Original subtitles

We good?

Are you guys gonna be in the other room?

- I'm gonna be here. - Okay.

I thought not to wear a tie.

I think it's better.

I mean, with a jacket, it's semi-formal.

I have 100 ties, really great ones.

Somebody said, "Men shouldn't wear ties anymore."

And so I wore a tie just as anti-conformity.

The last year, the Stanford Prison Study

has received lots of criticism.

"The Stanford Prison Experiment is a lie."

"Zimbardo is a fraud."

Zimbardo was not behaving as a scientist.

He was behaving as someone who wanted to shock the world.

He took a narrative

and he sold it hard and well.

Phil makes it into, like, everybody became a sadist.

It wasn't even true of the nine guards.

The experimenters putting their hands

into the material.

Why did you do that do those kids?

He really built his career on this.

He basks in the limelight.

A stupid experiment.

There was obvious manipulation of us.

Zimbardo was disingenuous.

He's an egotist.

Huckster. Disco psychologist.

They don't really like you. I think they like me.

Yo.

Salesman. Showbiz.

- It's Phil Zimbardo. - Hustler.

The official narrative was a lie.

None of their criticisms hold up.

Zero.

Last June, almost every day for a week,

a different critic appeared,

criticizing a different aspect of the study.

My first instinct was to go,

"Oh, I'm gonna debunk all this."

But then the longer I spent with it,

there's something really interesting

and important happening.

Have you ever tried to reenact

the Stanford Prison Experiment with your students?

Hands against the wall, please.

Please take off your shoes.

I want you to go a bit faster!

I have done hour-long improvisations

of guards versus prisoners,

because essentially, the Stanford Experiment

is arguably the most influential piece of performance art

of the 20th century.

Zimbardo says it is the lesson in what happens

when a situation imposes itself on the people inside of it.

That's it. That's it.

But we can't generalize about situations

any more than we can generalize about people.

Any interactive circumstance that involves multiple people

will result in different experiences

of that same situation

and different understandings of what happened.

I'm trying to tell you.

So, you shouldn't ever take

one person's opinion as the truth.

It might be their truth,

but somebody else will have a different truth.

So, this is when I had a,

the start of a little bit of a mustache,

but pure, pure and clean.

And this is the start of the mus--

No, this had to be in the '70s

'cause it's, it's the long, long hair.

And this is a great picture.

I'm actually holding a sword.

I have an admiral's uniform.

This is my mother Margaret, my father George.

So, this is, this is me.

That's the Bronx, 1950, I think.

I was born in 1933, in the Depression,

which is a terrible time to be born.

My parents were second-generation Sicilian,

uneducated, and we grew up in the South Bronx in the ghetto.

People lived in very close proximity in small apartments.

It was a toxic environment.

When I was five years old, I got double pneumonia

and whooping cough at the same time.

I spent five months in the hospital.

And there are no wonder drugs, which means zero treatment.

And kids died all the time.

In the hospital, time got distorted.

Every day was the same. Every night was the same.

Time simply flowed on.

Life was boring.

The only thing we had were comic books.

It's 1939 and Superman comics had just come out.

And I can remember devouring it.

We would share the comic books with each other,

and we'd just tell stories about good versus evil.

I was able to create alternative realities

that made our little bit of life in the hospital

more interesting.

They can imprison my body, but my mind is always free.

This is the power of the human imagination,

the ultimate power on Earth.

That hospital experience, that five months,

ingrained so much into my brain,

the forces of good versus the forces of evil,

and that life could be really short.

And so whatever time you have on Earth,

whatever power you have, you want to do good.

After the war, social psychology was sometimes

referred to as Holocaust psychology.

Many of the great scholars in the discipline were obsessed

by the question of how the Holocaust could happen.

How so many people could be slaughtered,

not for anything they'd done,

but simply because of who they were.

The human capacity for inhumanity towards others

has dominated the field.

Two.

- Two. - Two.

Two.

The subject denies the evidence of his own eyes

and yields to group influence.

Asch found subjects went along with the group

on 37% of the critical trials.

Solomon Asch, who started work on conformity.

