Hey, everyone, We're coming to Salt Lake City, Utah and Phoenix, Arizona this fall. Yeah, October, we're going to be at Salt Lake Cities Grand Theater and then the next night October will be in Phoenix. And we added a second show to our Melbourne show, right, that's right, a second earlier show in Melbourne. So you can get all the information for all of these shows at s y s K live dot com. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from how Stuff Works dot com. Hey you, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, Jerry's over there. So why don't you pull up a chair, kick back and tell us about your problems? Because this is psychology stuff. We should just call this episode the Stanford Prison Experiment a k a. Perhaps the happiest experiment of all time, and it's really not an experiment anyway, but it's the most famous psychology experiment ever. Yeah. I got kind of ticked off while I was researching this, you should, man, because I used to think it was cool, like, oh man, what a cool experiment. Yeah, everybody's evil and it's core. Yeah. Then I researched it, and I was like, this is a bunch of bs, all of it. This is one of the worst executed experiments I've ever heard of. That is so funny because I while I was researching this, I was like, I'm gonna have to keep it together. Maybe at the end I can really go off from let's go off at the beginning. That's great. Man. I watched the movie today to yeah, how was it? How was Billy crude up? Because I loved him in almost famous Well, I'm a fan, he's he was good. Um, But like, I don't know, the movie A was pretty sensationalized as far as the violence. Like they showed a lot of straight up physical violence in the movie which supposedly didn't occur, um, like beating them with billy clubs and hog tying them in like like real violence. How actually, these days I should say at Lanta, Yeah, Uh, y'allywood is what they call it. Oh, there you go. Perfect, That's that's perfect. That sounds like a Norman Reda's creation. It might have been uh and then uh, what was I saying? Oh? Um, I don't feel like it came down hard enough on on this Yahoo. What was the guy's name? Zimbardo. Yeah, Zimbardo for just crafting a really poor doing a very poor job at crafting its supposedly scientific experiment. No, he was like the driving force behind that movie getting made. Apparently he'd been trying to get a movie made in America. He seems to be a pretty frameless self promoter decades. Yes, Yeah, it's not a good quality in a social psychologist. No, so we're gonna see. I guess we'll let the cat out of the bag. But well, we shall see that. Um. The Stanford prison experiment one of the most famous experiments in the Annals of Psychology. It's not an experiment at all. It's it's findings are wide open new interpretation, and it was conducted by a showman. Basically. Yeah, I mean, you know, it's a red flag when you don't publish your findings in a medical journal. You published them in New York was a New York magazine, New York Times magazine, Hodgeman's rag. Well, great rag, But that's not the place to go publish scientific findings. No peer of viewed journals are, and they circumvented that, but for very good reasons. All right, so let's let's talk about the outline. So let's go back to the beginning, right, Yeah, back to the year of my birth and Stanford at Stanford University, which is what Palo Alto. Yeah, uh find being sequoia is what is there? They have like a big old sequoia on their logo. I think it's like a and then they have a uh sequoia with its fists up. That's Notre Dame I'm thinking of. I do feel like it has something. Chuck's looking it up everybody, so let me stall. It is a tree, the Stanford Tree. I don't know what the mascot is, but there's definitely a tree associated. I looked it up, the Stanford Tree. Okay. And the first question is why is it a tree? Huh? Well, what's the answer. Well, I mean, I'm sure it's just because of where it is in California, But that doesn't answer the real question, which is why would you have a tree? Right Phillips Embardo sitting there like quit stall and get to the get to the heckling. He's still around, Yeah he is, so um, all right, we're at Stanford. It's nine Yeah. We're actually in the basement of one of the buildings at Stanford, Stanford University. I think like Campbell Hall or something like that. And I think August of nineteen seventy one, there were um twenty four young men, almost all of them one I think one of them was Asian American, and um, they are doing something pretty bizarre in this basement in August of They've been divided into two groups, guards and prisoners supposedly average kids, right, and they are um acting out this basically role playing game of guards versus prisoners for fifteen bucks a day in a simulated prison in the basement of this this hall at Stanford University. Yeah, which would be about nine dollars today, funded by the U S Office of Naval Research. Is that right? So it would be ninety three bucks a day, and it was originally gonna be two weeks. So I'm sure some of these guys were like, hey, yeah, yeah, I mean I kind of forgot what it was like to be a college student that that would be, uh, you know what between twelve and four bucks darting off your summer it would be about dollars if my quick math is correct, good scratch for year old. Yeah, two