In an episode from 2012, we looked at what Sleep No More and the Stanford Prison Experiment can tell us about who we really are. SOURCES:Felix Barrett, artistic director of Punchdrunk.Steven Levitt, professor of economics at the University of Chicago.Philip Zimbardo, professor emeritus at Stanford University. RESOURCES:“Philip Zimbardo, the psychologist behind the ‘Stanford Prison Experiment,’ dies at 91,” by Melissa De Witte (Stanford Report, 2024).“Debunking the Stanford Prison Experiment,” by Thibault Le Texier (American Psychologist, 2019).“The Lifespan of a Lie,” by Ben Blum (GEN, 2018).Punchdrunk. EXTRAS:“How Is Live Theater Still Alive?” by Freakonomics Radio (2025)."Why Is There So Much Fraud in Academia?" by Freakonomics Radio (2024).
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode?
Hey there, Stephen Dubner. We are in the middle of a new series on the economics of live theater, which got me thinking about another episode we made way back in 2012 about the psychology of one particularly fascinating piece of theater. Such a fascinating piece that it only closed finally in early 2025. The episode also gets into one of the most famous experiments in the history of psychology.
So I hope you enjoy this bonus episode. As always, thanks for listening. Sometimes you see a piece of theater and it completely scrambles your brain.
I remember I was at one of the first performances of Hair.
That's Philip Zimbardo, the renowned psychologist.
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.
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.
Again, that was Philip Zimbardo. Does that name ring a bell? If you ever took Psychology 101 in college, think back to that. You remember reading about the Stanford Prison Experiment? That was Zimbardo's experiment back in 1971, in which some student volunteers played the role of prisoners and others acted as guards. Things got ugly fast. Zimbardo died in 2024 at the age of 91.
In his everyday life, he liked messing with people.
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.
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Chapter 2: What is Sleep No More about?
You make your own journey. It's like very personal. It's sexual and leading.
But what about the actors? Where are they?
I didn't see an actor for like the first 15 minutes, so I thought it was just kind of set decoration everywhere.
But then you start seeing them and trying to figure out who they are, their relationships. You think back to what you were told, that fortune favors the bold. And you learn that you have to follow the performers from room to room, even chase them, or they might bring you with them.
A bald woman dragged me up several flights of stairs, through staircases, into this arena, and it was incredible.
The context is further muddied by the fact that none of the performers actually speak. But over the course of the evening, you will see a lot.
Someone hanging themselves was pretty cool. It's like the final, I won't tell you that, sorry.
A pregnant woman and her husband having a fight and then making up.
Lots of fighting, lots of kissing. Lots of taxidermy. Dry humping.
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Chapter 3: How does Sleep No More challenge audience expectations?
It's completely safe. It just feels, we almost fictionalize, we dimmed it back, we fictionalize a state of tension that feels slightly unsettling and threatening when actually it's not.
Before Sleep No More came to New York, it played in Boston, in an old school building.
When we did Boston, the first show, they said, health and safety, this is not going to work, it's too dangerous. So we had to put the lights up, and the show didn't work at all. The audience were just walking around nonchalantly, just treating it like a gallery, chatting, because there was no sense of threat. Even though you told them not to talk?
Yeah, because here we have this huge swathe of darkness. If that's not there, then there's no mystery.
So how would you behave if you were thrust into an unfamiliar situation, given a set of off-putting rules, and then told to hide behind a mask? That's coming up after the break. I'm Stephen Dubner, and this is Freakonomics Radio. Sleep No More, for me, was a thrill, unsettling on many dimensions, but also a thrill.
What it really made me think about, however, wasn't Macbeth or Shakespeare or Hitchcock or all the awesomely grisly ideas promoted therein. I was mostly thinking about the audience. What it really made me think about... was Philip Zimbardo, his Stanford prison experiment, and how people change their behavior depending on their surroundings. Here's Zimbardo again.
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.
In a way, Sleep No More does to the audience every night what social scientists like Zimbardo have been doing in experiments for decades. They put people in a situation, fiddle with the variables, and see how they behave.
Like Stanley Milgram's famous obedience experiments at Yale in the early 1960s to see whether a volunteer would administer an electric jolt to someone if told to do so by an authority figure.
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Chapter 4: What psychological concepts are explored in Sleep No More?
And not only are you a grown up, but you are the administrator of this thing. And it's amazing to me. I mean, now, 40 some years later, you can talk about it with the perspective of someone who was a participant and who understands what happened to you. But did you have any sense that what was happening to you was happening to you at the time?
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.
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.
So does Sleep No More offer a better lesson in human behavior? No. To answer that question, I called my Freakonomics friend and co-author, Steve Levitt. He's an economist at the University of Chicago and host of the podcast, People I Mostly Admire. Over the course of his academic career, Levitt has run and observed a lot of experiments, both in the lab and in the field.
Hey, let me ask you this, Levitt. I'm sure you're familiar with the famous Stanford prison experiment, Philip Zimbardo, yes? Sure. So what do you think that says about anonymity or the power that a circumstance, a place being put in a place and playing a role, the power that that has on us?
You know, I actually never, that's one result I don't believe. I just fundamentally don't believe that if you take undergrads and you put them in the role of the prisoner versus the prison guard, it's just, you know, I've never tried it. But I just don't believe that it's real. And I think to get it, you have to manipulate other things. It just doesn't seem right to me that people are like that.
Now, maybe that's what's so amazing about it is that it really happens. And there was... I don't know if you were with me by the time I was talking to a movie director from the BBC, and he said that he had tried to recreate that for the BBC, and it got so ugly so quickly that he had to cancel the whole thing, and they didn't even do the show. But... I don't know.
But wait, got so ugly so quickly connoting that it did happen, yeah? Yeah, he said it was real too. But a lot of times what I've found is that when I try to do experiments as an economist that work great for psychologists, I cannot get them to work. And I really have come to believe that it's because the people in this study are so keen on doing what the researcher wants them to do
And they think that the psychologist wants them to behave in one way and they think the economist wants them to behave in a different way. And so it's hard to reproduce some of those psychological findings. So I would love to do the prison study and I'd love to do it in a way that was unbiased.
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