Stanley Milgram who did the famous obedience studies.

Milgram argued that ordinary people could do great harm.

People could inflict electric shocks

on innocent victims.

Milgram opened the door, and therefore it's easier

for psychologists like Zimbardo to push it further.

Psychology in the '60s was focused on

predicting individual behavior.

Without visual cues, what shapes can a man

most easily distinguish by feel alone?

This was the era of personality testing,

personality traits, individual differences.

I always challenged that,

saying we have to give more attention to situations.

From my own experience in the hospital,

it was the situation that forced me to use my imagination

to triumph over that hospital experience.

It was always the situation which individuals

find themselves that influenced their behavior.

The Stanford Prison Study is really an extension

of that idea, showing the power of the situation.

I got a lot of criticism for the ethics of the study

and controlling the story afterwards,

but it was really a pure exploration,

what happens when you put good people in a bad place?

At the time, I thought the study had an immediate appeal

about power, about looking into the dark places of prisons

that we never see, that we can only imagine.

And it was really intended to be used in college classes.

I never expected it would become a "media darling"

that I could not ignore.

Oh, yeah. No, again...

In the prison study,

we tried to put enough into the experiment

to make the power of authority feel real.

I had arranged with the chief of police to do these arrests.

I had contacted the local TV station and I told them,

"I'm gonna do this experiment.

I'll give you an exclusive to it."

That made the study work,

changed the whole mindset of the prisoners,

that "I'm under the control of the authorities."

If the kids came and said, "I'm here to begin the study,"

they were in charge.

So, the media arrests mean that you are no longer in charge.

So, that started the study off in high gear.

Can all of the actors and our participants...

I thought about the experiment

as an improvisational drama.

The basement yard, it was the stage,

the actors were prisoners and guards with different uniforms,

and the video camera was the audience.

The important thing to understand

about an experiment like this

is that there is an element of theatrical artifice.

But that doesn't mean that there's not also a level

of psychological reality; and the two coexist.

As a participant in the experiment,

what can you learn about yourself

by really living that situation?

Enough.

Oh, my goodness. Look at this here.

Hi, Doug.

Prisoner 8612.

This is unbelievable.

They took our clothes, and they took our bed.

Big fan of your work.

Big fan of my work, huh?

Hey.

So, I'm just supposed to act natural?

- You're Chuck? - I am Chuck.

- I'm Doug. - Doug. You were a...

Prisoner 8612. What were you?

I was the guard.

Really? You were a guard, huh?

Somebody had to be.

Hello, gentlemen. Good morning.

Morning, girls!

- I'm Dave. - There's the man.

Do you?

Didn't I tell you that you could not laugh?

What we have here is a failure to communicate.

You got it.

And you remember some of my lines, too.

I remember Cool Hand Luke.

- Oh, okay. - And you are?

- I'm Jerry Shue, 5486. - Okay. Okay.

And do you remember me?

- Yes, I do. - Hi, Dave.

Dave. How are you, Clay?

I was 416. I did the hunger strike.

Please be careful with the wires and cords.

It's kind of cool that they actually

went to all the trouble to make this set.

Well, you'll see.

Okay.

Déjà vu.

- Isn't this incredible? - Wow.

It's a pretty decent job.

Yeah. These doors look pretty solid

compared to what I remember, honestly.

Yeah. Oh, no, this is...

Were you the prisoner

who had a psychotic break or something?

You were the screamer.

- Yeah. - Yeah.

In the experiment, all I was thinking was,

"This is a really bad job."

What kind of job can you not leave?

During this experiment, at any time,

if you choose to stop being a participant,

all you have to say is,

I want to or I choose to quit this experiment.

But Doug Korpi didn't say that.

And so I was willing to do whatever it took to get out.

Action.

Kids come back and they try to escape.

You don't touch them and go manhandle them.

You go, "Get in there."

Action.

What are you guys doing?

Oh, man.

Get in your cell.

Yeah, that was correct.

That was right.

Doug Korpi is a strange bird.

Blah bluh blah.

He's a wise guy.

He's always cursing.

I don't about myself.

He loved that.