weeks on summer break, that's right. So Uh, you were divided into two lots, like you said. Um, they asked people, um, supposedly what you wanted to be, unless this was purely a movie creation, and they did try and look up and try and find out the differences. Um, But they supposedly asked him. In most everyone said, or in fact everyone said prisoner. Uh. In one of the reactions from who ended up being the bad guard, the guy said, they asked him why, and he's like, because nobody likes cards. It's like, why would anyone want to be a guard? Because they thought we'll just be prisoners, because they just will lay around smoke cigarettes. So we'll we'll and we'll kind of unpack what that suggests later on. Sure. Okay, so you've got these these guys and they're down here for this experiment, and so coming at it from the way. This is the popular interpretation of what happened at the Stanford Prison experiment. Okay, you've got you've got twelve guards and twelve prisoners. The prisoners had been arrested, by the way, by the real Palo Alto police. Yeah, they weren't told when, but like the real cops came by arrested each one of them for you know, a variety of crimes, booked them at the Palo Alto Police station and then transported them to the jail, the fake jail in uh at Stanford. Yeah, they call it the Stanford County Jail. And they did a legit job. They put up signs, they had these rooms decked out like jail cells, they had a whole um. They did a really believable job of making this seem like a prison environment at least so Um, you've got these these prisoners who have been delivered, You've got these guards who are waiting there for him, and um as as far as Zimbardo has ever said, these these guards were told you have to protect the prison and everything else is up to you. The only rule is there's no physical punishment. We're just here to observe, Like here's your uniforms, here's your sunglasses. Yeah. And then the prisoners were booked in with wearing smocks, no shoes, no underwear, Yeah, naked under the smocks, chained at the ankles. And then they wore like um, those stocking cap do rags, a panty on their head to simulate to simulate they're having their head shaved, right, Uh, and you know, this is this the early seventies, so most of them had these big afrozen long hair and stuff under these panties. Right, so, um, this is like at first, everything's pretty normal. The guards don't quite know what to do. They're a little timid. The prisoners apparently relish this immediately and started like finding where the guard's boundaries were, and they started to band together. And there was actually, I think on day two, the the the turnover from day one to two, there was a prisoner riot. Yeah, I mean they m like you said, they were sort of laughing at first, and I think we didn't mention too and this is will end up being very very problematic and the first sign that he didn't do a good job. Zimbardo actually acted as the superintendent of the prison, involved himself in his own experiment and had one of it. He had some graduate assistants that were assisting in the program. They acted as parole board, and one of them was the warden that was yeah, undergrad actually, well the warden Jaffee, his last name was Jaffee. He was an undergrad at the time and actually he had come up with the experiment on his own. Oh, he was the guy, huh huh. And then um, Zimbardo was like, this is a really good idea. Let's do this for real. Imagine the press, right. So yeah, like he said, it escalated pretty quickly. After kind of laughing at first, these guards got into their roles, to say the least, and um really kind of started being jerks in quick order. And after the prisoners were like, hey, this is kind of funny, like you're being you're not being very cool, and they were you know, kind of smacked down and and you know, made to do things like push ups and jumping jacks and uh, they would withhold food and eventually they would like take their beds away from them and stuff like. It just got worse and worse, and there was, I think, like you said, on day two, a an uprising. They got together, threw the cots off their beds and through the bed frames against the door and wouldn't let them in. So there was a prisoner riot. Yeah. That's pretty significant, right, um. And what's equally significant is that the guards by the second day started to show signs of like real cruelty toward the prisoners. They started treating them very poorly. Um, they started engage aging and basically acts of torture like waking them up randomly in the middle of the night, making them get up, like you said, push ups, which is interpreted as um physical punishment because again you couldn't you couldn't hit them with the rubber hose, you couldn't hit them with the baton, you couldn't punch them. But if you make somebody to do a bunch of push ups, that's physical punishment too. Yeah, and it was within the bounds apparently. Yeah. They were referred to only by their prison numbers. They would never say their names. They were made to memorize everyone else's prison number, and like they would line them up and tell them to repeat their numbers for like an hour. If they didn't do it fast enough and then in reverse order, uh, they would get punishment. They would do the kind of the classic moves of holding one responsible