Philip Zimbardo
Appearances
Freakonomics Radio
Is It a Theater Piece or a Psychological Experiment? (Update)
And the guards not only were in uniforms, but they had to wear silver-reflecting sunglasses, an idea I got from the movie Cool Hand Luke. It didn't take long for the situation to curdle.
Freakonomics Radio
Is It a Theater Piece or a Psychological Experiment? (Update)
I began to be the prison superintendent. I see videotapes of my, I'm walking down the yard with my hands behind my back and my chest out. I never do that. I was surprised to see that. But that is how, you know, the military officers, when they're reviewing the troops, that's the many politicians, it's a position of authority and power, which I abhor.
Freakonomics Radio
Is It a Theater Piece or a Psychological Experiment? (Update)
I mean, I always work hard to minimize the power I have as a teacher. And here I was unconsciously assuming it. Now, Zimbardo is a situationist. I'm a situationist, dyed in the wool. Individual variations in, quote, personality predict almost nothing about people in these situations.
Freakonomics Radio
Is It a Theater Piece or a Psychological Experiment? (Update)
The way the study ended was I had invited young faculty members and graduate students who knew nothing about this study to come down and interview all the prisoners, guards, and staff. And Christina Maslach, who had been my graduate student, who we had just started dating, comes down the night before and sees the guards abusing the prisoners.
Freakonomics Radio
Is It a Theater Piece or a Psychological Experiment? (Update)
And I look up, it's a 10 o'clock toilet run, 10 o'clock at night, last time prisoners go to the toilet. And prisoners have bags over their head, legs chained together, yelling, screaming, cursing. And I say, hey, Christina, look at that. Isn't that interesting? And she starts crying and runs out. And we have this big argument. And I'm saying, what kind of psychologist are you?
Freakonomics Radio
Is It a Theater Piece or a Psychological Experiment? (Update)
This is a crucible of human nature. She says, wait a minute. How could you see what I see and not see it as dehumanization? I thought I knew who you were. I don't know who you are. I don't know who this person is. And I'm not sure I want to continue my relationship with you if this is the real you. How long had you been dating by this point? Oh, probably six months.
Freakonomics Radio
Is It a Theater Piece or a Psychological Experiment? (Update)
And when she said it, was it kind of a light bulb moment for you or did you fight against the impulse? No, I fought against the impulse because at some deep level, I knew she was right. I didn't want to believe that I was changed by the situation. I mean, I'm a grown up. I've done lots of research.
Freakonomics Radio
Is It a Theater Piece or a Psychological Experiment? (Update)
Oh, not at all. No, I'm saying it was not a light bulb. It was a lightning bolt. that when she said it, we both talked about it. We subsequently got married the next year because I realized she was my heroine who saved me because the study was going to go another full week. And I'm not sure what would have happened at that point, but it was a lightning bolt.
Freakonomics Radio
Is It a Theater Piece or a Psychological Experiment? (Update)
And of course I resisted at first because what it means is I had made this mistake. I should have ended it days earlier. And essentially it's what administrators do. I didn't do anything wrong, but I allowed wrongdoing to go on. And actually, one of the worst guards said in a later interview, the professor never said I couldn't do it. And therefore, I did it.
Freakonomics Radio
Is It a Theater Piece or a Psychological Experiment? (Update)
In many settings I'm in, I tweak my environment to see what would happen. What would happen if, you know, you go into a restaurant and the waiter gives you a thing and you say, I'd like to start with dessert. And he says, what? I'd like to start with dessert. You've got a really good dessert menu. Sometimes they say, no, you can't. No, you have to start with the appetizer.
Freakonomics Radio
Is It a Theater Piece or a Psychological Experiment? (Update)
I say, no, I'd like the dessert. I'll work backwards. What difference does it make? By putting people in totally new situations, that's really how we discover something about ourselves.
Freakonomics Radio
Is It a Theater Piece or a Psychological Experiment? (Update)
I remember I was at one of the first performances of Hair.
Freakonomics Radio
Is It a Theater Piece or a Psychological Experiment? (Update)
Seeing hair scrambled his brain because... The performers start walking on the seats over your head and walking down the aisles. And that, I had never experienced that before. And it was really troubling, exhilarating, confusing. Because, again, hair was going to confuse you.
