we called him John Wayne.
[Eshleman] They gave me the nickname John Wayne. And it's kind of curious, because John Wayne never played evil characters in his films, he always played the hero. Well, we were all against the Vietnam War. John Wayne came out in full support of the Vietnam War. So if you're an evil dude, you're an enemy...
[indistinct shouting]
...you're John Wayne.
[Shue] John Wayne was a very dramatic presence.
[Eshleman] This time, louder.
[Korpi] He kept doing irritating things.
[Eshleman] You tell me who's boss.
[whistle blows]
[Eshleman] At first, I tried to make it kind of entertaining, and I would make up the drills as I pretty much went along.
[Eshleman] It was singing stupid songs or it was telling the guy next to you that you loved him. Anything that we thought would be kind of humiliating for guys.
[Eshleman] We had them refer to us as, "Yes, Mr. Correctional Officer."
[Eshleman] We referred to them by their numbers.
[Eshleman] So all things designed to sort of dehumanize the prisoners.
[Shue] We started out having fun, laughing and joking. And they told us to chant something, we would bastardize it somehow. [laughter]
[Korpi] And you know that the "guards" couldn't hurt you. I mean, it's an experiment, for God's sakes. We're all White, middle-class students. What are they gonna do to us?
[Shue] They started to selectively punish smartasses.
[Van Orsdol] Just harassment, basically, and wanting the prisoners to show respect to the guards.
[Zimbardo] We're really dealing now with power relationships between people who have some power to control others and people who allow themselves to be controlled. It's a gradual process. You get socialized into the role.
[Eshleman] It's almost surreal when you think about it. Everybody was taking this as if it were a real prison. I think that I took control of the group of guards and they followed my lead.
♪ ♪ ♪ ♪
[Korpi] I had just finished my freshman year where I had gone through hazing at a fraternity. And they would take us through different humiliations. They poured molasses all over my head. They made me rub this very burning ointment on my genitals. I said, "This has got nothing to do with anything. It's just you guys being sadistic bastards." And some of that you hold inside, and if you're in a position where you can return this cruelty to somebody else, maybe you know how to do it.
[Burton] Dave had cultivated this persona of this despised, hated, feared figure of authority that nobody wanted to mess with.
[Burton] I tried to be a sidekick to him in a lot of the stuff we were doing.
[Burton] Everybody was in their role. We were already settling into this is what it's like in a prison.
[Burton] One, two, three, four. We just kind of contrived things to make the prisoners feel bad about themselves. In this very short period of time, we were endeavoring to break them down.
♪ ♪ ♪ ♪
[Burton] My name is Chuck Burton. I live in Mexico for more than half of every year where my name is either Carlos or Carlitos. In 1981, I became a tax preparer, and I basically worked for 36 years doing tax returns. I decided I didn't want to spend my life indoors anymore. So I spend my life outdoors as much as possible. This all fits in the context of a pretty deep Buddhist meditation practice. My younger days were very difficult. I was super small. I was the smallest kid in high school. My parents made the mistake when I was in third grade of skipping me because I was intellectually so far ahead. This was a very difficult thing in my adolescent years and into my early 20s. In the Stanford Prison Experiment, it was one of the first times I can remember in my life feeling powerful.
♪ ♪
[Korpi] So we're in these cells, and I learned they weren't gonna let anybody come in to give me my books. And I thought, well, wait a minute. In prison, they give you books. How can you deny this in an experiment? And there's nothing to do.
[Guard] 3401.
[Korpi] And the guards kept doing irritating things like not giving us utensils to eat and [bleep]. They were making life yucky. But the job was to be a prisoner. And what do prisoners do? They get to act naughty. And we knew we could do anything. So it was like this incredible sense of freedom. So I thought, "Well, we'll make this a rebellion." And it turns out the doors opened into the cells. So I thought, "These guards keep waking us up. Well, screw that. Let's just put the beds in front of the door so they can't come in. Get your bed in front of the door! One vertical, one horizontal. Don't let them in. And that pissed off the guards.
[Guard] Get reinforcements!
[Prisoner] Yeah, you're gonna have to push harder than that.
[Eshleman] That was a reason for us to get tougher with them. We could not have them challenge our authority as guards.
[Zimbardo] The prisoners rebelled. That was the turning point, because then the guards had a reason to crush the rebellion and think of these other students as dangerous prisoners.
