Stanford Prison Experiment Documentary Review (Opinion)

The Stanford Prison Experiment: Revealing the Truth-and limited series Which just premiered on the National Geographic Channel and is streaming on Disney+ and Hulu, it’s at least the sixth time the events of 1971 have been detailed on screen, either in documentary format or as a semi-fictional drama. How could anyone squeeze nearly three hours of video coverage out of such carefully covered events? I sat down to watch the preview screen, ready to fast forward if necessary.

In fact, it never happened. The series is masterfully constructed and extremely boozy. Its narrative arc runs through more layers of context than even someone familiar with the relevant history would likely think.

Many readers of this column (perhaps most) already know something about the experiment itself, with its near-legendary use of students as guinea pigs in the days when institutional review boards kept tabs on such things.

But anyone who draws the blank can see this is a 10 minute video why the experiment has long been a staple of elementary psychology textbooks. It was a provocation — and still is, although now for different reasons.

The professor who conducted experiment Philip Zimbardo (1933–2024) always presented his plan and results as quite clear. Guards and inmates were randomly selected from the same apparently homogeneous pool of participants (ie, young white students at Stanford University with no criminal history and good mental health).

As their relationship quickly spiraled into sadism and rebellion, the deciding factor was not racial tension—or some psychological trait shared by both groups—but rather the simulation of the prison environment itself.

The events at Stanford took place just weeks before the Attica prison riot. Newspaper and television reporters who had paid little attention to Zimbardo’s first press releases suddenly found their interest piqued. The availability of six hours of footage shot during the experiment was a surprise for media release. And the influence of the experiment is difficult to separate from its telegenic aspects.

On National Geographic A parade of video clips over the decades shows that Zimbardo was the perfect talk show guest: serious but empathetic and willing to avoid uncomfortable details for the sake of a compelling narrative.

Early reports indicated that guards’ attitudes toward inmates ranged from friendliness to aggressive contempt.

But in repeated media appearances, Zimbardo came to see the effects of prison conditions as homogeneous and inevitable: all guards became dominant, at least in a publicity-friendly version.

And indeed, the most hostile and aggressive guards set the tone for the footage captured during the experiment, especially the guard nicknamed John Wayne by his peers, who happily occupies the alpha position. But in a recent interview, one less enthusiastic guard describes how Zimbardo took him aside and encouraged him to participate with more vigor.

Similarly, the alpha guard recalls how Zimbardo encouraged him to take the lead. He had experience working in the theater and saw himself as a character inspired by a film about a prison Cool hand Luke.

Participants interviewed for the documentary agree that Zimbardo had certain expectations about what would happen. He was critical of the prison as an institution, as well as some probationers.

Zimbardo may not have expected things to escalate so quickly, but the overall trajectory was as expected. A press release issued shortly after the experiment began already spoke of “reforms needed at the psychological level to ensure that men who commit crimes are not turned into dehumanized objects by their prison experience…” What the guards themselves felt themselves dehumanized due to the court process, manifests in the interview.

In 2019, the French scientist Thibault Le Texier published paper in the flagship journal of the American Psychological Association, titled “Debunking the Stanford Experiment,” based on archival sources and interviews with 15 of the 24 experiment participants. It summarized the conclusions of the monograph he published a year earlier and which has now been translated The Stanford Prison Experiment Investigation: A History of Lies (Springer). Le Texier appears briefly in the documentary, but his influence is evident beyond that: the producers followed his research, but did not approve of the characterization of Zimbardo’s behavior as dishonest.

This is left to the surviving members to do. Most of them either felt that the experiment had been misled or abused, or had been used by Zimbardo to boost his media stardom since the 1970s. If I read my notes correctly, he is called a “disco psychologist” twice, which was one of the less hostile remarks.

Zimbardo appears in the third episode, responding to criticism and letting his own insults fly, but he is ultimately convinced that the experiment showed something about how bad situations can turn good people into monsters. I don’t know if this story will make it to the screen again, but it’s unlikely that it will improve on this rendition.