Freakonomics Radio
Is It a Theater Piece or a Psychological Experiment? (Update)
They're going to sing songs about masturbation and black girls having sex with white guys and white guys having sex with... So essentially, before the play began... What they did is set up to say, this is going to shock you. This is going to be off your usual radar. So don't come expecting traditional theater. This is something new. I still remember that. It was like 40 years ago. We starve, look.
Freakonomics Radio
Is It a Theater Piece or a Psychological Experiment? (Update)
One of the things that strikes me about this interesting play is that it puts the audience in a totally new situation. That is, audiences have never been asked to wear masks, play a role, have a set of rules to govern their behavior.
Freakonomics Radio
Is It a Theater Piece or a Psychological Experiment? (Update)
And as a sidebar, little Stanley Milgram and I were high school classmates at James Monroe High School in the Bronx... in senior year, 1948, 49. So essentially there was something in that water, but it was really, you know, he was a little Jewish kid who worried about, you know, could the Holocaust happen in America? If Hitler said, electrocute somebody, would you do it? Or Hitler's henchmen?
Freakonomics Radio
Is It a Theater Piece or a Psychological Experiment? (Update)
And everybody said, no, Stanley, we're not that kind of person. And what he said as a high school kid, how do you know unless you're in that situation?
Freakonomics Radio
Is It a Theater Piece or a Psychological Experiment? (Update)
And that was the central commonality in the Milgram-Bedian studies and my Stanford prison study, is we put people in a totally new situation where in both studies we gave people total power over someone else.
Hidden Brain
How Monsters are Made
It's 1971. These are anti-war activists. These are civil rights activists. Everybody's got hair down to here, not only long hair, and nobody wanted to be a guard. Guards are pigs. I didn't go to college to become a prison guard.
Hidden Brain
How Monsters are Made
We want them to own the prison, okay? And so what it means is we go with them to buy uniforms at army, navy stores. They have military kind of uniform. We give them symbols of power, handcuffs, billy clubs, whistles. And then I imposed an interesting, subtle piece from the movie Cool Hand Luke.
Hidden Brain
How Monsters are Made
Namely, everybody, when they were in contact with the prisoners, had to wear silver-reflecting sunglasses. which means that nobody can see your eyes.
Hidden Brain
How Monsters are Made
I recruited the Palo Alto Police Department, the Rio Police Department, to make simulated arrests, to go to each kid's place, ask for the name of the kid, and then give them their Miranda rights. You have a right to remain silent, a right for a lawyer. And then bring them down to where the squad car is with lights flashing, lean them against the car, handcuff them, give them their rights again.
Hidden Brain
How Monsters are Made
Then my graduate students came, took the prisoner, put him in their car, took him down to our prison, and they stripped him naked. And when they take off the blindfold, the kid is standing naked, and all the guards are around, laughing, mocking him, and say, welcome to the Stanford Jail.
Hidden Brain
How Monsters are Made
And they all had an iron chain and a lock on one ankle that was there all the time. And instead of cutting their hair, they wore women's nylon stocking caps. So it was really de-individuation, dehumanization.
Hidden Brain
How Monsters are Made
The kids playing the role of guards just felt awkward. In fact, you can hear. We videotape a lot of it. And they say, come on, you guys, stop laughing. This is serious business. Nobody could take it seriously.
Hidden Brain
How Monsters are Made
They ripped off their stocking caps. They ripped off their numbers. They barricaded themselves in their cell. And then they made a huge mistake. They started ridiculing the guards. Like, you little punk, when I get out, I'm going to kick your butt. And suddenly the guards come to me and say, what are we going to do? I said, it's your prison. What do you want to do?
Hidden Brain
How Monsters are Made
They said, we need reinforcements. So it means there are three guards on the morning shift. They call in all the other guards. The guards meet. They have a meeting. They say, OK, we've got to treat force with force. So they break down the doors. They drag the prisoners out. They strip them all naked. They put the ringleaders, the rebellion, in solitary confinement.
Hidden Brain
How Monsters are Made
That's the switch. They're no longer college students like you. Everybody knows they're college students. So now they are dangerous prisoners. And what do you do with dangerous prisoners? You have to teach them that they have no power. They have minus power. Because the potential for rebellion is always there. And this is true of real guards in real prisons.
Hidden Brain
How Monsters are Made
So in every way and every day, you have to suppress their freedom, suppress their likelihood to rebel. And you had to demonstrate, mostly by doing arbitrary, stupid things, that you had power. So you tell a joke and they laugh, you punish them. They tell a joke and they don't laugh, you punish them. So you create a totally arbitrary environment where prisoners in college have no idea what to do.
