Control

Control: The Stanford Prison Experiment

Transcript for Control (Full Episode)​

[00:00:00] 

Multiple Speakers: It's 90.1 KZU Stanford

State of the Human

Bojan Srbinovski: Here it is.

This is the basement of Jordan Hall. It's peaceful here. There are no classes right now in the background. You can hear murmuring pages flipping and a water fountain in the distance. But when Professor Philip Zimbardo visits, he hears echoes of the most important week of his life.

Philip Zimbardo: When I see that space, you know, I close my eyes, you know, I can hear, uh,

Archival tape: hands in the air.

Why don't you play Frankenstein? You can be the bride of Frankenstein. You stand here, you down 10,

Philip Zimbardo: it's more than 40 years, and you know, have vivid memory of. You know, almost hour by hour action that that took place. The names of the prisoners and numbers and so forth. So it's, um, for better or worse, uh, permanently etched in my memory.

Bojan Srbinovski: You are listening to State of the Human, the radio show of the Stanford Storytelling Project on KZSU 90.1 fm. I'm Bojan Srbinovski. Today's episode is called Control and it's about what is perhaps the most infamous study in human psychology, the Stanford Prison Experiment. We're following Stanford Professor Philip Zimbardo, [00:02:00] through his memory to the basement of Jordan Hall, where he discovered some of the most terrifying villains in history. And the reason they're so scary, he says, is that they're still here lurking inside of you, waiting for the right circumstances to take control, but there is a way to defeat them. Stay with us.

Our story starts in 1971. Dr. Zimbardo was teaching a social psychology course. And that year he decided to do things a little differently. I was teaching my social psychology course, which was a popular course, and I said to them, in this course I'm gonna do something different. I'm gonna teach the best lectures I have for the first half of the term and the second half of the term, it's your job to make the class even more interesting.

The second half of the quarter would be centered around independent studies done by students. Here are five or six topics that I'm interested in. I'm interested in prisons. What happens when people go to prison? How do guards become brutal and so forth? The students that signed up to study prisons came up with an unusual idea.

One day after class, they pulled Dr. Zimbardo aside and said, you know, we would like to create a mock prison in our dormitory. And so they did that. The students picked out guards and prisoners recruiting some students outside of the course as well. They constructed simple costumes and made the basement of Toyon Hall a dormitory on campus into a mock prison for three days and two nights over one weekend.

A few weeks later, the students gave their presentation on prison life first. They brought in an expert to [00:04:00] talk a man named Carlo Prescott, who had recently been released from prison after 17 years. Mr. Prescott helped provide context speaking angrily about what he had endured in California's San Quentin prison.

After that, it was time for the students who had taken part in the mock prison study to present their findings, and something really strange happened in the middle of their presentation. The students almost started reliving the study.

Philip Zimbardo: One said to the other, I can never be your friend again. The real you is that guard. You were, you were horrible. You went way beyond what you had to do. And I said, no, no. I was just playing a role. And I said, no, I think you're playing a role now.

Bojan Srbinovski: A small student led study had turned serious.

Philip Zimbardo: Somebody else starts literally crying, saying it was one of the women. I told him, you know, I would let him do anything he wanted to me if he just let me out. And fortunately he didn't, fortunately for him and also for, for me as a professor in the class.

And I couldn't believe it. I said, how could this be, you know, kids playing cops and robbers, you know, how could they have done this? So at the end of the class they said, look, I gotta meet with all of you. And so we had a debriefing session and in the middle of that I started thinking, could it really be that a role playing situation could be that powerful for people to cross the line between role playing and imagination and a new kind of psychological reality.

Bojan Srbinovski: Of course this had been a student project and the experimental design wasn't perfect. The designers did not randomly select who would be prisoner and who would be guard, which meant that in theory, personality differences [00:06:00] could explain some of their behavior, and none of the prisoners had been tested for mental health prior to the experiment, so that could have contributed as well.

But the results, the extreme reactions of all the participants were still shocking enough that Dr. Zimbardo decided that he needed to follow up.

Philip Zimbardo: Said, you know, I really should do an experiment where we have ordinary people that we pretest to be sure we have normal, healthy participants, and then randomly assign them to the role of Prison Guard.

And then, you know, we would set up observation so that we could collect some systematic data. 

Bojan Srbinovski: Dr. Zimbardo shared his idea with several graduate students who decided to join him. David Jaffe, the undergraduate who had run the Toyon study, also joined the project they embarked on is the Stanford Prison Experiment.

Each week on state of the Human, we pick a common human experience like obsession or joking or listening, and share a series of stories that pose questions about that experience. The Toyon study provoked the question, is the state of the human a result of individual character, upbringing, morality, or is the state of the human controlled by the situation?

And if so, what happens when that situation spins out of control? This is how Dr. Zimbardo puts it, 

Philip Zimbardo: and the question is if you have a bad barrel filled with good apples. Doesn't that change the nature of the barrel, or does a bad barrel nevertheless corrupt even good people?