[Guard] Get, get them out.
[Prisoner] Oh, man.
[Prisoner] Come on! Come on!
[Eshleman] We took their beds away.
[Burton] Back up.
[Eshleman] To remove that element of comfort.
[Prisoner] Whoa! Whoa!
[Prisoner] Leave me alone. Come on, man.
[Korpi] They beat us when they took the beds out. So they won that round.
[Burton] How about that?
[Korpi] So they're not winning the next round.
[Burton] The prisoners had gotten together and decided that they were gonna fight their way out of this and mounted a rebellion. Get back from the door. At that point, it escalated.
[Korpi] I ripped off my number and I threw it in the hall. And I said, "Let's all rip off our numbers and let's all throw them in the halls." Tear off your numbers!
[Prisoner] Yes!
[Korpi] And when they would call me 8612, I wouldn't respond. I said, "My name is Doug!"
[Prisoner] You can't take our smocks, man.
[Guard] Yes, we are.
[Prisoner] You're not taking our...
[Guard] Smocks off.
[Korpi] They took our smocks. And underneath our smocks, we had nothing. Me and this other guy, they chained us together. One arm to one arm, and one leg to one leg. Naked. So now they're thinking, they got me, they've won. I wasn't gonna let them win. Come on, dogs. I've always been an extrovert. [laughing] A dog's gotta take a dump. I've always had a lot of energy. I'm an energized guy. Growing up, I suffered a cultural lag when I was in high school. And then I went to UC Berkeley, and it was during the really raucous years.
♪ ♪
It was rebellionville. The antiauthoritarian spirit was part of the zeitgeist. We were all feeling this way. That's where I became political. I used to have wonderful hair. [laughs] You got to yell and scream and rail against the man. It taught me that I had a perspective, that I was creative, which means breaking out of the box in some way. I wasn't the usual guy that was just gonna go along with things. I was gonna have my way.
♪ ♪
[Korpi] In the prison cell, there were plugs. And in the plugs, there's a screw. If you take that screw out, you can use that as a screwdriver. The mechanism that locked the door was on the inside. So we use that screw, every time the guard would go out of the way. We'd go and unloosen some of the screws. He'd come back, we'd... [whistles] And he'll be waiting for the shift change. We opened up the door. We looked to see if they were gone. And then hobble down the other way, naked, and around the corner, thinking that we were gonna escape. So they figured out we escaped and they came and got us.
[Guards] Hey, come here! Come on. Come on.
[Korpi] When they threw us back in the cell naked, and I thought, oh, my god. This is not fun anymore. This can't get any better. It can only get worse.
[Loftus] Hands off the door. This one guy was rattling the bars and calling me something, and I grab this fire extinguisher to get him away from the bars, and I sprayed him with it. I thought it was funny.
[Korpi] When the repercussions were being too severe, all I remember thinking, "This is a bad, bad job. I gotta get out of this job."
[Korpi] [bleep] This is for real. These people don't want to let me out. What am I gonna do? And I had to be creative. So I said I had a tummy ache, because I thought that would get me out. So they pulled me in the back, Zimbardo was there, that's where I really remember Zimbardo for the first time. Phil is big, 6-foot-1, 220 pounds. I was 110 and 5'8". He was a professor at Stanford. Zimbardo's a fancy guy. I was intimidated. He said, "Doug, you can't leave because history being made, and you're the leader of the rebellion, for God's sakes. We need your input in this important event." When I came out of that room, I had the definite impression that I couldn't leave the experiment.
[Van Orsdol] Locking them in the hole was the most disturbing. It was a small closet which was very dark and dank and very small. And it would be quite a frightening experience.
[Korpi] They threw me in the hole.
[door slams]
[Korpi] I was in this closet on my side lying down. And it's dark. And I remember being really like, "Oh, [bleep], I can't get out of this experiment." Somebody had control over my life. I'm in this emotional state.
[Shue] I could hear him screaming about, "I'm burning up inside."
[Korpi] I'm [bleep] up. And then I got desperate. I want out! I want out! I want out right now! Right now, I want out! I want out! [hyperventilating]
[Mark] Being isolated in that little dark space, he cracked.
[screaming]
[Zimbardo] Prisoner 8612 was suffering from acute emotional disturbance. We had already come to think so much like prison authorities that we thought he was trying to con us.