Hidden Brain
How Monsters are Made
And then punishment is usually just push-ups, jumping jacks, but then it escalates, and it always escalates, as we saw in Abu Ghraib, toward the sexual. So the guards say, you're Frankenstein, you're Mrs. Frankenstein, walk like Frankenstein, hug them, say I love you.
Hidden Brain
How Monsters are Made
And then little things like this or, you know, your female camels, your male camels bend over. Now, you know, hump them. So it's a play on words. And they're simulating sodomy in an experiment with college students. Now, some of this I didn't see because the experiment's going on 24 hours a day. And most of the things, the worst things happen at night.
Hidden Brain
How Monsters are Made
She sees something which, from her point of view, is unimaginable that should happen anywhere. Unimaginable should happen in an experiment. Namely, guards are cursing and screaming and pushing prisoners. Prisoners have bags over their head. They're shuffling their legs. Legs are chains, like a chain gang. Like you see in pictures of the South in Louisiana prisons.
Hidden Brain
How Monsters are Made
And I'm looking at this, and literally, I have 8 o'clock breakfast, 10 o'clock parole board hearing, 12 o'clock lunch, and it's 10 o'clock, and it simply says, toilet run.
Hidden Brain
How Monsters are Made
And now we're standing outside in the fresh air. It's now 11 o'clock at night or 10.30 at night in front of the psychology building. And she's saying, how could you see what I see and not get upset? And I'm saying, what do you see? It's the dynamics of human nature. It's It's the power of the situation. I'm giving all the psychological jargon and she's giving me the humanity of the situation.
Hidden Brain
How Monsters are Made
Boys are suffering. They're not prisoners. That's what she's saying. They're not prisoners in our guards. They're boys and you are responsible. How could you allow this to happen?
Hidden Brain
How Monsters are Made
She says, I don't understand. I know you from other situations. You're a caring, loving professor. You love students. Students love you. How could you see this? There's this chasm between us. I'm over here and you're over here, and we're looking at the same thing, and we see two totally different worlds.
Hidden Brain
How Monsters are Made
And then she says, I'm not sure I want to continue my relationship with you if this is the real you. I thought you were someone else when I started dating you, and I don't know who this is. So that's the ultimate power of a situation to transform. She's looking at me, and she knew me for a number of years as a professor there, and she's looking at me and saying, I don't know who you are.
Hidden Brain
How Monsters are Made
And really what she's saying, do you know who you are? And the answer is no, that this is what I had become is abhorrent. I mean, I fight authoritarianism. I fight, you know, I'm as liberal as most people get. I'm anti-authoritarian, anti-control, anti-structure, all these things. And that's what I became. I mean, I became my worst inner enemy. And at that point, I just stopped.
Hidden Brain
How Monsters are Made
I mean, I think it's when she said, I'm not sure I want to continue my relationship. It was like a double slap in the face. I said, oh my God, what's happened to me? It was really like, she should have just shook me and said, wake up, the dream is over, the game is over.
Hidden Brain
How Monsters are Made
Then we had all the prisoners come together to debrief. We spent hours. Then all the guards separately, and then the prisoners and guards. Because I used that as a moral re-education. Because I could say, we all did bad things, including me. What do we learn from this? We learn about the power of the situation. We learn to be aware of how easy each of us can get seduced into a role.
Hidden Brain
How Monsters are Made
They said, I don't know, I probably would have played by the rules, but I would not have been as creative. That the worst guards were the ones who clearly went beyond the rules. That is, it was clear what you had to do to be a guard, and it was going beyond the boundary of your role. that in every role there's a moral latitude. And clearly some guards went beyond it.
Hidden Brain
How Monsters are Made
You know, you could say, do 10 push-ups, do 10 more. But then to tell somebody to sit on your back when you're doing push-ups, that's going beyond the thing. You know, to tell somebody to kiss the other guy as the Bride of Frankenstein, that's being creatively evil.
Hidden Brain
How Monsters are Made
So again, most of the prisoners said, I'm not sure what I would do, but I would be a guard who played by the rules and not develop new rules.
Hidden Brain
How Monsters are Made
All that research, in a way, really is trying to answer the question from childhood, what makes good people do bad things? And my focus has always been on trying to understand how situations shape us, mold us, and corrupt us. So starting with an evil orientation, what I try to do is create evil. It's really studying evil from the inside out.