I up.

He's always putting down the guards.

He's really an unlikeable person,

unlikeable prisoner.

So, he constantly gets put into solitary confinement.

He's banging on the door, yelling and screaming.

I want out!

Guards really want to put a pillow over his face

to shut him up.

He was the first prisoner to break down

in 36 hours.

And he was ashamed of it that he couldn't take it,

he couldn't handle it.

And then said, "I was faking it. I was faking it to get out."

I don't have to say I was faking.

You can hear me faking.

When you hear my voiceover,

"I'm burning up inside," that's what I say.

I mean, who says that?

Action.

They won't let us out.

No, not that gleeful. Try that again.

- Not that gleeful. - Action.

They won't let us out.

That was good.

Alright, prisoners. It's time to do some push-ups.

That was right.

The guards were around as much as we were.

Action.

You guys get that this is a job.

Like, this isn't an experiment.

Hole it is.

Dr. Zimbardo, you're a liar!

No, this is torture!

No!

This is torture! Stop! Let, let go!

Action.

No, this is torture!

- Action. - Let go!

That was much more how it happened.

So, Doug, I think you were sitting.

No, no, it was against that back wall,

like, just like you had.

No, the, the back wall.

That one, yeah. And turn 90 degrees.

- This way? - No, the other way.

That way, yes.

Okay, and sit down.

Okay. That's exactly how I was. Okay, now I'm thinking,

"how am I gonna do this?"

I wanted to be convincing, and I wanted out.

And then I decided, okay, ready... act.

I'm burning up inside. Don't you know?

I want out! I want out!

I want out right now!

Right now!

Perfect.

- Well done. - Yeah.

- Well done. - Thank you. Thank you.

No, not bad.

Oh, thank you.

Sweet outfit.

- That's it. - I like that.

I love that.

That was good.

Doug Korpi says, "I was pretending to be upset.

I was just bored with the experiment.

I wanted to get out."

But then some years after the prison study,

I made another video with him,

in which Doug Korpi becomes the prison psychologist

in San Francisco County Jail.

I'm a forensic psychologist,

and I specialize in risk analysis.

So, if you've killed once, the judges ask me,

"Is he gonna kill again?"

What he hates is he lost control of himself.

He says at some point,

"I wanted to find out more about the mind."

And maybe it was just in part this experiment

just furthered my, my craving for control of my feelings.

I think that speaks to why I went into psychology.

He chose as his lifetime occupation

to be a prison psychologist.

What could be a more powerful effect of being a participant

in an experiment that it changes your entire life?

Phil would love to say that I was inspired

by the Stanford Prison Experiment

to become a psychologist.

You know, unconscious urges, you know, maybe it's true.

But am I aware that the Stanford Prison Experiment influenced me

in a significant-- no, I'm not aware of it.

It was only 36 hours.

And so, you leave it up to the audience, you know,

which do you think is the reality?

Alright, ladies. It's time for a count.

You all get the idea?

You break the rules, you get in the hole.

Now get back in your cells.

Let's go. Come on.

Let's go.

Good job.

To this day, I'm angry at Zimbardo.

You're not?

No, I was not at all angry with Zimbardo.

Zimbardo got caught up in the same dynamic that everybody did.

And you got caught up in it?

I don't think anybody in the experiment

did not get caught up in it.

We guards feel somewhat deceived by...

Deceived.

...leading, we were led to believe

that the experiment was all about the prisoners.

We were just there to help them

get the results they're looking for.

I could see where the guards thought

that they were not subject of our interest,

and they were simply doing their duty.

But everybody fell into their roles,

which speaks to the validity of the experiment.

So, how much direction was given

to the guards?

No, it was very little.

I mean, we have it, we have it all on video.

Prisons always have rules.

I told the guards, your job is to maintain law and order,

to be sure no prisoners escape.

Maybe we said by all means necessary,

something generally vague,

but we made clear you're not permitted

to use any physical force.

We can create boredom, we can create a sense of frustration,

we can create a sense of fear in them.

But I did not minimize psychological force.

At the beginning, the guards,

they saw themselves as nice guys.