Bojan Srbinovski: In August of 1971, Dr. Zimbardo tried to answer that question by conducting a more formal version of the Toyon study. For the rest of the show, we'll be sharing the story of the prison experiment. You'll hear how it got started, how it went wrong, how it got stopped, and [00:08:00] the lasting effect it's had on our understanding of situational control and brutality.

Stay with us.

So the Toyon prison study inspired Dr. Zimbardo to do the prison study that would become infamous. But there's also another reason he was interested, and it goes back to high school conversations with another future psychologist, Stanley Milgram. 

Philip Zimbardo: We both talked about the importance of situations influencing behavior.

Bojan Srbinovski: In the mid 1960s, Stanley Milgram would create the other most infamous psychology study in history, the shock experiment. In that study, ordinary people, the subjects would be paired with someone in a different room. That person was actually an actor, but the subjects didn't know this. The subject would be sitting in front of a machine that they were told, administered electric shocks to the person in the other room.

That person would be trying to answer questions, and if they got them wrong, then the subject was supposed to shock them. The shocks increased in intensity. The more questions the actor got wrong and the subjects could actually hear them begin to scream from the other room. But usually they press the shock button anyway, and if the subject hesitated, there was a lab coded experimenter watching them and if necessary, encouraging them to push the shock button.

And they did it most of the time. Between 61 and 66% of the subjects kept administering until the. Person in the other room stopped responding, presumably because that person was dead. Pretty much all of them needed prompting from the lab coated administrator to do this. But they still did it. 

Philip Zimbardo: And that study has been known as Blind Obedience to Authority.

Bojan Srbinovski: The shock experiment had made Dr. Zimbardo curious

Philip Zimbardo: because my sense was that it is relatively rare that an individual in authority position tells someone to do something which is bad or evil, [00:10:00] that more often we are in a group, in a context so we are playing a role. Other people in the group don't necessarily tell us to do something bad they're just doing bad things, and the social norm becomes do bad in this situation.

Bojan Srbinovski: Dr. Zimbardo spent the summer of 1971 learning about prisons, hiring Carlo Prescott as a consultant. When he had enough information to properly simulate a prison, he was ready. David Jaffe, the undergraduate who had helped run the Toyon study was to be the prison warden and Craig Haney and Kurt Banks, both third and second year graduate students, respectively were assisting with administration. 

Philip Zimbardo: How did we get these prisons and guards? I put an ad in the Palo Alto Times

Wanted college students for study of prison life, $15 a day for up to two weeks. 75 people answered the ad. We invited all of them to come down for an interview. We interviewed each one, gave them a battery of psychological tests, seven different psychological tests, RI personality inventory from UCLA and we did a background information. So we didn't have anybody who was in therapy, who was using drugs anything more than marijuana, had no criminal record at all and was normal and healthy on all psychological dimensions.

Bojan Srbinovski: Now he had his subjects healthy, normal college students. Some of them from Stanford, but not all who were in town for the summer and wanted some money. They were separated randomly into prisoners and guards. The prisoners were told that they should be prepared to have their privacy and probably some of their civil rights violated, but that they would be given three meals and $15 a day.

But there was one thing [00:12:00] remaining the prison. And to make the study feel as real as possible, he needed a prison that seemed real.

We wanted to have things like visiting day. We wanted to have a visit by a prison chaplain, a former prison chaplain, a Catholic priest. We wanted to have parole board hearings, and most importantly, to have the authorities take away the freedom of the boys who were going to be prisoners. My notion was if the students we chose to be prisoners randomly came and said, I'm here to be a prisoner in your ex, I'm here to be in your experiment, they would be giving up their freedom voluntarily.

And that means if and when they got stressed, extremely in the setting, they could simply say, I want my freedom back, I quit. And we would have to release them instead, in the real world. You don't say, I want to go to prison. The authorities say You're guilty of a crime and we're gonna put you in jail awaiting trial.

So what I did was I spent a lot of time persuading the new chief of police in Palo Alto, captain Zurka, to have some of his policemen make mock arrests on Sunday morning, August 14th, 1971. 

That morning, the police department went out to the dorms and homes of the people who had been chosen as prisoners, 

Philip Zimbardo: and they would make very realistic arrests. They would get their name, tell them, uh, you wanted a violation of a particular penal code. Give them their Miranda rights, put them in handcuffs, put 'em in a squad car where the siren was going and bring them [00:14:00] down to the police department, fingerprint them, take a photo, and then put them in an isolation cell.

And everything they did was very serious, very realistic. The only thing that was different from usual procedure is they blindfolded them. 

Bojan Srbinovski: Professor Zimbardo had the students blindfolded so they wouldn't know they were being taken to a long, thin corridor in the basement of Jordan Hall, the psychology building at Stanford.

But once the blindfolds came off, what they saw was not a basement, it was a prison.

Offices had become prison cells big enough for three cots and nothing else. The broom closet had been transformed into the hole guards wearing mirrored sunglasses and army surplus store uniforms, stripped them naked and hosed them with ding spray. Each prisoner was given a smock to wear. Each smock had a number on it.