Hidden Brain
How Monsters are Made
You know, theologians, poets, dramatists, sociologists, you know, criminologists have studied evil. But they've studied evil in place. So what I try to do that's unique is create it. You see the process of transformation. You see people who start off on day one, normal, healthy. You put them in role, and then you see the divergence. The role becomes the person.
Hidden Brain
How Monsters are Made
I became an expert witness for one of the guards, Chip Frederick, because I knew that these were good apples that somebody put in a bad barrel. That's the metaphor I started using. In fact, I know I gave an interview at NPR. And I was the first to say, I want to believe our American soldiers are good. They're not bad apples, as Cheney and Rumsfeld and Bush and General Myers say.
Hidden Brain
How Monsters are Made
I believe they were good apples when they got there. And somebody put them in a very bad barrel. And that barrel looks exactly like the prison study. So I got to know really everything there is to know about Albert Grave.
Hidden Brain
How Monsters are Made
The only abuses happened in that prison on the night shift. None happened on a day shift. And it turns out in Abu Ghraib was part of the unit, was the center of interrogation. So you have military intelligence with its set of interrogators interrogating. Now, they're not getting any information.
Hidden Brain
How Monsters are Made
For the military, it's called actionable intelligence because what happened was when the insurgency broke out, the military was caught blind. They had no idea this was going to happen. So they start arresting all men and boys around explosion. So they had no information. But now they're interrogating them and they're getting nothing.
Hidden Brain
How Monsters are Made
So military intelligence goes to the head of military police and says, we need your guys to help us. They got to prepare the prisoners for interrogation, break them, take the gloves off, all these euphemism. And so when we interrogate them, they're going to spill the beans.
Hidden Brain
How Monsters are Made
And then in three months, no senior officer ever goes down to the dungeon to see what's happening. So this gives them complete liberty to reproduce the Sanford Prison Study in spades, namely to do whatever you want. The guards were not part of the interrogation team. They were simply humiliating, tormenting the prisoners to break their will. So this is the clearest situational variable.
Hidden Brain
How Monsters are Made
They give guards total power with no oversight, recipe for abuse. And in fact, what they said was, every time an explosion goes off and one of your buddies dies, his blood is on your hands explicitly. So it's not like these guys were getting off on a torture. Essentially, it's you are part of our national security realm.
Hidden Brain
How Monsters are Made
And if you remember, you know, in the war, it was everybody is for us or against us. So really, if you don't do this, you know, you're suspect.
Hidden Brain
How Monsters are Made
So the guards got sucked in. But then, as we said earlier, it's now the night shift. So the biggest contributor to evil is boredom. And so you're bored. You've got 12 hours to kill in places filled with stress and danger. And the only playthings are prisoners. And most of the prisoners are already naked. And it's never been the case we have female guards with naked prisoners.
Hidden Brain
How Monsters are Made
Again, for Muslims, you never show yourself naked in front of a woman. And so the sexual agenda is there. I mean, it's just boiling over. And it only goes down. It gets worse and worse and worse. So the images, the dozen images that were shown on television are almost the least objectionable. The others are even worse.
Hidden Brain
How Monsters are Made
Hannah Arendt, in trying to understand Eichmann, this brutal killer, coined the term the banality of evil, meaning this guy looks like your Uncle Charlie. I mean, the phrase is he was terrifyingly normal.
Hidden Brain
How Monsters are Made
And I said, well, isn't that true? If we flip it, isn't there the banality of heroes? That most heroes are ordinary people, everyday people. They do little things each day that we never know about unless they live in a major media city and somebody has to make a videotape. Then I started thinking of heroic things that I knew people did.
Hidden Brain
How Monsters are Made
And then I said, gee, now we should celebrate heroism more than we do. Well, the problem is with a lot of the stuff on heroes, it really made them seem extra special. These are male warriors, Agamemnon, Achilles, samurai. And there's almost no research on heroism.
Hidden Brain
How Monsters are Made
We started developing classroom modules, which first started off by saying, be aware of the power of the dark side. So we teach you about the prison study, the messages of a Milgram study. We show videos of a woman lying on a subway station and Liverpool station in London and In five minutes, the little clock is going, 35 people pass right by and nobody stops. The question is, what's wrong?
