Is It a Theater Piece or a Psychological Experiment? (Update)
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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. 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.
This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with your host, Stephen Dubner.
Okay, so Philip Zimbardo is the man responsible for the Stanford Prison Experiment, one of the most famous social science experiments in history. We will hear more about that and some new revelations about the experiment later in this episode. But first, let's get to the real inspiration for today's show. It is a theater piece, an immersive, interactive theater piece called Sleep No More. Sleep No More is the creation of a British theater group called Punch Drunk. It opened in New York in 2011 and ran until January of 2025. Sleep No More is a mashup of Macbeth and Hitchcock and film noir, but it's even stranger than all that.
I don't even know how to describe it. It's insane. I don't know. It is. It's crazy. Sexual and violent. Crazy. Insane. Dead babies involved. Passionate. I don't know.
Sleep No More is designed to throw you off balance. It begins before you even go inside. The location is called the McKittrick Hotel, but in fact, it's an old warehouse in Chelsea. The whole thing is cloaked in secrecy.
Not really sure what to expect. We were told to know as little as possible. And so we've done almost no research as to what we're about to do.
I'm just hoping I can make it all the way through and I don't leave. I don't get too scared.
Just like little tidbits of intrigue. You know, we've heard that you get like a key to a room. Apparently everyone wears a mask and you're allowed to look through drawers in the sets. That's about all we know. We heard that it's like psychologically intense. Yeah, psychologically intense. It seems interesting to me.
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