Their new identity and what they would be called by for the rest of the study. They had to wear stockings on their heads. A nod at the practice of shaving heads in prison. Each prisoner had a chain locked around one leg,

Philip Zimbardo: and when nine prisoners were picked up, going through this induction process, put in the cell, then the study began.

Bojan Srbinovski: Then 

Philip Zimbardo: David Jaffe announced the prison rules. 

Archival tape: Some of you prisoners already know the rules, but other of you have shown that you don't know how to act. So obviously don't know the rules and must be told. These are the prison rules. Rule number one, prisoners must remain silent during rest period, after lights out through meals, and wear it whenever they are outside the prison yard.

Two prisoners must eat at meal times and only at meal times. Three, prisoners must part. Participate in all prison activities. Four, prisoners must keep the self clean at all times. Death must be made in effects. [00:16:00] Prisoners must address each other by number only. Eight, five. Prisoners must always address the guards as Mr.

Correctional Officer and the warden as Mr. Chief Correctional Officer. Nine. Prisoners must never refer to their conditions as an experiment or a simulation. They are imprisoned until parole. 10. Prisoners will be allowed five minutes in the laboratory. No prisoners must obey all orders issued by the guards at all times.

The guard's order supersedes any written order. The warden's order supersede both the guard's orders and the written rules. Orders of the superintendent of prisons are supreme. Prisoners must report all rule violations to the guards. Rule 16 prisoners must report all rule violations to the guards. 17, failure to obey any of the above rules may result in punishment.

Bojan Srbinovski: The first day was devoted to establishing the guard's authority over the prisoners. The guards were instructed to be authoritative and even manipulative in order to maintain power, but not to use physical force. One of the ways they could do this was through counts. 

Philip Zimbardo: The guards were supposed to for each guard shift have a count. I said prisoners counting off their numbers to be sure all the prisoners are there in attendance and nobody's escaped. It was also supposed to be a way for them to learn their number 

Archival tape: first we're gonna count off by ones beginning down here with 10 37. We're gonna do it until we do it right.

We're satisfied with it. And I want you to do it fast, and I want you to do it loud. Let's start with 10 37. What's your number? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. I couldn't hear that very well. I didn't hear it very well. Oh, we'll have to do that again. Okay. 10 37. 

Bojan Srbinovski: The guards made prisoners do counts over and over again.

Made them sing the counts or say them backwards, but during [00:18:00] the first day, nothing beyond that happened. The guards and the prisoners got along all right. No one seemed to be taking things tremendously seriously. One of the prisoners kept laughing even when he was supposed to do the count over and over again. But then things got more serious. Students had gone into a basement and put on costumes, and now they were transforming. 

Philip Zimbardo: Uh, the first morning Monday, the prisoners rebelled.

Archival tape: A man wants to wait backing yourself. No yourself backing yourself. 

Philip Zimbardo: They took their nylon stocking caps off. Some of them ripped their numbers off. They did not wanna be anonymous, and they started screaming and cursing at the guards.

Now the problem was the prisoners in the safety of their cells started challenging, humiliating the guards. So to say to one guard, you little punk, you know, I'm gonna, when I get out, I'm going to kick your butt. Well, so, so now it becomes a personal thing and also it meant the guards redefine the prisoners as dangerous prisoners,

of course, think back. Everybody knows that prisoners didn't break the law. The prisoners didn't do anything bad to be there. They were just at the wrong end of a coin that was flipped. Heads are tailed, but all of that is in a distant past. So people living in the moment and at that moment, it's no longer an experiment.

Bojan Srbinovski: The guards stripped the rebellious prisoners naked. The prisoners in cell number one put their beds up against their cell doors and barricaded themselves in. The guards weren't sure what to do. So to retaliate, they took the beds out of cell number two. This meant some of the prisoners who were already naked now had no beds.

The guards created a privileged cell for the least rebellious [00:20:00] prisoners who also were offered a special lunch to eat and full sight of everyone else. But that didn't end the barricade. So as the day wore on, the guards asked what they should do 

Philip Zimbardo: and the guards came to me and said, what are we gonna do? I said, it's your prison.

What do you wanna do? 

Bojan Srbinovski: This moment is exactly what Dr. Zimbardo is curious about. It's your prison. What are you going to do? So they said, we gotta, we gotta deal with this in a forceful way.

So the guards asked the night shift to come in early and using a fire extinguisher to drive the prisoners back from the cell door. They managed to remove the barricade. 

Philip Zimbardo: Prisoners are hitting back. And they started using physical force, so fortunately I was able to contain that and then say to each guard separately, at altogether, you cannot use physical force.

You have a a baton. And if you touch the prisoner, it's like hitting him and that's it. You cannot hit. But I did not limit psychological force. The power of the guard of the prisoners really manipulating in a naive way, the psychology of the situation for the guards. These are dangerous prisoners. And what you have to demonstrate is you have power and they have none.