[Eshleman] The guy's a wimp. He can't take it. He must be just a very weak-willed individual. Turn around. Push-ups! There's nothing we're doing here that's even close to what they do if you try to join a fraternity.
[Zimbardo] Took quite a while before we could be convinced that he was really suffering, and then we released him.
[bird chirping] [machine humming]
[Korpi] Did you see what Debbie gave us yet? Our neighbor gave us dessert. My girlfriend, Theresa, came down to Stanford to pick me up. We got in the parking lot and I could relax, and I said, "Oh, phew. I got out of there. Thanks for coming and saving me, honey." [laughs] You want me to make you a cup of coffee, sweetie?
[Theresa Hanna] Yeah.
[machine humming]
[Hanna] It was in the evening and they called and said, "He's really upset and he says he wants to go home, so I think maybe you should come and get him." I got there and the guy, the guy says, "Well, you know, he seems to be having some kind of mental breakdown." I majored in psychology, too, so I was aware of all these, you know, human subject experiments and that there were moral problems with subjecting human beings to artificially abusive situations. You seemed really upset that they would keep you against your will, and that made you very, very angry.
♪ ♪
[Korpi] I blame Zimbardo for doing that experiment on me. It was a horrible job, and Zimbardo was the perpetrator. I was a victim. Zimbardo would say, "It's getting the job done for the greater good." The problem is he doesn't care who he hurts along the way.
♪ ♪ ♪ ♪
[Ramsay] The Stanford Prison Experiment began, and I had not been called. So then I was disappointed, like, "Oh, shoot." You know, it's like whatever it was gonna be, $220, you know? Ah, too bad. And I forgot about it completely. But then the phone rang and they said, "We would like you to come in." And I went, "Great!"
[Ramsay] So I arrived at Stanford. They told me what building, what door, so I went in. And I kind of went, "Where is everybody?"
[Guard] Got fresh meat here.
[Guard] Think so. We got his stuff here.
[Ramsay] They stripped me, deloused me, put the gown on me, and the anklet chain, and then took me down to my cell.
[Guard] ...you guys will be out here all night if you don't get it right.
[Ramsay] If you were in a cell, you couldn't see anything, really. I could hear a little bit of what was going on on the other side of the wall.
[Guard] Well, why don't you apply it to yourself? Inmate 2093, think about just what a...
[Ramsay] There were things going on right there that you didn't understand, and especially coming in in the middle, that was true for me. Your real communication was limited mostly to the people who were in the cell with you.
[Shue] Clay was a standby prisoner, and we wound up in the same cell, and we had good talks about lots of things. So there was a bond there.
[Burton] The prisoners were very subdued. They had already been subjected to trauma. And they were not in much of a mood to challenge us in any way.
[Eshleman] The prisoners simply were exhausted.
♪ ♪
And they were in a much different environment than we were. We did an eight-hour shift. We can go home, reconnect with the real outside world, and then resume the next day. They're there 24 hours a day, had no idea what time it was, whether it was night or day, how long they'd been there, so you can see why they would despair.
[Zimbardo] What we wanted to do is create a central psychology of imprisonment, and that's all about power. Every prison is about power. The prisoners have to be ultimately dehumanized, end up thinking of them as animals. And the guards have to be impersonal, distant.
[whistle blows]
[Guard] Everybody out in the hallway. Come on.
[Guard] Come on. Let's go.
[Eshleman] We amplified it day after day. It's like, "What can we do today to top what we did the day before?"
[Ramsay] The foundation of the harassment was breaking up our sleep.
[Guard] Good morning.
[Ramsay] To be woken at 2:00 in the morning.
[whistle blows]
[Eshleman] Everybody out in the hallway. Come on. Come on. Up.
[Ramsay] And again at 4:00 in the morning.
[whistle blows]
[Ramsay] That is a really effective way of breaking people down.
[Prisoners] 4075, 1043.
[Ramsay] And so everybody's up and you're on your feet, you're not really awake, and then they try to think of things to do.
[Prisoner] 819, 54, 86.
[Eshleman] Wait.
[Guard] That's terrible.
[Ramsay] John Wayne in particular, he would pick one and say he'd done something wrong. Pull him out, make him do push-ups.
[Prisoner] One, two...
