Philip Zimbardo
speaker
81 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Apr 2025
Philip Zimbardo’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Suddenly, they say, these are dangerous prisoners.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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