And you're gonna do that by creating a totally arbitrary environment, um, where prisoners have no idea what is the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do, because anything they do could be punished. And the punishment is being put in solitary confinement for an hour or more. Punishment is not getting breakfast, lunch, or dinner. Uh, punishment is doing menial tasks over and over again. 

Bojan Srbinovski: So after the rebellion, the prisoners were very upset and the guards felt they had to be more intimidating to maintain control. There was one guard who seemed especially inclined to be tough,

Philip Zimbardo: the worst guard, in quote, the worst guard was the guard who had taken over control of the night shift. Prisoners named him [00:22:00] John Wayne. He was the most creatively evil.

He was the one who later described the situation as we were the puppeteers and they were our puppets, and we were getting off our jollies as puppeteers. So this is the ultimate control and dehumanization, there are people there, not prisoners, students like you.

Bojan Srbinovski: In the latter part of the experiment, John Wayne's abuses went way beyond pushups and solitary, but even now, prisoners were beginning to crack under the intense psychological pressure from the guards. 

Archival tape: Alright, gentlemen, we enjoy our count. Yes. Ah, who said that?

Judge, spend a little time in the hall.

86, 12, I think you gotta spend a little time in the hole. What do you think? Thank you. Spend a little time in the hole. 

Philip Zimbardo: When the first prisoner broke down Doug Corp, I had assumed that Craig Haney and Kurt Banks, who had done the selection made a mistake and I was really angry at them 

Archival tape: here to spend more time in there.

86 12. Good place to get to know Will 

Bojan Srbinovski: Doug Corby was prisoner 8 6 1 2. He had initially asked to be released after being stripped naked and having his bed taken away. But when he asked Carlo Prescott, who happened to be in the office, scolded him for being weak, Dr. Zimbardo said he would tell the guards to stop harassing him on the condition that he turned informant.

8 6 1 2 agreed to consider it, but that night he had an emotional breakdown. He began screaming, cursing, crying uncontrollably. Craig Haney, just a third year graduate student, had no idea what to do. He wasn't even sure if the prisoner was faking it. There [00:24:00] was no system in place for this. He released the prisoner.

The mental breakdown of a prisoner had a dramatic effect on Zimbardo's role in the experiment. Before he had been mostly a supervisor, a researcher, and now he was seeing some truly dark things, things that concerned him. But he also felt strangely protective of his study, and then of his jail. So much work had gone into this experiment.

Philip Zimbardo: There was a rumor that when Doug Korpe was released prison 8 6 1 2, he was gonna come back the next day with his friends and they were gonna break into the prison and liberate the prisoners. Well. That's interesting, study it. Or I could, why didn't I study the rumor transmission instead? My focus was how do I maintain the security of my prison, my prison?

Bojan Srbinovski: This says Zimbardo is the moment where he stopped being Dr. Zimbardo. He felt he had to protect not just the experiment, but his prison. He began acting like a prison superintendent. 

Philip Zimbardo: I go to the sergeant in the Palo Alto Police department and I persuade him that we're gonna move all of our prisoners to their jail for a day until this gets dealt with.

And it's only, and I literally go downtown to Palo Alto to, to talk to him. We look at the place we're gonna send our prisoners, and it's only because the city managers says we can't do that because in case somebody gets hurt, there'll be, there could be a insurance violation. Okay? And I'm furious. I'm saying what kind of institute guy must have thought I was a lunatic?

You know, I'm yelling at you. At the police, the police sergeant, uh, what kind of institutional cooperation is it? Um, and so instead, the idea I had was when they break in, we assume it's gonna happen. I'll be [00:26:00] there long, take all the doors off the cells, and when they break in, I will simply say, Hey, you know, we shut down the experiments all over.

Um, I'm here just waiting for the people to come to take the beds and stuff. Meanwhile, we take all the prisoners, put them in a storage room on the fifth floor. You know, for hours and nothing happens.

Bojan Srbinovski: That is, nobody breaks in

Philip Zimbardo: 'cause there was a rumor.

Bojan Srbinovski: By that point, it's too late. Prison Superintendent Zimbardo is here to stay the same day that the prisoners get locked in the fifth floor storage room there are evening visiting hours upcoming. Now, keep in mind, they've gotten almost no sleep. One of them is gone because of an emotional breakdown. Now they have visiting hours with their families, which Superintendent Zimbardo realized very quickly was going to be problematic. 

There was no place to shower.

And so I guess we provided sponge with a tub of water, but the prisoners began to smell very quickly and they're in this close quarters, and the guards were keeping them up. So the prisoners are really tired and on all the ships, the guards are making them work and work and do menial tasks, moving boxes back and forth in and out.

The guards would put their blankets in that, and then having them pick out, pick hours picking out the nettles so they could use the blankets to sleep on. So the point is, even by Tuesday, prisons are tired, raggedy, and really upset. And I just imagine the parents are gonna come down and say, this is ridiculous. I'll give my kid $15 a day not to be in your study. So I had to create a deception where the parents could not imagine the reality of what the prison, what their son is saying. We needed to get these parents under situational control.

