The Stanford Prison Experiment: Uncovering the Truth—a limited series that recently premiered on the National Geographic channel and is streaming on Disney+ and Hulu—represents at least the sixth time the events of 1971 have been presented at length on screen, either in documentary format or fictional drama. How could anyone condense nearly three hours worth of video narration into such well-covered events? I sat down to watch the preview screen set to fast forward, as needed.
In fact, it was not. The series is creatively designed and very attractive. Its narrative arc goes through more layers of context than anyone who knows the proper history could possibly see coming.
Many (perhaps most) readers of this column already know something about the test itself, with its popular use of undergraduates as guinea pigs in the days before institutional review boards put an eye on such things.
But anyone who draws a blank can see in this 10-minute video why research has long been a staple of introductory psychology textbooks. It was arousing—and still is, though for different reasons now.
The professor who conducted it research, Philip Zimbardo (1933–2024), always presented the structure and findings as clear cuts. Guards and inmates were randomly selected from the same location, apparently from a pool of participants (ie, young, white, male Stanford students with no criminal history and judged to be in good mental health).
When their interaction turned into tragedy and rebellion, the most important factor was not racial tension—or some psychological trait shared by either group—but, rather, the simulated prison environment itself.
The Stanford events played out just weeks before the Attica prison violence. Newspaper and television reporters who had paid little attention to Zimbardo’s news releases suddenly found their interest piqued. The availability of six hours of film footage captured during the trial was a breath of media exposure. And the influence of the experiment is difficult to separate from its telegenic aspects.
You have National Geographic The show, a showcase of video clips from across the decades, shows that Zimbardo was the perfect guest for the show: sincere but human and willing to expose negative details for the sake of a dramatic narrative.
Early accounts reported that the guards’ attitudes toward the prisoners ranged from friendliness to brutal contempt.
But in the course of repeated media appearances, Zimbardo came to treat the impact of prison conditions as uniform and inevitable: All guards became powerful, at least in the socially acceptable version.
And indeed, the more brutal and aggressive security guards set the tone for the photo shoot during the screening—especially the security guard named after his peer John Wayne, who takes the alpha’s place with great haste. But in a recent interview, one of the less enthusiastic curators describes being sidelined by Zimbardo and being encouraged to engage with more force.
Likewise, the alpha guard remembers Zimbardo encouraging him to take leadership. He had a theater background and envisioned himself playing a character—inspired by a prison movie Cool Hand Luke.
The participants interviewed in the documentary agree that Zimbardo had some expectations about what was going to happen. He was critical of the prison as an institution, as were some of the experimental subjects.
Zimbardo may not have expected things to grow so quickly, but the overall trajectory was unexpected. The press release issued shortly after the start of the trial has already referred to “necessary changes at the psychological level so that men who commit crimes are not subjected to dehumanizing actions due to their prison experience…” discussions.
In 2019, the French scholar Thibault Le Texier published a paper in the Journal of the American Psychological Association under the title “Debunking the Stanford Experiment,” drawing on archival sources and interviews with 15 of the 24 study subjects. It summarized the findings of a monograph he had published the previous year, now translated as Investigating the Stanford Prison Experiment: A False History (Springer). Le Texier appears briefly in the documentary, but his influence is seen beyond that: The makers followed behind his research, but without authorizing the characterization of Zimbardo’s behavior as dishonest.
That is left to the remaining participants to do. Most of them felt, or have felt, misled or abused by the experiment, or exploited by Zimbardo to further his media prominence from the 1970s onwards. If I’m reading my notes correctly, he is referred to twice as a “disco psychologist,” which was among the less hostile remarks.
Zimbardo appears in the third episode, responding to criticism and letting his anger fly, but in the end he is convinced that research has shown something about how bad situations can turn good people into monsters. I don’t know if the story will make it to the screen again, but it’s unlikely that it will improve on this release.
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