[Ramsay] He would insult us in a way that he hoped would get a rise out of somebody, so that then that person could be punished.
[Prisoner] No, sir.
[Ramsay] If somebody seemed to not like that person getting punished, then pull them out of the line and make them do the punishing.
[Ramsay] And just kind of build it up from there.
[Shue] Clay wasn't comfortable with what's going on. It was a little too rough and angry.
[Eshleman] He didn't understand the drill, so to speak, you know, he's coming in fresh from the outside, and he didn't want to cooperate. And so we picked on him and made sure that we would break his will.
[Prisoners] Life is but a dream!
[Eshleman] Good. Everybody up against the wall.
[Ramsay] I could understand people feeling like it's only two weeks, but I was absolutely not an "it's only two weeks" person about anything.
[Prisoner singing] ♪ Row, row, row your boat ♪
[Ramsay] I didn't think any moment of my precious life was worth wasting. Once I had arrived at the conclusion something was stupid, then I was out of there.
♪ Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream ♪
♪ Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily ♪
♪ Life is but a dream ♪
[Eshleman] Not bad.
[Ramsay] During high school, I wanted to be a great avant-garde novelist. I thought that college was some kind of ideological trap. And instead, I was gonna join the Merchant Marine and I was gonna work six months of the year, and then, I would take the money and I would go to Mexico, and I would write my masterpiece. If someone had said, "Aren't you gonna miss your friends?" I would have gone, "This is important." I was the sailors' janitor. What I did was get up at 5:00 in the morning and go look at the sunrise. I did meditate. I would go up on the bow, which is a fantastic place to meditate. With the experiment, I do recall thinking that I'll just have a lot of time to meditate, that it will be reflective, because people will leave you alone. [chuckles]
[Prisoner] One.
[Eshleman] I want to hear 'em. Yeah, louder!
[Shue] Clay had been in the Merchant Marines. He had been there and done that, and he wasn't gonna do this for fun.
[Ramsay] And I thought to myself, "Is this what I would call an experiment?" [chuckles]
[Eshleman] Three over there.
[Ramsay] It is just a mess. I began to think about how could I get myself released. And at that point, I had the idea of a hunger strike.
[whistle blows]
[Eshleman] Hot dog day!
♪ ♪ ♪ ♪
[Eshleman] Eat that hot dog, Prisoner 416.
[Ramsay] It's not easy in a real prison to break somebody's hunger strike. It was a surprise for them, because they hadn't figured out what do you do?
[Burton] Our meal that evening was sausages, and he wouldn't eat them.
[Burton] Both Dave and I were just enraged that this guy was challenging our authority.
[Ramsay] They did try to jam food down my throat.
[Burton] He was just, "No way."
[Ramsay] It was clear that they didn't know how far to go.
[Burton] And so we put him in the hole.
[Guard] Go ahead.
[Ramsay] I am put in the big empty box. I don't think I could stretch out 100%, but close, but I had privacy. Remember, I was also sleep deprived. So I was thinking about my novel, which was about the cultural revolution of California by acid. It was a kind of fever dream.
[Eshleman] Thank you, 416.
[Burton] Over there. Alright. That's fine.
[Eshleman] In order to turn the prisoners against the prisoner who went on a hunger strike, we let them know that if he was not going to eat his dinner, we would take their blanket away.
[Shue] The other three remaining prisoners all said, "No, I won't give up my sheet." And I liked Clay and we had shared a cell, and I said, "Yeah, I'll give him my sheet." I thought I was above the game at that point.
[Shue] Later that night, he's still in the closet. The guard ordered the prisoners to pound on the door.
[Shue] Basically, I just didn't want to make waves, and I thought, "Well, he knows I'm his friend, and I'll do this just to keep things smooth."
[Shue] I could have said, "No, I will not pound on that door." But it was easier to just go through the motions and say something calming. Um... So... So I respect what he represented.
[Eshleman] Because of our solidarity, we were successful in our aim to break down the solidarity of the prisoners to where the prisoners were turning against each other.
[Burton] I was so angry at being challenged on this basis when we had never been challenged. And at one point, I started walking by this little tiny closet that he was in... [voice breaking] ...and hitting it with my club. [sniffles] I've never come to grips with how or why that happened.