So when the parents came down, there's an attractive Stanford student sitting at a desk with flowers. There's music playing. She greets them, takes their name, tell them to sit down, [00:28:00] and then she says, I'll see if they're ready. She goes in, it's all pre-arranged. She comes down and says, we're sorry we're running a little late.

Your children have insisted on a second dessert.

And so now we want them to begin to be angry at their kid and then finally she goes in and apologize profusely. I'm really so sorry. We're really running in into all of our available time, so only two of you are allowed to visit. So sometimes there was a family of four, and so now they're really angry.

It's not arbitrary rule, it's because of what the kids are doing. So when they go in, they're already a little bit angry at the kid, the prisoner, they've been made to wait a long time. But even so, the situational control is we say you sit there and we tell you when you can go in and when not. So in a subtle way that you're unaware of this is how situations control you .

So they go in now and 'cause there's a limited space, they can only go in like three at a time. And we have three tables, the prisoners at each table, and then we have a guard at each table. So it's not even private. And I think we tell the prisoners if you make trouble, there'll be consequences. And then we videotape what's happening.

Superintendent Zimbardo hoped these measures would be enough to trick the parents, trick them into overlooking that their children were no longer just pretending to be prisoners. But one moment threatened the entire enterprise.

Philip Zimbardo: The parents of Richard Yako come to see me. I shake hands with him. The mother immediately says, I don't mean to make trouble, sir, but I have never seen my son looking so terrible. That's an alarm. She is going to make trouble if that's what she starts off saying. And so I have to diffuse that immediately.

And what I do is I say, [00:30:00] as most school principals do when you know, mother comes in to complain about a teacher or something, I say, what seems to be the matter with your son? So now I'm putting it on him. And she said he's exhausted, he's tired, he's fatigued, you know, um, you know, he's, he's, he's not himself.

And then I say, does he have insomnia? Does he have a sleep problem? So again, I'm reframing it. What's wrong with the individual? And she says, no, he, you know, he, he says they keep him up all night. And I said, oh, I understand. It's what we call the count. Every guard shift has to be accountable to be sure that all the prisoners are present. It's an institutional rule that the guards are simply following, not explaining why they have to do it for hours on end. And then I, I probably describe a little why we're doing this, what we're trying to understand, the nature of human behavior. Then again, she says, well, I don't mean to make trouble. Well, so now it's, it's embedded in. And so what am I gonna do? And now automatically, without planning or thinking, I realize I have to get the father to contain her. He hasn't said anything and, and I turn to him and I say, Mr. Yako, don't you think your son can handle it? Now, what is he gonna say? No, my son is a sissy. He's gonna break down. So what I'm doing unconsciously is I'm doing a whole sexist routine that as I'm saying, we guys know that your kid could handle it. The mother is being overly emotional as women are, as mothers are. Uh, and you're gonna have to handle this. So that's the subtext. And in fact, it worked exactly that way. He says, oh no of course my kids are a real leader. He's, he's a great guy and I'm sure he is gonna be good. You're doing really wonderful work, you know. Come on, honey. We'll see you next visit. [00:32:00] Shake hands and they leave.

Bojan Srbinovski: The next morning, another student tore up his own pillow and threw the feathers all over the cell. He was thrown into solitary and the other prisoners had to clean it up, recognizing the early signs of distress. Dr. Zimbardo tried to separate him, but it was too late. One of the guards ordered the prisoners to chant, prisoner 8 1 9 did a bad thing, 

Archival tape: bad thing prisoner eight nine, did a bad thing 

Bojan Srbinovski: over and over again until prisoner 8 1 9 was sobbing uncontrollably.

He was released, against his own will. He wanted to show that he could go back in there and be a good prisoner.

On Wednesday and Thursday, there were parole hearings where prisoners faced Carlo Prescott as the head of parole. Parole partially became a way to release prisoners who were breaking down. One of those prisoners was Richard Yako, the student whose parents had been worried about him on day two. The experiment was rapidly spinning out of control.

Days into the situation, its participants had long forgotten that they resided. In a hypothetical. 

Philip Zimbardo: What made it more difficult for me than I could ever have imagined was on Wednesday, Craig Haney had to leave the experiment and Palo Alto and not come back because he had a family emergency. What does that mean?

It means that for 24 hours a day, there are only three people watching the store, me, Kurt Banks, David Jaffe, and it means if somebody's doing the video recording, somebody else has to be in charge of getting the food. Somebody else has to be in charge of setting up parole board hearings, visiting day, et cetera, et cetera.

So it was overwhelming [00:34:00] and in retrospect, I'm not even clear how I was able to do that, but there's no question that I was operating on maximum stress level. And that clearly impaired my judgement. I certainly should have ended much sooner when this third prisoner broke down. When the fourth prisoner broke down, there's no, you proved your point.

I was now operating at that high stress level where it was, to me it was no longer an experiment. It was, it was a prison. Not even thinking about, well, we'll do it a second week. It was like, yeah, of course. Of course it's gonna keep, it's gonna keep going on. 

Bojan Srbinovski: By the time the prison study was over, there would be only five prisoners left. And they would be acting like zombies mindlessly obeying all guard commands, even sexually degrading ones.