for the punishment of others. Yeah, that's a that's a big one. Like if you didn't make your bed good enough, then no one could go to sleep. Stuff like that. The guards also innovated um the carrots here there too. They actually made one cell like a good cell, like they put a bed in it with like betting. Um, if you were in that cell, you were eligible for like good meals better than what the other prisoners had. And there were room for three inmates in there at a time, and so instilled this sense of competition and and um skullduggery, I guess backstabbery among the prisoners to curry favor with the guards, like by informing on the other ones so that you could get a chance to be in like the nice cell. Yeah. And I think even before that, like when they went to do the when they went to stage the uprising, I don't think there were three rooms of three and I think six of them. Two of the rooms participated and one of the rooms did not. And uh, because not all the guys, um, you know, not all the prisoners like rebelled as much. Some of them just kind of went along with it. Interestingly, some of the guards did not descend into cruelty. They actually some of them did like favors, went out of their way to be nice to the prisoners. But in um the grabster who wrote this article points out very significantly, they didn't stand up to the cruel guards or officially object to their their behavior. They went along with it. But then in their own right, in their own way, they did what they could to retain their humanity. So there are two huge points and one of them, there's one among the guards and one among the prisoners. And the one among the prisoners comes thirty six hours after the beginning of the of the experiment, and this prisoner, his name, it would later be revealed, was Douglas Corpy. Um, he had an emotional breakdown, a nervous breakdown thirty six hours after this this this experiment starts, one of the prisoners, it becomes so emotionally involved in this simulated prison at this cruelty, the simulated supposedly cruelty of the guards that he had a nervous breakdown and had to be had to be removed from them the experiment. And this is like, this is embardos. This is the official line for the Stanford Prison experiment and has been for decades. Yeah. He also said that one of them broke out in a psychosomatic rash. There was um all manner of of various levels of psychological breakdowns happening on the other side. The big star among the guards was a guy named John Wayne, who you referenced earlier. Yeah, his name was Dave Eshelman, and he was the one who he was the ringleader. He's the one that came out as the most brutal guard of them all, and all the other guards kind of fell in line behind him and took their cues from him. So this whole thing is going on, This is crazy town in this place. In in six days, six days, this thing descends into chaos. Supposed to be two weeks, yes, there was. There was rumors that there was going to be a breakout, and so they moved the experiment. Um. There were that that guy Douglas Corpi, who had a nervous breakdown, ended up getting put into the whole um this broom closet for I think overnight and was finally released because the the researchers that actually stepped in and said, you shoulhould probably let him out. Um. It was. It was just utter chaos. And then eventually um Phillip Zimbardo's girlfriend at the time of a woman named Christine mass Maslock his wife to be. Um. Oh she married him, huh um. So she came and just dropped in to see how things were going and was so outraged at what she saw that she was like, you, you're so far beyond the line. You have to stop this now, like this is this is descended into chaos. You can't do this. These people are treating these these prisoners horribly, Like how are you letting this go on? Fine? And so the next day he canceled the experiment again after six days, and it was scheduled to go on for two weeks. And so he comes out tells the world in this New York Times magazine, guys, if I took you, if I took you josh and I took you Chuck and put you as guarden prisoner in an even a simulated prison, and put a smock on josh and took his underwear off and uh put a stocking on his head, and gave Chuck a baton and some glasses. Chuck would beat Josh up, and Joshua probably have his spirit broken and have a nervous breakdown. It's in everybody. Evil is in everybody crumbling at the first sign of adversity. Isn't everybody We're all just pathetic weaklings? Stanford Prison experiment and he ran off and said, I'm famous. All right, that's a great setup. So we'll take a break here and come back and talk a little bit about the more about the experiment and the realities of it right after this. All right, So you've got John Wayne in there. I don't think we mentioned that he took on the persona of the prison boss and cool hand Luke. He did a fake Southern accent and everything and dove right into this role. Um, if you talk to Dave Eshelmann today, he will say he's very much on record of saying, I'm not some jerk, uh, And I didn't get off on being sadistic. He said, I wanted to do what they paid me fifteen dollars a day to do, which was to be a prison guard and to treat these guys poorly. And so I you know, he said, I did some drama in high school, and I literally acted this part as well as I could. That was I felt