And guards are supposed to be mean guys.

But then the prisoners rebelled.

It's a rebellion!

And that was the switch in the experiment.

After that, guards said, "These are dangerous prisoners

and we have to show them who's in control."

So, even though it was kids in tiny rooms

with fake bars on the doors, it created its own dynamic,

that is nothing was real except in their minds.

All good? Alright. Thank you.

There's the props.

Hey, Chase, let me give a little words of advice

before we go out there.

Whoever you are in your daily life, that's gone.

You are now the meanest prison guard that has ever existed.

What's your backstory?

Think about that.

Where were you born?

What were your childhood experiences?

Close your eyes.

Inhabit that person.

Now open your eyes.

Take these glasses...

this whistle...

...and this nightstick.

Who are you?

Dave. Guard Dave.

Guard Dave.

Alright.

Alright, girls, come on out!

Here in this hallway, I'm boss.

Let's do some sit-ups. On the ground.

I want to hear them. Yeah, louder!

Two, three...

And these are the worst sit-ups I've ever seen.

Three, four...

Push-ups!

Turn them over.

You heard him. Push-ups. Let's go.

Count them out.

Come on.

- Four, five. - It ain't that hard.

2196 is such a goodie little two shoes.

We all fall down.

To the ground.

Enough. Back in your cells.

Hey, guys, you guys did great.

Fantastic.

Yeah.

You are rocking those sideburns.

There you go. Hey, man.

It's funny to see yourself channeled like that,

you know, it's really weird.

But the one thing you could do is get a little louder,

you know, get in their face.

"You piece of junk!" You know?

Alright.

You know, 'cause at, even at your volume level

that there was that sense of menace there

that should be intimidating.

I understood that what they were trying to do

was some sort of exposé

about the evils of the whole prison system.

So, I said, "Well, I'm an actor."

I just got through watching Cool Hand Luke, you know?

I can do a better job of this than anybody.

I tried to be intimidating

to where I would really instill some, some fear.

I would expect one way for the guards

to minimize their guilt

is to say, "I didn't create the evil.

I was simply following orders of evil higher-ups."

Six, seven, eight, nine.

The problem is there were no orders.

If anything, there is a day where one of the guards

is sitting, smoking,

and the warden, David Jaffe, says to him,

"You're getting paid to be a guard. So act like a guard."

That was only to one guard

on one of the three shifts.

Hour after hour, day after day, the guards came up with new ways

to humiliate and essentially dominate their prisoners

on their own, I mean, adlibbing.

Prisoners must never smoke in the cell.

Prisoners must never smoke in the cell.

The guards accepted that role

that they are part of the correctional system

rather than they were students making some money,

playing a game in a basement.

Didn't I tell you that you could not laugh?

Maybe you didn't hear me right.

Dave Eshleman and some of the other guards

who did cruel things to the prisoners

in retrospect have to justify what they did.

And the easiest justification is, "It wasn't the real me.

I was playing the role in order to make this experiment work."

You walk over here like Frankenstein.

I love you, 2093.

Get up close. Get up close.

I love you, 2093.

I love you, 2093.

You're smiling, 2093!

You get down here and do 10 push-ups.

But the problem is you're improvising on a stage

for 12 hours.

And the audience goes away and you're still improvising.

Some of the worst things that he did

happened in the middle of the night

when he had no idea that we were making videos,

we were observing him.

The videotaping was random, and you couldn't tell.

And the question is how much of what he did was improv?

And how much of it was sadistic impulses in him

that came out to dominate somebody else?

Did I tell you to stop?

One, two.

And we have video evidence of his delight

in being a cruel, sadistic guard.

What could have happened

had Dave Eshleman not decided to ramp it up?

I guess what would have happened,

what happens in real prisons, nothing.

I would often use my acting just to mess with people.

Professor Zimbardo made it a point as to come up to me

and say, "You were fantastic."

And that's where I felt that

I had done what he wanted me to do.

Dave Eshleman has an excuse that works for him.

It wasn't for real. This was artificial context.

And inside that, I was doing an artificial thing,

and those don't count.

Mealtime.