It would take a courageous outsider to stop the maddening anxiety that was percolating hour by hour in Jordan Hall 

Philip Zimbardo: I had started dating a, A woman had been a graduate student of mine, Christina Maslach.

Dr. Christina Maslach: My name is Christina Maslach. I am a professor of psychology at uc berkeley have been for more than 40 years now, and I received my PhD at Stanford in psychology back in 1971.

Bojan Srbinovski: Dr. Maslach didn't know much about the experiment. 

Dr. Christina Maslach: There was just a lot of planning and it was going. I wasn't paying much attention 'cause I was finishing up my dissertation and I was about to move and go to Berkeley. 

Bojan Srbinovski: And Dr. Zimbardo needed an outside person to come in and interview students about how it was going. She was one of several young colleagues who had agreed to interview guards, prisoners, and staff halfway through the study to help better plan the next week, 

Philip Zimbardo: I said, why don't you come by around 10 o'clock? The last official thing that I have to be there for, it's the last time prisoners can go to the toilet during the night. There's a bucket in their cell, which they hated to do 'cause everything's stunk. [00:36:00] She comes down the entranceway and passes the guard's quarters and there's this charming guy outside and she's having conversation with him

Dr. Christina Maslach: at that point, the guards were bringing the prisoners out to take them for a bathroom run before they went to bed.

And so I saw, you know, these guys come out with these khaki uniforms and they had a line of guys in sort of these white smocks. With paper bags over their heads and the paper bags were so that they were not actually seeing were in the basement, you know? In other words, it was to keep them only seeing the prison, but to take them down to the bathroom.

They had to go down another hall or quarter or whatever. So they would apparently use that paper bag and I saw that and I just got sick to my stomach.

This is terrible. This is awful. Why are we, you know, why are you doing something like this? Why, how is this part of the prison experiment? 

Philip Zimbardo: And I look up and for me it is what? It's a check mark. It's the 10 o'clock toilet run. Because now it see again, what, what happens in this situation? 'cause you're living it hour after hour, you acclimate to what is deviant and bizarre. So she, so she now runs out of the, of the basement, 

Bojan Srbinovski: outside the prison walls, Dr. Maslach and Dr. Zimbardo get into a massive argument.

Dr. Christina Maslach: I, I was just upset and we had started dating and it was kind of like, I thought, wow, this is a really neat guy. 

Philip Zimbardo: She knew me as somebody who loves students caring, you know, compassionate knew me from the anti-war activities involving students. And, 

Dr. Christina Maslach: um, had it been anybody else, had it been another professor at Stanford who was doing this and asked me, gee, could you come down and help us? We need some more people to do interviews. I probably would've just said, you know what? I don't think I can do it. You know, why don't you get somebody else? I'll leave. And that might've made me feel better, but it wouldn't have been [00:38:00] doing anything about that. The fact that Phil and I had a relationship meant that I cared a lot. And you know, I really wanted to find out what was what ha what happened here. You know, it really meant that I just hung in to argue 

Philip Zimbardo: and I'm really angry now and she's calling me on this and I'm saying, you're not appreciating, we're showing the power of the situation in a most dramatic way and stuff.

And she just says, be aware of how you have changed, be aware of what you are allowing, permitting, sanctioning, even and if that's your choice, then I cannot relate to it or to you. And at that moment it was like a shock. It was like a shutter to say, oh my God, she's right.

Bojan Srbinovski: Finally, professor Zimbardo admitted that he had been transformed by his own experiment. 

Philip Zimbardo: Okay, you're right. I'll end it tomorrow.

Bojan Srbinovski: When Dr. Zimbardo returned, he found Kurt Banks who also told him to end the study while they were outside. The chaos inside the prison was escalating to new levels. John Wayne was forcing prisoners to simulate sex acts with each other during counts. So they both agreed it was time to make the madness stop, but of course there was another question. So now how do you end this study? The next day there was an opportunity.

A public defender, another part of the realistic prison efforts had been scheduled to come down and interview all the prisoners. At this point, there are only five prisoners left. The most recent has been released due to a full body rash, probably due to stress, 

Philip Zimbardo: and he comes down and goes through his role.

Any threats, uh uh that you [00:40:00] had? Any promises that have been violent? He's reading off a public defendant's script and the kids are saying, it's terrible. We can't go go. And then at the end he says, I hope to be back on Monday. This is Friday. And his cousins started screaming, you know, you can't leave us here.

Guy said, well, it's only a few days. He said, what do you mean I'll be here Monday? He said, they're saying you don't understand what a few days mean. Really quote, when you're in hell. And at that point I was able to do one of the best things I could ever do in my whole life is to say, listen very carefully. The experiment is over. The prison is shut down, and there's this big pause and then celebration.

Hugging each other, and I said, it's over. Thank you very much. 

Bojan Srbinovski: At that meeting, professor Zimbardo shared what the experiment had taught him, a lesson he hoped to instill in each participant. 

