Were the Horrors of the Stanford Prison Experiment Exaggerated and Faked?

For a few days in 1971, some dudes at a Northern California college pulled some zany stunts in a basement and we’re still talking about it. No, this had nothing to do with playing Jefferson Airplane tapes backwards while on acid. We’re talking about a social-science experiment called “the Stanford Prison Experiment” that, for decades, has been used by nihilists as concrete evidence that all humans are secretly sadistic beasts. A new three-part Nat Geo series, The Stanford Prison Experiment: Unlocking the Truth, which premieres Nov. 13, does its best to explain what really went down.

You probably learned about the experiment if you took a sociology course. (That is, if you want to class instead of hanging out in basements listening to the Jefferson Airplane, man.) During summer break, 38-year-old psychology professor Philip Zimbardo, ostensibly looking to investigate the effects of depersonalization and unearned authority, dressed a basement at Stanford University to look like a jail, paid some students for two weeks of work, and set them loose to create an enclosed institutional system. And started recording.

The students (“good boys,” as Zimbardo calls them in decades' worth of archival interviews) were chosen at random to be guards or prisoners. In a very short amount of time, things went haywire. Left to their own devices, the prisoners short-circuited and rebelled, the guards went mad and vicious with power, and, thanks only to a drop-in from Zimbardo’s girlfriend on day six of a planned 14, the whole thing was called off before someone got seriously hurt. The study was funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research, but that’s never mentioned in this docuseries for some reason.

Like Solomon Asch’s study on conformity at Swarthmore and Stanley Milgram’s obedience tests at Yale in the years prior, Zimbardo’s work was seized upon as an answer to the most baffling question of the 20th century: How could seemingly normal people embrace and engage in Nazism? Are individuals with free will really this malleable? Is it that easy to convince people to do something they know is wrong?

I can’t really answer that, but what I can tell you, having watched the three 45-minute episodes of this documentary, is that a lot of the methods used at Stanford were … dodgy at best. For years, there have been debates about whether what Zimbardo did was ethical. But accusations from an author and researcher (and the Frenchest man on earth) Thibault Le Texier suggest that Zimbardo intentionally misrepresented the experiment for his personal gain. And many of the “good boys” who took part in the study more than 50 years ago, who are interviewed in this new project, agree.

This is certainly interesting, but Nat Geo’s program is, unfortunately, grim in its lowest-common-denominator presentation. It’s funny, because many of the commentators suggest that the footage recorded of the experiment is an ancestor to modern reality television. Yet Unlocking the Truth has a similar grammar to an average episode of Real Housewives.

The first chapter simply retells the tale of what happened as we all know it. (Incidentally, there was a pretty good movie made in 2015 called The Stanford Prison Experiment with Billy Crudup, Ezra Miller, Tye Sheridan, and others. In 2001, a German version, Das Experiment, was more loosely based on the study, with a more violent “what if?” ending.)

The second chapter is the “but wait!” in which we hit rewind and hear about all the secrets. The guards didn’t just transform into monsters that devised their own rules—they were coached. The notorious lead guard (“John Wayne”) wasn’t some demon eager to crack skulls, but a pot-smoking theater kid doing what he thought was asked of him. (In Episode 1, we see his extravagant home and sneer; in Episode 2, we see him wearing flip-flops and singing in a Beatles cover band and realize he’s chill.) The prisoner who famously had a mental collapse 36 hours into the experiment now swears he did it because he just wanted to quit this dumb summer job, and was told this was the only way he’d be allowed to leave.

Everyone points the finger at Zimbardo, who dined out on his experiment for decades, appearing in documentaries and publishing books. Zimbardo took advantage of the experiment’s timing just before the Attica prison riots, and he was eager to appear as a witness for the defense after Abu Ghraib, oftentimes doing his TV spots in a weird Superman-type shirt with a Z on it. By the end you are pretty much convinced Zimbardo was a con man.

Finally, in the third chapter, Zimbardo, who died a few weeks ago at age 92, shows up to defend himself. He’s certainly clever, and had an interesting life, but he says basically nothing. No one wants to say it, but the fact-versus-fiction about the Stanford Prison Experiment is quite likely “a little from column A, a little from column B.”

The series concludes with a “believe what you want to believe” summation, but not before our surviving guards and prisoners watch a recreation and give notes. This is meant to be cathartic, but it comes across as a big shrug. We’re never quite sure to what extent the experiment was a major life trauma for these men, or just a little footnote. I’m sure there are great revelations into human behavior nestled within this story, but this isn’t where you are going to find it.