Hidden Brain
How Monsters are Made
Are these bad people? And so the kids say, we would help. Well, what's the difference between you sitting here and people there? And they come up with situational differences. And then we teach them these lessons, the Bison Effect, prejudice and discrimination. We get the college kids to teach high school kids. High school kids, they teach middle school kids. It offsets all the evil I've done.
Hidden Brain
How Monsters are Made
My parents were second generation Sicilian. My family background was my grandfather was a barber. My other grandfather was a shoemaker. So it was really, you know, tradespeople.
Hidden Brain
How Monsters are Made
When I was a child, I was very sickly. In fact, I almost died from pneumonia and whooping cough at a time when there was no penicillin or sulfur drugs for contagious diseases. So I was hospitalized for six months, and kids around me all died, and I survived somehow. Resilience or hardiness, I'm not sure what.
Hidden Brain
How Monsters are Made
When I came out of the hospital because I was really sick, I used to get beaten up all the time, also because I looked Jewish. And then I realized that the world is made up of leaders and followers, and followers are going to get beaten up. So I really, as a 6, 7, 10-year-old kid, started trying to understand what was it about some kids who got to be leaders.
Hidden Brain
How Monsters are Made
And I think I figured out a kind of recipe. They were bigger. They were the first ones to talk up. They usually had a joke. They usually had a big, stronger guy backing them up. And they always gave the group some interesting activities.
Hidden Brain
How Monsters are Made
In order to get into the gang, and the gang was the kids on the block, the newest kid had to physically fight the most recent kid who was in the gang until one of you got a bloody nose. And I hated violence. I could see it's the stupidness of these kind of rituals. Philip also noticed how hierarchy worked in groups. Some kids give orders, some kids follow orders.
Hidden Brain
How Monsters are Made
And I thought, you know, typically the orders they follow are stupid. But once you get used to that, it becomes a habit.
Hidden Brain
How Monsters are Made
But it was really structuring situations, being the one that came up with a new idea to say, hey, marble season should be always boring. Why don't we do stickball? So essentially, it's coming up with the idea of what to do that other kids would say, yeah, that's interesting, let's do it.
Hidden Brain
How Monsters are Made
He won all the medals at graduation, so obviously nobody liked him because we were all envious of him. But he was super smart and super serious.
Hidden Brain
How Monsters are Made
He was worried that the Holocaust could happen again in America. And everybody said, Stanley, that was Nazi Germany. That was then. We're not that kind of people. And he would say, I'll bet they thought the same thing. And the bottom line, he says, how do you know how you would act unless you're in the situation? Because we all think we're good people.
Hidden Brain
How Monsters are Made
If you're middle class, you don't do things for money because your parents give you the money. If you're poor, nobody's going to give you things. So if you want to buy sneakers, then somebody comes on the court and says, hey, carry this package down the other and give it to some guy named Charlie.
Hidden Brain
How Monsters are Made
Well, you knew it had to be something illegal because they're going to give you $10 to carrying a package down the street. But you also knew that if you got caught, there would be consequences. And I was tempted. I could use $10. I mean, you know, I used to work in a laundry truck, you know, delivering laundry in Harlem. You know, I think we got $2 a day or something.
Hidden Brain
How Monsters are Made
The brilliance of the experiment is that the teacher is sitting in front of a shock box with 30 switches. The first switch is only 15 volts. When you press a button, the learner who's in another room experiences some minimal level of shock. And then of these 30 switches, the increment is 15 volts, 15, 30, 45, et cetera. And the person doesn't respond until it gets up to nearly 100.
Hidden Brain
How Monsters are Made
But the problem is that you are now in a slippery slope down. So each increment is not noticeable from the previous. And so now when you hit 100 and the guys start to say, hey, that really hurts, you're only slightly different from where you were. And at some point, you realize you should have stopped soon at.
Hidden Brain
How Monsters are Made
who we are is really shaped not so much by somebody telling you what to do and not to do. It's really that we play roles. We're a student, we're a teacher, we're a worker. And those roles are always in some setting. And within those, you belong to some subgroups. Initially, you're with the new workers, you're with the freshmen and so forth.
Hidden Brain
How Monsters are Made
And I said, so that's where we really want to study how power operates.
Hidden Brain
How Monsters are Made
I said, well, what kind of setting could we use to illustrate that? Now, you could have done a summer camp. In fact, since I did my experiment, many people have written to me saying, oh my God, I was in a summer camp where the counselors were brutal guards. But I thought prison because prisons are all about power. Prison.