I have a psychology degree and I remember distinctly how much the Stanford prison experiment weighed on my views and general theories of mankind. At root, it seemed to suggest that every person deep down is potentially a sadist, and that all it took to bring it out was the right circumstances. It was a particularly bleak assessment of the human race which seemed reinforced by history. Who can forget Hannah Arendt’s assessment of the Holocaust after her study of Eichmann where she concluded that evil is so very terrifying because it is banal?
National Geographic’s, The Stanford Prison Experiment: Unlocking the Truth explores this extraordinary experiment in three extensive parts. For those who don’t know anything about it, the experiment was conducted in 1971 at the height of liberal campus unrest in Northern California in which Dr. Philip Zimbardo of the Stanford faculty randomly chose two dozen male college students to participate in an experiment where they would pretend for two weeks to be prisoners and guards. Who was to play what role was also determined randomly, with no weight given to personality traits of the subjects’ prior history. The experiment was set up in a faux prison constructed in the basement of a Stanford campus building with actual cells the prisoners were not allowed to leave for the duration of the experiment. Guards could go home at the end of the workday.
Portions of the experiment were filmed and the documentary shows what footage there is from it. It does not take long for things to get nasty. Whether it’s out of sheer sadistic pleasure or simple boredom the guards begin provoking the prisoners for no obvious reason and the prisoners begin provoking them back in a way that escalates into episodes of absurd and pointless humiliations where the guards sometimes force naked prisoners to do calisthenics and perform variously dehumanizing acts. One guard in particular, a subject named Dave Eshleman — nicknamed by the prisoners John Wayne because of the sadistic zeal in which he played his role — is essentially the ringleader. He is especially inventive at breaking prisoners down including stints in a cell they call The Hole where prisoners are sent into solitary confinement until they learn to obey.
The experiment lasted all of six days before Zimbardo called it off, mostly at the behest of his girlfriend who was beginning to question his humanity as it continued. As fate would have it, shortly after the experiment was over the Attica prison riot in New York occurred and Zimbardo, with his ready explanations of prison dynamics was off to the races, pointing to his aborted experiment as proof of what happens when human beings create situations that encourage the abuse of power. Zimbardo would go on to become something of a celebrity, appearing on Donahue, TED talks, The Daily Show, and many other venues looking, by all appearances, like an inveterate narcissist and attention whore.
it was only when a Frenchman named Thibault Le Texier began to look deeply into the experiment years later that things begin to crack. The men who played the guards, as it turned out, were essentially coached into their bad behavior by Zimbardo who was looking to create something explosive, meeting with them before the experiment even started and giving them advice as to what to do.
In the world of science this would automatically invalidate Zimbardo’s findings, except things were not quite that simple. The film interviews some of the subjects about their participation in the experiment, including Eshleman. They are mature, aged, accomplished men now, all grown up and not a one of them seemed traumatized by what happened. The notorious Eshleman in particular could not be more likable. He is happy to explain that he saw himself essentially as an actor who was out to prove that the prison system was rotten and never had any cruel intentions of any kind but only behaved the way he did as a public service in the hopes of bringing social changes. To this day, he loves playing roles and is even in an English invasion cover band where he dresses up like a mod character from the Sixties and plays guitar.
The prisoners are equally as blithe, telling the camera that it was all done in good fun. Even the subject who demanded to leave early and looked to be legitimately suffering only wanted to go because he realized he was trapped for two weeks in the experiment and came to think of it as a bad summer job.
Where things get interesting however is in episode three where the original subjects are invited to a recreation of the experiment staged by the BBC. Here they get to actually coach a new set of subjects to recreate their behavior.
It’s only then you begin to see some cracks in their sunny view of it. You start to wonder if maybe they are rationalizing their behavior a bit and have been doing so for years because they do not want to face possible ugly or humiliating truths about themselves. Eshleman openly wonders if there might be something more to what he did than simply playing a role. Could it be that he enjoyed it more than he realized? Was it possible he really hurt somebody in a lasting way? Some of the men who played the prisoners are equally as ambivalent, openly emotional, in particular, about a moment where they were forced to denigrate a fellow prisoner and went along with it. Some of them admit they have been haunted by the moment for years. To a man they agree that Zimbardo used them for personal gain.
Zimbardo himself says that even if his methods were questionable it doesn’t actually invalidate the results. If he had told them what to do they still did it anyway. And he does have a point. What’s interesting here is that maybe the experiment actually proved something it didn’t really set out to prove. Not that human beings are more than willing to torment their fellows when give a chance but about whether the line between fact and fiction, truth and rhetoric can even be said to exist. It evolves into a question as to whether there is a difference between the reasons that you think you are doing something and their consequences. What if the stories we tell each other, the fictions, and the staged events, are more real than we suspect? What is the difference between pretending to do something (according to your mind) and actually doing it? If you choose to go along with something that could be considered morally questionable for reasons you think are noble and the result is something that appears morally questionable should you be given a pass?
In some ways present events make the experiment even more pertinent. Is there a difference, for example, between talking like an authoritarian and being one? And if you behave like one as a sort of joke or a simple way of getting back at somebody does that mean you still get to call yourself a good person? And if things turn out much worse than you intended does that keep you from being culpable? If you go to church and behave politely to other people and yet allow other people to do bad things should you be free of blame?
Unfortunately, the research, or the amount of attention given to it, doesn’t have clear answers for these questions. Perhaps evil exists not so much as a temptation but as a condition, one of many options for behavior in pursuit of a conscious or unconscious goal, the likes of which can never be fully understood either by the perpetrator or the victim. Wasn’t John Wayne, after all, an actor who spent his life pretending to be the good guy?
What’s alarming is the feeling the documentary gives you that the culture has lost the ability to tell the difference, that it is so addicted to its fictions that it can no longer separate them out from what might be the truth. And so the truth becomes provisional. And evil remains banal.