was expected and wanted from me, right, And I put on this fake Southern accent. And if you like asked people friends and family today, they would laugh at this because I'm really not this guy at all, right, Because he really comes off as as a bit of a villain in this movie. For sure. Well, he perpetrated real cruelty on other people and we'll get to that later. And he should because the other people actually did suffer under this guy's leadership as the ringleader of the mean guards, like they wore pink on Wednesday. It was terrible everywhere, right, So, um, he really should feel bad, and apparently he does. I saw that all over the place too, that he feels bad for it. But the point is is that he has said, like, this didn't happen organically, like I I wasn't. I wasn't I felt encouraged to play this role. That's a big deal because the findings of the Stanford prison experiments say, if you take some people and say you're a guard empower and you will turn evil, they will turn evil within a day. A day they said about this guy. And this guy's like, no, I was, just like you said, doing my job. But they're paying me fifteen bucks a day for Let's put that one to the side. In that Let's go visit with Douglas Corpi, who was the prisoner who in thirty six short hours of this simulated prison experiment lost his marbles and had a nervous breakdown and had to go home. Right, one of the other two pillars of the findings that people are either evil or easily crumble in the face of adversity from the Stanford prison experiment. And again, this is how this thing has been taught for like fifty years. Okay, Yeah, So Corpy comes out and says, I was faking that, and I put on a big act so I could get out of there because it sucked and I didn't want to be there anymore. So I fake like I was. And he he like one of his quotes was I don't have it here, but basically said like any trained clinician would have been able to see right through this. Like when I hear the tapes years later, it's like, I'm not an actor. I wasn't like apparently the John Wayne guy at least had been in like high school plays in college too, I think, yeah, And he was like, I was not an actor. And it was so clear to me looking back at these tapes that I was faking it, faking a nervous breakdown, faking a nervous breakdown to get out of there. So the reason why he said later that he did fake this nervous breakdown is because he took the job because he thought he'd just be laying around, like you said, smoking cigarettes, being a prisoner, and he would get to study for the g r E. He was inner grad school and well they said, no, you can't have your books. Now. They didn't give him anything, and this guy was like, whoa, whoa, Wait a minute, this is day one. He's like, whoa, whoa whoa, Like, I need those books. I'm taking the g r E, basically leaving here after two weeks and going to take the test, like I've got to spend this two week studying. They're like, you can't have your books. So he quickly saw that the only way out was to fake this nervous breakdown. And Billy crude Up went in there and said, why is everyone saying whoa whoa whoa? Only I can say whoa whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa whoa. Uh yeah, so we've kind of poo pooed the two major findings from the study already. So that's that's a huge deal, right, because again the idea is that if you put people any random people, Remember these are just average like middle middle class white kids, um, which is another problem. Right if you put if you put any, well, that means everybody that's the whole world. Right, If you put anybody in the world in this situation, they're going to either turn evil or lose their marbles. So, um, those are the two findings. That's what everybody took it as at first. It later came out, now this guy was acting. This guy was faking. So what else do we have? Then, Well, we have this idea that Zimbardo insinuated himself as part of the experiment, and that actually created the findings from the Standford prison experiment. So should we put a pin in that. You want to talk about that now? No, No, I want to go. I want to go where you want to go. All right, let's put a pin in that then and talk about a little bit more about what went on that week. Um, they had everything from visitation like you could write a letter to your family or girlfriend or whoever you want to come visit you to ask for visitation rights, and the family came in and they did. They came in and visited for an hour and they were in some cases parents were like I don't know about this. This is like this just seems like a really weird thing. And Zimbardo will be like, oh no, it's totally fine, Like you know, they're the psychologists. Yeah, like they want to be here, like ask them and the the kids. You know, they did say that they wanted to stay okay, which is which is important? Okay, so what all? What else is importantess Like, no one in the visiting hour. I don't think we're like, get me out of here. They're like no, this is all part of the part of the act. Essentially. Um, they had parole hearings inside the course of a week. Somehow they said that if they they could be released, if they would forfeit the money. Uh. And this is after I don't know how many of the six days. But um, they could not get paid if and be paroled if they went in front of the parole