Hot dog day.

We don't got all day.

I strongly disagreed with that.

Eat that hot dog, Prisoner 416.

Eat your hot dog.

No.

Do you know where I'm gonna stick that hot dog

if you do not eat it?

It's getting crammed up your ass.

All life is real life.

Hole it is.

Come on.

There is not some special box

where what you do doesn't have consequences.

That does not exist.

Way to follow the rules, boys.

Finish eating.

Finish up them dogs, boys.

The magical question is, you know,

when does acting stop and reality start?

One of the troubling things to me is if I really believed

I was doing something for the greater good,

would I have been willing to use my nightstick

and hit one of these guys in the head?

When I think about it now, I think no, there's no way

I would have crossed the line and actually hit somebody.

Ethically, it really doesn't matter

whether something's supposed to be play pretend

or it's supposed to be a scientific experiment,

or no, now where this is the real world

but somebody else has made the rules for the real world.

And so, my ethics are different.

That is all.

You know, at some point

if I actually did some psychological harm to people,

you know, that's not acting.

True.

I would feel very guilty if I had, you know,

actually caused anybody any harm.

Hole cam is rolling.

And action.

Prisoner 416 will stay in the hole

for the remainder of the night.

So, what'll it be?

Are you gonna keep your blankets?

What'll it be?

Keep my blanket, sir.

Blanket.

Keep my blanket.

Give up my blanket.

I think majority rules, right?

Well, looks like Prisoner 416

is gonna stay another night in the hole.

You hear that, Prisoner 416?

Hope you're comfy, Prisoner 416.

But before you go, I want you to thank Prisoner 416

like this for me.

Thank you, Prisoner 416.

Thank you, Prisoner 416.

Oh, yeah.

At that moment, I felt no empathy whatsoever

for a fellow human being.

It's very difficult to confront the fact

that I'm actually capable of that type of evil.

Thank you, Prisoner 416.

Thank you, Prisoner 416.

Thank you, Prisoner 416.

Basically, I just didn't wanna make waves, and I thought,

well, he knows I'm his friend since we had shared a cell.

I'll do this just to keep things smooth.

416, it's okay. We'll get you out.

No, no, no.

I did not say that.

Thank him and give a bang on the door.

I could have said, "No, I will not pound on that door."

Thank you, Prisoner 416.

But it was easier to just go through the motions.

So...

So I respect what he represented.

It's very interesting that this is the pivotal memory

that has been with me for my whole life.

I went through the whole experiment

kind of as a spectator, I thought,

and felt like I was above it until I realized

that I had been manipulated

into pounding on the door really hard.

And regardless of Clay's reaction,

I was succumbing to the pressures of the situation.

How does it feel to watch that again for you, Chuck?

It was a good detoxification about something

that's made me feel terrible my whole life.

When I got into this experiment, it was the first time

in my whole life where I experienced having power.

And I was so angry that somebody was resisting

after nobody had been resisting for days

that I just walked by and I slammed my, slammed my club

into the door just in a rage.

For me, that's a surprising parallel,

because it's the one thing I regretted ever since then.

This is where almost everybody involved realized

that we had gone over a line.

Did I tell you to stop barking?

As the stress built up among the prisoners,

it also built up among the staff.

I had done a lot of research in my life,

but nothing that went beyond an hour or something.

I had never been in a study that went on hour after hour,

day after day.

So, it was just physically exhausting.

You get down on all fours.

Pretend like you're a dog.

On the fifth day,

Christina, who I was dating, came.

All fours.

We were observing the night shift.

No!

Get in there.

One, two, three.

And she begins to tear up,

and then she simply says,

"I don't know who you've become in this week.

And if this is the real you,

I don't think I want to continue our relationship."

That was a smack in the face. I said, "What?"

Multiple people say,

"He planned for his girlfriend to show up and be upset."

It became the perfect excuse to stop it.

Yeah, no, I don't think so.

Because here was somebody I thought I knew.

Here was somebody I thought, "This is the one."

And now, I'm not sure I know this person.

This was so shocking

that I could have misjudged somebody so badly.