[Zimbardo] But the reality of that prison was so deep, once you're in that setting, your identity as a good guard or a bad guard becomes really important to you. The level of aggression the guards escalated, they would think of more and more sadistically creative things to do to show that they had power. The worst abuses happened at night. Because at night, I went to sleep. So, when the cat's away, it's time to play.
[Shue] Tried to put us in sexually embarrassing situations.
[Zimbardo] Guards would say, "Okay. You guys are female camels, bend over. You guys are male camels, hump them."
[Prisoner] Oh, no.
[Shue] A guy would be in a push-up position, and somebody else was supposed to mount them like a dog.
[Zimbardo] They would simulate sodomy, their butts were exposed. You had five kids having emotional breakdowns. It was out of control.
[Eshleman] You give somebody absolute power, they're gonna want to use it. And if you make people objects by assigning them a number, instead of referring to them by name, I don't see you as equal to me anymore, and therefore anything I do to you is justified.
[Zimbardo] The fifth day. Would you like to see the rest of the facility? One of the people that came down was a young woman, Christina Maslach, and she and I had just started dating.
[Christina Maslach] I just came down to the prison basement just to see what was happening.
[Eshleman] Down, up, down, up.
[Maslach] And I just got sick to my stomach. I thought that, "Oh, my god, this is awful." Philip said, "Oh, you see that?" You know, kind of thing. And I just got upset.
[Zimbardo] And she starts tearing up and runs out. And I run after her and I said, "What's wrong?" And she said, "What you're doing to those boys is terrible."
[Maslach] These are young people and they're being treated badly, and there's no reason for this. And why are you doing it? You have to stop it now.
[Zimbardo] We are creating the prison in which people are suffering, where the guards are behaving sadistically, brutally. At times, even I forgot I was an experimenter and acted like a prison warden. And at that point, we said, "Enough, we have to end this."
[Eshleman] I came in for my shift and was told, "That's it. They called it off." And I said, "Oh, so early?" You know, I thought it was just getting started.
[Shue] John Wayne had played his role about as hard as he could play his role given the constraints. I mean, the only way he could play his role any harder would be to physically abuse Clay.
[Ramsay] The only good news was that they were gonna let me out.
[Van Orsdol] I remember being quite disappointed that it ended early and surprised why.
[Burton] The people that had created this Frankenstein monster were controlled by the monster, up to the very top.
[Eshleman] Shortly after they called it off, it hit the news.
[Ted Koppel] Philip Zimbardo, professor of psychology at Stanford University.
[Eshleman] It was sensational.
[Crosby] What did your experiment prove?
[Zimbardo] Evil behavior can be elicited in the best of us. We underestimate how strong the situation is. These good boys were behaving sadistically if they were guards.
[Eshleman] It was a dramatic story. He got tons of news coverage.
[Burton] Lots of people wanting to talk to him, lots of people want to hear his opinion.
[Shue] Zimbardo became an authority on prison.
[Man] He spent his career speaking as an expert witness in court cases defending people in prisons who'd done awful things.
[Analyst] You testified in the Abu Ghraib scandal.
[Zimbardo] I was part of the defense team.
[Ramsay] And then it became an academic object because it found its way into textbooks in social psychology. Students are introduced to it year after year after year.
[Mark] He wrote a book.
[Newscaster] Entitled The Lucifer Effect, Understanding How Good People Turn Evil.
[Eshleman] He's got a narrative to tell, but he can be a little more forthcoming about what really went on.
[Le Texier] I never thought about debunking the Stanford Prison Experiment. But then I went through the archive. There are large discrepancies between the official narrative and the archive. What Zimbardo says happened is not what the archives says happened. He's caught into his own trap.
[Le Texier] It can prove that you can do very bad science and go away with it. The official narrative was a lie. After going through the archive, I started to realize that what Zimbardo says happened, it was not what really happened.
[Mark] Zimbardo was disingenuous.
[Man] I'm the guy that you never heard about that you should be hearing about.
[Eshleman] We were all on the same page to prove that prisons are an evil environment. This is set up for the guards to abuse.
[Hanna] I can't have them kill each other.
[Le Texier] The experimenter is putting their hands into the material.
[Eshleman] If you listen to the tape, it does sound a little suspect.
[Le Texier] The participants couldn't get out.
[Korpi] He's re-traumatizing.
[Man] Why did you do that to those kids?
[Eshleman] Come on.
[Man] Have you ever...
[beep]
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