board. They went in front of the parole board, some of them did, and most of the prisoners said that they would give up their money. In fact, and the parole members like, uh, like I said, they were the graduate assistants. They even had one um former prisoner, this guy that like it was a fifteen year yeah inmate, fifteen or seventeen year inmate on the board that I guess him Zimbardo. I want to call him Zamboni. So he actually was a friend of Jaffi's, the guy who originally actually as an undergrad, so he brought him in on it, right, So he was on the parole board, and he was kind of one of the ones, um at least in the film version that was kind of saying like, no, this is like how it is, like, you should keep it going. But I don't know how much of that was dramatized. I don't either. That's a that's a That's one of the problems with this is, you know, so much of the documentation has been not released over the years, and when it does get released, it contradicts the official line. And um, it's very tough to separate truth from fiction, especially when you introduce a Hollywood movie into the whole thing, just to just to drive those nails in the coffin too. Yeah, and so reality in fact, there's been a lot of in the years since, a lot of complaints that a lot of these you know, kids were screaming, I want to go home, I want to go home. And for his part, Zimbardo said, in the contract it says I want to exit the experiment, as the official line to say, and they could have gone home and he was like, but you hear no one ever said I want to exit the experiment. They would say I want my mommy, or I'm going crazy, or my god, please stop this, please stop this, but they never said those exact words, this safe phrase. Let's say, yeah, the safe phrase. But it turns out that's bunk to right. Yeah, it turns out that if you look at the contract that they had that he's referencing that that say the rules and everything in the emit there's no safe word to be mentioned. Certainly doesn't say if you say I want to quit the experiment, you get released from the experiment. So he's just flat out lying about that. Then that's from what I understand. Yes, and what article was this that you sent? There's a really good takedown um in medium called the The Lifespan of a Lie um and it's based on that titles based on a I think a documentary by a documentary or book by a French filmmaker um which who titled his version The Birth of a Lie and it's basically about how the Stanford prison experiment was just basically it was bunked from the get go, which will kind of pick that apart in a little bit, and that it's just fascinatingly has been perpetuated over again, basically fifty years. It just entered the cultural zeitgeist and just stayed like an infection. All Right. Some other things that happened to make it realistic. They brought in, um, a lawyer when parents asked for one, and played along like it was real. They brought in a chaplain who came in to speak to prisoners. Uh, and he played along with it too. Uh. They basically did everything that you would think would happen in a real prison um on on a slightly scaled down level. Right, But the upshot of all of this is Zimbardo saying, like, do you see what's going on here? Everybody? Like I just put some guys in, like nine guys in at a time, or twelve guys as guards, twelve guys as prisoners, and their parents came for visiting hours, a lawyer came. That's the that's how real the simulated prison became in people's minds. Just imagine what a real prisons like, right. So um and he was saying they could have left at any time if they just said the safe word, and no one ever said the safe word. There is some evidence that these people were basically kept there against their will, especially after Douglas Corpy basically faked his emotional breakdown and then was thrown into broom closet and retaliation for it. Um that he should have very very clearly should have been left or allowed to leave. And to even be led to think that you couldn't leave, which is apparently the idea that spread throughout the prisoners. Um, that would be like keeping someone against their will. Yeah, and he did leave, but was supposed to agree to come back, supposedly, uh to like play a different role as a prisoner who like maybe escaped and came back I think, but didn't come back, right, And um, I think five people were released early before the whole experiment was called off, all prisoners. No guards left the experiment, which is telling well, and they were working in shifts that which is important. Okay, that is a big one too. Um. But but if you consider that no one asked to be a guard, they all has to be prisoners. But then none of the guards left the experiment, that's to me, that's interesting on its face, right, there's something to that, but um, they're the whole thing just kind of falling apart after Zimbardo's girlfriend Um at the time, came um the idea that up to this point, these people had engaged in this fantasy and thought that they couldn't leave when they really could. That's controversial in and of itself, because again there's evidence that they were led to believe they couldn't leave, and that's different. That changes things entirely. So you want to take another break and then pick this part some more. Yeah, let's do it. Kind of fun alright, the final takedown. I'm