My brain had been functioning at this other level

of abstract intellectual.

I was wrapped in the role of superintendent.

I was blinded to what I had created.

It was like being awakened from a nightmare.

I came to my senses and I said, "Oh, my god, you're right.

I have to end the study as soon as possible."

Do you feel any guilt?

Oh, sure. I was overwhelmed with guilt.

You know, how could I not have seen what she saw?

But there was no one to apologize to

except, you know, the god of science.

What about the prisoners or the guards?

Did you ever feel like you needed to apologize to them?

I made it explicit in the debriefing

that, that I am sorry that I allowed this to go on too long.

Six days is a long time for a study.

But yes, I felt guilty, I felt shame.

What would you say to Zimbardo if he was here?

Way to go,.

60 Minutes calls me up and I said, "Look, Phil,

I don't wanna have anything to do with your experiment.

I'm done with it.

Leave me alone, Phil."

And he wouldn't leave me alone.

Didn't you change your phone number

and he found it anyway or something?

Yeah, did everything.

Wow.

I'd like to know how much he's earned from this experiment.

Plenty.

Well, he certainly achieved fame,

which is what he wanted.

Zimbardo is the only one

that's making money and reputation.

This is his life.

This is what gives him stature.

Attica happening so quickly

after the experiment finished was really a great opportunity

for psychologists to come forward and say why it happened.

And then when Abu Ghraib pops up...

Yeah.

You could just see all the, the lessons

from the experiment being misused.

It's marketing.

After the experiment ended,

I didn't think it would have any lasting effect.

It was really intended to be used in college classes.

But then three weeks after I did the prison study,

there was Attica.

Prisoners went on a strike and took over Attica Prison

in New York to get attention of citizens

about some horrible conditions.

And this became a big media event.

Now, the public want to know

about what's happening in our prisons.

Attica is blood on Rockefeller's hands!

And from the Stanford Prison Experiment,

we had video footage, giving viewers an eye

into the secret life of what happens in a prison.

It was reality television taking the audience into that scene.

And suddenly, this little experiment,

which I was ready to put to bed

became national news, national event.

The immediate impact

of the Stanford Prison Experiment had waned.

I'm now doing research on shyness,

on time perspective, and then...

The abuse of Iraqi prisoners by some Americans.

These images were released to the media,

and suddenly there is an interest

in the prison experiment again.

The lawyer called me and said, "Would you give testimony

to help for one of the prison guards, Chip Frederick,

because the military wants to give him 15 years

because it was a disgrace to America."

- Can I interrupt you? - Yeah.

Were you hesitant to take on that role,

in defense of somebody who committed those abuses?

Yeah, no, because I told his lawyer

I'm giving a tentative maybe.

And so, I got to know him.

I spent hours talking to him, checking his whole background.

And I said, "This is as good as a guy gets."

He was a good father, good husband.

I said, "Your Honor, this is an extension of the prison study.

Chip Frederick never would have done any of this

had he not been put in that night shift.

Everybody who was in that basement at night

was corrupted."

It's quite problematic to use

any artificial scenario to explain real torture.

That seems, to me, cheap.

What Chip Frederick did was awful,

deserved some punishment, but I was able to reduce his sentence.

And then I decided I would write a book about it.

I called it The Lucifer Effect:

Understanding How Good People Turn Evil.

So really, each thing led to the next thing throughout my life.

Zimbardo, unlike a lot of professors,

is certainly not afraid of the limelight.

I think that he likes the publicity.

I think that this particular demonstration, experiment

really made a name for him.

I've always associated his name with salesman,

selling himself, selling his project.

He knows where it's cool

and what will attract media attention.

This is a savvy dude.

Some years after the prison study, I thought,

I really know so much psychology now.

I've been teaching it. I've been writing about it.

But now I'm interested in giving psychology away to the public.

Instead of being limited to 500 kids

who are fortunate to get into Stanford,

how do I get my message to the world?

Well, how about if I was on the television?

So, I helped create a series called Discovering Psychology.

This was presenting the tableau is psychology from A to Z.

What does the mind's eye see?

Many of our beliefs we accept without question.

