What makes ordinary people do evil things? It was a question that long fascinated the psychologist Philip Zimbardo, who died in October. Zimbardo was best known for the controversial Stanford prison experiment, in which he created a simulated prison in the basement of a university building and recruited volunteers to act as prisoners and guards. This week, we explore how Zimbardo came to create one of psychology's most notorious experiments – and inadvertently became the poster child for the human weaknesses he was trying to study. We're bringing Hidden Brain to the stage in San Francisco and Seattle in February 2025! Join our host Shankar Vedantam as he shares seven key insights from his first decade hosting the show. Click here for more info and tickets.
What were the ethical implications of the Stanford prison experiment?
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.
He followed up again weeks later with the volunteers and asked the prisoners if they thought they would have behaved like the guards if the roles had been reversed.
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.
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.
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.
Phil's study sparked intense public interest and criticism, both of which have continued to this day. For starters, there was the inhumane treatment of the volunteers playing the role of prisoners, the decision to strip them naked, the physical punishments and verbal abuse, the restricted access to toilet facilities.
Both the Stanford Prison Experiment and Stanley Milgram's Obedience Studies prompted universities to create more rigorous review processes before greenlighting experiments. I think it's impossible any review board at any major university today would greenlight a study like the Stanford Prison Experiment.
In addition to the ethical concerns, scholars have also criticized the experiment as bad science, or not really science at all. Some have argued that the guards were essentially primed to be abusive. As Phil noted earlier, the guards were given to understand the prison was theirs and that they should do what was needed to maintain order.
They were arguably being nudged to amp up their behavior to please the researchers. Remember how Phil almost shut the experiment down the first day because nothing much was happening? The guards may well have picked up on that, a possibility confirmed recently by volunteer Dave Eshelman, who played a guard known for being particularly aggressive to the prisoners.
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