I'm waiting for I'm waiting for Phillipsimbardo to release a book about like our Jackhammer episode. That's fine, I would read it, all right, So where are we here? Basically, we're at the point where uh he is he has into the experiment and now we're dealing with the fallout since nine and how this should be viewed. One of the big things that came out of that French book, The Birth of a Lie, is the um the filmmaker unearthed a recording that was I don't know where he found it, but they he found it and released the transcript of it that clearly has Um, if not Zimbardo at least Jaffee. Definitely Jaffee coaching the um the guards to be more brutal, Right, be a tough guard. Just think of like how the pigs do it, and do it like that, I think is what the quote was, right, Yeah, when the whole idea of this thing is to try and prove that without any influence, Yes, this is what happens. Right, So there's a couple of things that happened method Methodologically, there's a lot of things that happened the moment they started coaching those guards. Number one, they took any organic nous out of their behavior. They were then doing what they thought they were expected to do, like John Wayne for sure, who just went over the top is what it was, um. And then number two, they made them co experimenters. Like the whole thing was supposed to be guards and prisoners, and we're going to watch as test subjects or participants. And when you coach the guards, you're their co experimenters. Now, now the experiments entirely on the on the prisoners, which you can say, okay, well then those findings still worked. Well, that gets thrown out when you base the whole thing on a guy who is faking right. But but you you make the guards co experimenters and you just completely take out any objectivity from this experiment. That's problem one with the methodology. Well, and the fact we already mentioned that one of one of the researchers was a warden and zim uh keep on to call m Zambrano. That's fine. Zimbardo Zamboni himself was the superintendent, like the minute he decided to do that, Like I looked up. I think he's like in his late thirties when he did this. How did he not like, was he that bad and doing his job? How did he not know? Like, wait a minute, this will taint the experiment. Do you want to talk about why the people think that he was so? Yeah, okay, so he was a uh he wasn't. I think still is a social activist for sure, And he had decided, um, and I can't really disagree with them that prisons were brutal places where brutality lived, and that they were inherently brutal. And so if you take somebody and put them into this place, you're doing a real disservice to humanity by by throwing somebody in a bruutal place that you know, is brutal. His aim was to get reformed to happen. Yes, from the outset. Well, I mean, I can't fault that, but you can't call it a scientific experiment either. And it actually supposedly backfired as well, because one interpretation of his findings is that it's all or nothing with prisons. Prisons are inherently brutal, or you can't have them. So either you have prisons and you have brutal prisons, or you have no prisons. And so, faced with that choice and with rising crime rates in the seventies, um a lot of people double down on getting tough and made prisons even worse and built more prisons and said, t yes, we're not even gonna try to like reform you anymore, but we're just gonna send you to these brutal places that are inherently brutal and there's nothing we can do about it. So it would have it would have backfired in that sense, but in in in the idea that he was doing something with the best interests of his fellow people at heart. Again, like you said, it's it's tough to fault him for that. He just really really gave social psychology a black eye. Yeah. So one of the other things he did wrong, UM, and this one I just can't figure out either, is he didn't have a control group and one of his Um, this guy wasn't in the experiment, but one of his colleagues came by one day and was like, you know what, what's your control what's your independent variable? Yeah, and he was like what, Yeah, He's like, I don't have one. So if you if you run a an experiment of any sort, um grabstre uses a great analogy where if you're trying to figure out what the effects of radiation are on tomatoes, you pick a bunch of tomatoes, you weigh them, you check them for color, um, you make sure that they're identical to another set of tomatoes. So you have two sets of basically identical tomatoes. One you radiate, one you do not, and after a set amount of time you go back and see what the differences are. And then you can say probably that when you read the eight tomatoes, these are the effects, and the effects are the differences between the two. Same thing with the prison experiment, what would you have here two different cell blocks and one that literally isn't coached and completely left alone. That's what I would have done for sure. And then one where you're saying, hey, be brutal, and yeah, we'll see if everyone falls into these roles exactly that that would have been great. And actually some researchers in two thousand one they did exactly that. They basically ran the experiment with just that control group you suggested. Um, it was called the BBC Prison Study. Yeah, has Lem and Riker. Yeah, and