As soon as a baby is born, an amazing process begins.

Behavior of animals in their own natural habitat.

Can tests really tell us how smart we are?

Psychology can be boring, and so I would always think about,

how am I gonna transmit what I have here into their brain

and make it memorable?

By manipulating your perception.

So, I had to get their attention,

focus it like a juggler does.

Going back to that hospital experience

where I was confined to my bed.

I had all these wonderful thoughts

that had no place to go.

And here was a way to share my ideas.

Phil has a kind of a warmth about him,

and I think this comes across even on TV,

because he will get tons of letters from students

who have never met him and have only seen him on screen.

He inspires joy in so many people.

They have a real affection for him.

And he's really kind of magical.

My most important achievement

is the Discovering Psychology series,

because it was turning the research into education

for the general public.

Let's look at it again,

only this time from a different perspective.

By the way, Clay, I apologize

for throwing you in that hole 52 years ago.

Look at what we've gotten out of it.

Everlasting fame.

Yeah, I doubt we'd still be talking about this

today if I hadn't been, you know, we hadn't been such jerks.

It's all, you know, absence of a design.

I mean, you thought this was an acting job.

Yeah.

I don't think any of us would have thought at that time

that it would ever become what it has become.

I didn't, I certainly didn't think so.

If Zimbardo had, you know, not embraced it

as his life's work afterward,

then it certainly wouldn't have, but...

When I...

And that, that is another

extremely weird thing about it.

He just milked this for 50 years.

Yeah.

Phil Zimbardo is right.

This was an incredibly important experiment and event.

Look at us all here 50 years later.

I think it's a good lesson that ordinary people

can easily do horrible things.

We all have these capabilities within us.

And I think this experiment was important

in, in putting that out there

whatever, whatever its other deficits.

The concept I think we can all identify with

is that, you know, good people can do bad things

in the wrong circumstances.

I feel that this was not a legitimate way to show that.

No.

Any of you guys want to take a shot at us,

you know, while we're standing here?

It's a, it's a little late for that, Dave.

I said, "Is anybody still angry?"

And what I've discovered, a lot of people are angry at Zimbardo.

I would be.

I think almost every time I read something written by him,

I got annoyed because he was generalizing.

And that wasn't the way I felt.

I think human memory is designed for people

to find a way to come to terms with who they are

and what they've done.

I think everybody had decades to develop a consistent narrative

that we can live with about what happened and what we remembered.

We all have our own agendas

that we bring into the experiment.

I know I certainly did.

And I'm sure each one of you did the same thing.

What has this experience been like

for all of you?

I'm so happy that Clay was not damaged

by anything I did.

That's great.

There was this one guy during the experiment

that I thought was a total.

And I met him, and he's not.

There you go. The rehabilitation.

Me? I didn't do anything.

I thought about you for 50 years

because I felt guilty for pounding on the door.

Here I meet you, and what the hell, you didn't even--

He wasn't even paying attention.

I've been feeling guilty about hitting my club

against the door.

Yeah, you probably don't remember it.

You didn't care.

The Stanford Prison Experiment proves

that if you get the right combination of elements,

that story will run and run.

And the line between fact and fiction is extremely unstable.

There's a saying in French,

"When the lie is beautiful, it deserves to be true."

The Stanford Prison Study should be seen

as a demonstration where right and wrong,

reality and illusion is all jumbled.

And it's up to the audience to pull it apart.

Because the playwright just gives you all of this material,

and you have to say what's real, what's not,

what's true, what's false.

And maybe that's what the enduring value

of the Stanford Prison Study is

it allows many different interpretations

of the same events,

but maybe there's no such thing as the same events.

The Stanford Prison Experiment is what happened

in the minds of 24 college students,

a handful of researchers in a basement

at Stanford University in 1971.

No, no. This is torture!

Three, two.

Two, three, four.

Oh, my god. Look at this.

Alright.

It fits!

Alright, everybody. That's a wrap.

Hooray. Yay.

We're done.

Yeah, it was such a pleasure.

We're done.

Yeah, it was such a pleasure.

It was great. It's been great.

I'm exhausted.