The Unethical Zimbardo Experiment That Started As Social Psychology And Went Completely Off The Rails

Conducted at Stanford University in the 1970s, the Stanford Prison Experiment is often presented as one of the clearest examples of how badly things can change once people are given power.

On the morning of August 15, 1971, nine university students had their homes raided by police officers, were handcuffed in front of their neighbors, and taken into custody. The young men were then brought to the mock Stanford prison, constructed in the basement of Stanford University. Waiting for them were nine guards. Wearing uniforms and mirrored sunglasses, the guards ordered the prisoners to strip, chained their ankles, placed nylon caps over their heads, and made them wait naked in the corridor. Each of them was assigned a number, and from that moment on, they were addressed only by those numbers. They were then placed into cells in groups of three.

All Of Them Were Just Students

To make the situation feel real, both the young men who were fictionally arrested and the guards who greeted them with humiliating treatment were in fact university students who had agreed to participate in a social psychology experiment for $15 a day. They had been selected at random.

Even though the participants were described as completely ordinary and psychologically healthy people, the experiment spiraled out of control within just a few days. On the second day, a rebellion broke out in response to the guards’ mistreatment, and it was crushed with fire extinguishers. Prisoners were forced to use buckets inside their cells as toilets and were not allowed to empty them. When one prisoner began a hunger strike in protest, he was locked inside a tiny closet for isolation.

What had supposedly begun as an experiment was quickly turning into something much darker.

Prisoner 8612 And The Breaking Point

Prisoner 8612 suffered a psychological collapse and began kicking the cell door, shouting, “For God’s sake, I’m burning up inside. Don’t you understand? I want out. This thing has gone too far. I can’t take another night. I’ve had enough. I just can’t take it anymore.”

Philip Zimbardo, the American psychologist who designed the experiment, also became absorbed in the situation and started behaving like a prison superintendent trying to maintain control. But on the sixth day, after his girlfriend visited the site and confronted him about what she saw, he came to his senses and ended the experiment.

By that point, five prisoners had shown signs of extreme emotional depression, crying, rage, and acute anxiety, while many of the guards were reportedly upset that the experiment was ending.

The Famous Conclusion Everyone Accepted

Zimbardo’s conclusion was that ordinary good people could suddenly become monsters, and that what happened at Stanford was the natural result of putting on a guard uniform.

That was the version of the story that became world-famous.

Then The Story Started Falling Apart

But from Rutger Bregman’s work Humankind, we learn that many of the events surrounding the experiment may have been far less spontaneous than the public was led to believe. According to later research, the entire thing looked more like a staged performance. Guards were given clear instructions, and their actions were outlined for them. Audio recordings revealed how Zimbardo’s assistant pressured guards who were not being harsh enough and pushed them to act tougher. In other words, the guards may not have simply “become evil.” They may have been playing the role they were expected to play.

One of the guards later admitted that he felt he had to give the researchers something to work with. As he put it, he began forming a concrete plan in his head because otherwise there would be no findings to produce. What kind of results could come from people just sitting around like they were at a holiday resort?

That changes the meaning of the entire experiment.

Even The Breakdown May Not Have Been Real

Douglas Korpi, the prisoner remembered as 8612, said in a 2017 interview that his breakdown had not been genuine and that he had been acting the whole time. According to Korpi, he joined the experiment because he thought he would be able to prepare for his exams in a quiet environment, but he was not allowed to bring his books inside. When he wanted to leave, he was told he could only get out if he showed physical or psychological distress. First he tried pretending to have a stomach problem. When that failed, he switched to acting psychologically destroyed.

If that account is true, then one of the most famous moments in the history of psychology was not a spontaneous collapse, but a performance designed to escape the experiment.

The BBC Tried It Again And Nothing Happened

Back in 2001, before Zimbardo had widely come to be seen as a charlatan by many critics, the BBC decided to repeat the same setup for prime-time television and turned it into a four-part reality program called The Experiment.

Millions of viewers in Britain tuned in expecting another descent into cruelty between prisoners and guards. But nothing happened.

This time, the guards had not been given instructions. They were simply observed. And what the audience ended up watching was something much less dramatic: ordinary, psychologically healthy people drinking tea together, talking through their problems, and resolving conflicts through conversation.

As Sunday Herald summarized it, if you put good people in a bad place and start recording, not much actually happens.

Maybe The Real Story Was About The Era

As Bregman argues, the 1970s were the wild west period of social psychology. Ambitious young researchers were building names for themselves through shocking experiments.

Maybe that is why these studies, and their dramatic conclusions, were so eagerly amplified. Maybe governments also found such conclusions useful, which made them even easier to promote.

In 2018, French sociologist Thibault Le Texier watched Zimbardo’s 2009 TED Talk, sensed that something was off, and decided to investigate. Until then, almost no one had seriously gone into Stanford’s archives. Once he did, it reportedly did not take long to discover that the story people had been told for decades was nowhere near as clean or as natural as it had been presented.

And perhaps that is the most disturbing part of all.