basically they did the same thing. They they they did not do any coaching, they didn't do any intervention. They did the the thing exactly like you're supposed to, or like Zimbardo should have from the outset. And um, they found that again they made the control group to the original Stanford prison experiment, they found that the exact opposite happened. The prisoners stayed banded together, the guards were totally in disarray, um and disorganized. The brutality never emerged. Um, and there wasn't any violence from what I understand. And this is where it gets really scummy. If he asked me. Zimbardo found out about this, and supposedly Hasselman Reicher said they discovered he was privately writing editors, uh to keep them from getting published and claiming that they were fraudulent. Yeah, in the journal that they they released their findings, and he wrote in an appendage to their their article and said, these are they just don't even listen to these guys. I'm Philip Simbardo. Man. So yeah, I thought that was pretty scummy too if he did that. Um, so you've got methodologically, there's even more problems too. If in the in the original newspaper advertisement, chuck, he said, um, prison experiment, prison experiment. Everybody sign up. Yeah, that was a problem in itself. They shouldn't have known what they were doing, no, exactly until they showed up, right, So you're gonna get a big, wide swath of people, and then once they find out what the experiment is, maybe they'll say no thanks or whatever. But this was like attracting um. A two thousand and seven follow up study found narcissistic, hostile, overly aggressive authoritarian types like flies to honey or the opposite. Well, that seems to be the case in this case, yeah, which was in fact, one of them was a liberal activist who kind of purposely went in there because he thought maybe these findings could be used one day for prison reform. Well, I think also most of the UM what I got from Jaffee coaching the people to say, like, think about what the pigs would do, and then do do that, because we really got to show them how how brutal prisons are. Um. I think everybody who showed up basically was against prisons. But whether you're against prisons or forum, you were automatically tainted before you even showed up for the interview because they wrote prison experiment in the ad. So from the outset there was biased, There was no control group. It attracted a bias cross section of people participated. He was a participant, and that actually chuck led to the second set of findings that Zimbardo had influenced this and become a participant himself. And here's the current interpretation of all of it. Okay, this seems to be the current dujur interpretation of the Stanford prison experiment. Not that people are inherently cruel and inherently will just crumble in the face of authority, although that that might still stand, but that people will be are capable of cruelty if they're recruited by an authority. Figure the second set, and there's actually been three sets of interpretations. The second set was that Zimbardo inserted himself and that it actually demonstrated what's called situation fist theory. Yeah, and that's basically that external circumstances are the drivers of human behavior. Right, So the point was not that people are inherently cruel on an individual level, but the situation that they're put in, they will quickly find those roles if there's a power structure above them, that is, that has normalized this and is expecting them to fulfill those roles. And this really tied in with you know, this is one people were still really trying to figure out what the heck had just happened with the Nazis. It was only like years before. So this idea that this banality of evil, this made perfect sense in that in that respect, right, there is a bureaucracy that had normalized evil and you were just following orders. That was the second interpretation of the Stanford prison experiment. Yeah. Well, and not just the Nazis, but everything like the Vietnam War, which was I mean, this is one, and like the Myley massacre, and you know, I was just following orders like this tied in this has his fingers in a lot of relevant politics of the day. Right, So, um, apparently it also tied in really well to Attica, and Zimbardo must have just couldn't believe is his good fortune that there was a there's alotiest prison riot in American history happened like a couple of weeks after he made the news in the New York Times magazine with this journal art or this article that he wrote, right, But that actually played into it too, because apparently, following orders, a lot of guards just fired blindly into the tear gas smoke of this prison riot and killed tons of of unarmed prisoners and hostages. So so Zimbard is like, Okay, that's fine, however we're going to interpret this. I'm cool with that. But the third one, I'm not quite sure that he would be cool with the current one, which is bad science, I think. So what I saw is that a lot of social psychologists we've known this is bad science all along, but the findings were really interesting and worthwhile, so we didn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. The third one is that that Zimbardo inserted himself and what this, what this this study really showed was that people will engage