Philip Zimbardo: We have all done bad things, including me, but only in this situation. Each of you have done bad things as guards. You've humiliated prison and so forth, and even if you were a good guard, meaning you didn't do anything personally bad to a prisoner, you allowed it. Not once did any good guard ever challenge in quote, a bad guard. And if you were prisoners, you didn't give other prisoners your support. When prisoners broke down, they disappeared.

You never even talked about them. You never gave support for people who were leading a rebellion. And so what do we learn from this? We learn about a, the reason of the study is the power of the situation. So it means you have to be aware for the rest of your life that you like all of us have this vulnerability.

To situational power, which is subtle, which is pervasive, which comes in different disguises. And so this should be a message that you take with you that you should be more aware than other people of how different situations, different roles you're gonna be asked to play, can transform your behavior. And also then you should be willing to be in where you change those bad situations, for the good[00:42:00] 

Bojan Srbinovski: Professor Zimbardo's audacious study had in certain ways been a failure. Half of its subjects had dropped out due to extreme emotional and physical stress. The experimenters themselves had been warped by the situation and blinded to the havoc that they were causing. They had allowed and even encouraged terrible abuses of power.

But in other ways, the experiment succeeded well past anything Professor Zimbardo could have imagined. It illustrated a powerful concept that in particular situations when given certain roles and a certain degree of encouragement, people can be induced to start acting in ways that would horrify their normal selves.

This insight gained a special significance in the fall of 1971. That year a tragedy occurred inside an American prison and a confused, traumatized public turned to Zimbardo and his experiment for answers. The week that the Stanford Prison study ended violence erupted in San Quentin State Prison located an hour from Palo Alto. An inmate and Black Panther member named George Jackson got hold of a pistol and used it to take several guards hostage. He ordered the guards to release inmates housed in solitary confinement, and then these inmates, along with Jackson, killed six people including three guards.

Soon after Jackson was shot to death in the prison yard by guards who said he was trying to escape. The events, made national headlines and people were hungry for answers. And here was the prison experiment ready with answers about the ease with which prison guards come to dehumanized prisoners. At one point, a reporter asked the associate warden of San Quentin, if Dr. Zimbardo's study shed light on this event. The warden denied it and Dr. Zimbardo decided to [00:44:00] debate the warden on tv. Press followed up and the prison experiment became nationally known.

And then weeks later, another event inside a prison shook the American psyche. A massive riot at Attica Correctional Facility in New York. After the bloody conclusion, which left 43 people dead, Dr. Zimbardo was invited to testify in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee. He presented video and audio evidence from his experiment demonstrating how prisons can degrade human compassion and inspire cruelty.

Dr. Zimbardo's research helped advance an important concept. That certain situations and roles make people lose control of their built incense of right and wrong. This is a powerful idea and it goes against our normal impulse to blame the individual. But the Stanford Prison experiment suggests we should expand our view.

It suggests that when someone does something bad, we should examine the situation that person was in and the role that he or she was playing. Cop, prison guard, soldier. Lots of psychological and sociological research has backed this claim up, and yet 40 years later, we in America still can't resist blaming individuals rather than systems.

Case in point, Abu Prison In Iraq, 

Archival tape: the Iraqi prisoners were hooded, stripped, naked, forced into sexually explicit poses or human pyramids and there are the American soldiers, male and female smiling, pointing. 

Bojan Srbinovski: In 2004, several news stories revealed that for a period of several months, American military personnel had routinely tortured, sexually assaulted and even killed Iraqi Prisoners of war. Public leaders expressed unanimous disgust and outrage, but they also made a vital mistake, says Professor Zimbardo, they blamed individuals. [00:46:00] 

Philip Zimbardo: Immediately, if you remember, the Bush administration, the top military officials, uh, general Meyers, head of joint chiefs of staff said, this is the work of a few bad apples.

You know, don't blame the system. I did a number of interviews essentially saying, my hypothesis is our soldiers were good apples. And what we saw was a replay of the Stanford prison study that before they went down to that dungeon, they were good apples. Uh, and then whoever created that dungeon created the conditions as I did that brings out the worst in people.

Bojan Srbinovski: Dr. Zimbardo became an expert witness on behalf of Sergeant Chip Frederick, who was in charge of the night shift on tier one, a Abu Grip Prison. In his testimony, Dr. Zimbardo. It was the situation, the night shift, which had fostered brutality among Frederick and the other guards. 

Philip Zimbardo: Every guard, nine of nine on the night shift did abuse of prisoners. No guard on the day shift in the same prison with the same prisoners. Uh, did any abuses. That's a situational difference. Why? On the guard, on the day shift, there were always senior officers there present with oversight on the night shift. There was never a senior officer there in three months. Why they had told the guards on the night shift prepare the prisoners for interrogation. Do whatever you have to do so that when we interrogate them, they'll spill the beans. They'll give us in quote, actionable intelligence. So they give the guards on the night shift permission to abuse the prisoners with no oversight, with no limits. 

Bojan Srbinovski: An expectation to soften up prisoners, an absence of senior level supervisors. Zimbardo says these factors created a warped system that encouraged guards to be violent. It is the people who set up the system says Dr. Zimbardo, who deserve at least as much blame as the guards, yet it was the guards who faced punishment. They were sentenced to prison terms ranging from six months to 10 years.

Philip Zimbardo: No senior [00:48:00] officer went on trial, no senior officer got a a letter of reprimand. That in your file it says, command complicity. If your subordinates engage in illegal immoral behavior that you should have known about, you are responsible. It went on for three months. You should have known about it. It's a small prison space.

You know, it's not like you're the mayor of the city. You don't know what happened in in some neighborhood. And so again, here's the system, protecting the system. Blaming, blaming the the individuals at the end. And this is what we see whenever there's a scandal in the police department, fire department, et cetera, et cetera. 

Bojan Srbinovski: To Professor Zimbardo, it's clear that we are still far too likely to blame individuals rather than the systems they live in. So with books and lectures. He's still spreading his message about the power of situations and roles. He hopes that by doing so, he can help people be more aware of moments when they're acting out the worst part of a role, whatever that role may be.

It's a lesson that Professor Zimbardo himself could have used decades ago in the basement of Jordan Hall when a handful of students became prison guards and he became a prison superintendent.

Philip Zimbardo: There's no question that I allowed evil to take place. As most administrators, as most top level politicians or military people, I nor they engaged in any evil directly. But you created the conditions that enabled or allowed it to happen.

Bojan Srbinovski: Individuals can sometimes overcome the power of a situation. Dr. Zimbardo knows this because that's what finally managed to stop the prison experiment. 

Philip Zimbardo: What's most good about people is people who are willing to take the [00:50:00] risk to be a hero. So Christina Maslach was willing to be, was a hero because had I said forget it, you know, the study's more important, we would not be here married forty years later.

Heroes take action to help others in need or defend a moral cause of principle. That's what she was doing, aware of the potential risks and costs. So she's fully aware that this could be devastating for her, and she said it doesn't matter.

Bojan Srbinovski: We all like to think of ourselves as heroes, and I think it's a big question for everyone who hears this story. Which side would you have taken? Would you be John Wayne or Christina Maslach? But Dr. Malac says the real people to look at are not the people who come across as heroes or villains. They're the good guards, the prisoners who chose to sit in the privileged cells.

Because odds are, they represent most of us, most of the time.

Dr. Christina Maslach: There were three, three person guard shifts and almost each one had a tough, there was some guy who was the more tough guy like John Wayne. And there were others who were you know, strict but fair. And there were others who were kind of really sweetheart, kind of nice guys, but they never stopped John Wayne never went up to somebody like a bully in a school and say, Hey, knock it off. Don't do that, you know?

So, you know, in some sense one of the lessons from all of that is not just about the John Wayne types, but everybody else who maybe is not comfortable with what the John Waynes of the world are doing, but don't take some action that will actually stop that or prevent it. 

Bojan Srbinovski: That ultimately might be one [00:52:00] of the greatest lessons of the Stanford Prison Experiment, how easy it is to remain passive, even when something terrible is going on and how important it is to override that instinct. But we don't need a uniform or opaque sunglasses to be under the influence of the situation. Situational influence is by definition all around us at school, at work, in our families. It's just very hard to see. 

Dr. Christina Maslach: The power of the situation is that the kinds of things that shape what you do or don't do the controls on those things, the strings on those things are not visible. Think about that little moment, you know, when you're with a parent or when you're with a friend and you find yourself not saying what you wanted to say or not doing, what you would really prefer, why, what's going on there?

And at what point in some kind of situations would you say, I can't go along, I can't be the same, I have to do something different.

Bojan Srbinovski: Today's program was produced by Rachel Hamburg, Borjan Srbinovski, Natasha Ruck, Victoria Hurst and Jonah Willinhganz. Special thanks to Professors Christina Maslach and Philip Zimbardo. Thanks also to Kate Nelson, Justine Bead. Charlie Mintz. Christy Hartman, Josh Hoyt. Will Rogers Miles s. And Nina Fouchee. Original music in this show was composed by Rob Voight.

For a complete list of all the music in this show, including lots of great creative commons artists, please visit our website. The Sounds [00:54:00] From the Prison Study are from Philip Zimbardo's papers in the Stanford University Archive. For their generous financial support, we'd like to thank the Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts, the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, and Bruce Braden.

We'd also like to thank the Stanford Alumni Association for the grant that funded this interview series. If you want to learn more about the Stanford Prison study, visit prison x.org. If you'd like to learn about Dr. Zimbardo's nonprofit organization devoted to fostering heroism, visit heroic imagination.org.

The original version of the show mistakenly identified the location of the Toyon Prison experiment. The Stanford Storytelling Project regrets this error. Remember that You can find this in every episode of State of the Human on iTunes. You can also download them and find out more about the storytelling projects, live events, grants, and workshops at our website, storytelling.stanford.edu.

For State of the Human and the Stanford Storytelling Project, I'm [00:56:00] Borjan Srbinovski.