in acts of cruelty if there is a figure of authority recruiting them to what they think is a righteous cause. And in this case it was Zimbardo making the guards co experiment ers by coaching them to be cruel and in in the name of prison reform. Ultimately, when they showed the world what happens when you put normal people in a prison situation. Yeah, which is what the John Wayne guy very much has said all his life since then, is that this is what they I thought they wanted was for me to be a bad guard so we could prove, uh, ultimately that prisons need reform. And that that is why he's still complicit, because he's still engaged in these acts of genuine cruelty against the prisoners in the study. And that's why he should still feel bad and still does feel bad. But he did it because he was recruited in the name of this rights is caused by somebody who was in authority. So is this being taught this way in classes now? I don't I think that they, especially once it came out the Zimbardo and at the very least his warden co experiment er was was coaching them to do this and that the organic cruelty is just totally out the window. I think they don't know what to do with it right now. They're trying to figure out like how to get these findings across or what to make of them. Because one one of these quotes from the article you sent the guy said, I don't think it's scientific fraud in the typical sense. It was never considered to be scientific. It's typically represented in classrooms as a demonstration, uh, not an experiment. And there's a notorious case of ethical malfeasance. So that's almost a fourth takeaway is that it's an example have how to not do a study correctly, which is interesting. Oh yeah, I mean methodologically inserting yourself, like lying about the findings later on, or misinterpreting the results or using spin. It's yeah, there's a lot here. But it was approved by the Stanford Human Rights Subjects Review Committee at the time. Those were Zimbardo's experiments. We presented this too, uh And there you know, he still says that it was ethical. Well, it was at the time under the guidelines, it was ethical, but then after they changed the guidelines, you couldn't do this today, or at least not with like he did it. So, I did you remember the very brief psychology is nuts serious? Watch that I did win on the Stanford Prison Experiment. Yeah, I watched that today, did you What do you think it was good? Thanks? Man? Cute little background? Yeah, I thought so too. Um and let's see you got anything else? No, I mean, boy, I thought we were pretty scathing, but we were. This is like vaping love all scathing. This is way worse than vaporing. I'm sure the vapors are like going. They were really hard on that guy. Yeah. The movie, uh, you know, the documentary is probably a little more accurate. But the movie wasn't bad. I mean it's not great, Yeah, but it was okay. It felt like a movie the week it's an airplane movie. Yeah, watch it on your next poine. That my recommendation, Thanks buddy. Well, if you want to know more about the Stanford Prison Experiment, um, type those words in the search part how stuff works dot comm and it will bring up this grab store article. Since I said grab store, it's time for listener mail. I'm gonna call this beautiful landscaping. Hey, guys, it's spent in the last two years fixing up the yard. Uh in our house. Uh in Point Pleasant, Pennsylvania. Oh, that sounds like a pleasant place. Yeah it is. My husband actually introducing your show a few years back, and thank god he did, because I've literally listened to you for hours and hours while working in the yard. It was a huge undertaking. I have a more flexible work schedule the he does, so I volunteered to absorb most of the responsibility, although he did a lot of heavy looking. To enjoyed the show so much, I stopped allowing myself to listen to to it any other time. You were only allowed during yard work. This made me much more ready to get outside and get into it. You guys were with me while I carried literally tons of red stone uphill and buckets, hauling rocks for a firing landing, planted uh pecky sandra ferns and hostas, and the rocky soil I've ever had to work with, and just clearing away over growth which it sounds like Tanya Harding training for the Olympics, and that one that one montage, which it turned out included a fair amount of poison ivy. During it all, I learned about tiny adorable little creature called it's heart degrade, the business of head transplants, the hookworm her favorite episode, and some haunting information I cannot and hear, such as you provided in the bullfighting and drowning episodes. You're always very entertaining, full of information. Even when I think it's boring, you make it fun. There were times you had me l o l ng in my back ard alone and covered in dirt and sweat like a crazy person. Attached her some pictures of the progress, all from your climate controlled studio, that is from Sharon Prashynski. And Sharon, you did a great job. That is one beautiful yard you got going. Yeah, for sure, it is lovely. It is nice work. We're glad we could be there with you to help you get up that hill. Yeah, and down the hill and then back up the hill and back down the hill. That's right, and then back up again. Uh. 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