The Stanford Prison Experiment is possibly the most famous psychological experiment of
all time, an insane role-playing game gone horribly wrong thanks to nylon stockings,
fire extinguishers, and a sadist nicknamed John Wayne.
So what really happened behind those prison walls?
Here's a look at the untold truth of the Stanford Prison Experiment.
The experiment begins
With funding from the US Office of Naval Research, Dr. Philip Zimbardo began The Stanford Prison
Experiment in August 1971 to study the effects of prison life and examine the power dynamic
between inmates and guards.
As he later wrote in his book The Lucifer Effect, Zimbardo wanted to know
"...[if] you put good people in a bad place, do the people triumph or does the place corrupt
them?"
He began by putting an ad in the paper for volunteers who would be paid $15 a day to
participate, about $93 bucks in today's cash after inflation.
After selecting 24 guinea pigs, Zimbardo and his assistants converted the basement of Stanford's
Psychology Department building into a makeshift prison, then flipped a coin to decide which
test subjects would be guards, and which would be prisoners.
It would turn out to be a fateful decision.
"F--- this experiment"
"And F--- Dr. Zimbardo!"
Welcome to prison
The experiment began when real-life cops pretended to arrest the students playing prisoners.
They were hauled to the actual Palo Alto Police Department, booked, fingerprinted, and then
blindfolded and tossed in a holding cell.
Once they were transferred to the fake prison, things got a lot worse.
The prisoners were ordered to strip naked, doused with a spray, forced to wear dress-like
garments without underwear and nylon stockings as hats, and fit with a chain locked around
one ankle.
The students playing guards were also encouraged to make up their own rules, leading to 17
strict guidelines the prisoners were forced to live by.
Prisoners were only allowed to refer to themselves by number, and guards would randomly wake
them up in the middle of the night with screeching whistles and force them to exercise.
Zimbardo even got into the act himself, playing the prison superintendent, where he always
sided with the guards and encouraged them to "create a sense of fear" among the inmates.
But the prisoners soon began fighting back.
The prisoners rebel
On the second day, the prisoners went on strike, removing their hats and the numbers from their
uniform and blocking the cell doors with their cots to keep the guards from entering.
That's when things got even darker.
The guards on duty called for reinforcements and used a fire extinguisher to force the
inmates away from the door.
After forcing their way in, they removed the cots, forcing inmates to sleep on the floor,
and refused to let the prisoners eat or brush their teeth.
They also threw the ringleaders of the insurrection into solitary confinement, and forced others
to clean toilets with their bare hands, while spreading rumors that some inmates were informing
on the others in the hopes of getting preferential treatment.
Finally, the guards stopped letting prisoners use the toilets at all, forcing them to do
their business in buckets which they weren't allowed to empty, turning the whole fake prison
into a giant open sewer.
Prisoner #8612 loses his mind
Less than 36 hours into the experiment, Douglas Korpi, aka Prisoner #8612, apparently lost
his mind from the stress.
One of the ringleaders during the rebellion, Korpi had been thrown into solitary confinement,
and was a target of harassment from the guards.
According to Zimbardo, Korpi began screaming and crying, although the doctor and his staff
initially thought he was just faking it in an attempt to escape.
Eventually they let him out, fearing for his mental health.
Korpi later claimed he faked it all, telling SFGate,
"The breakdown I had was a manipulation to get out of that damn experiment."
But in a documentary made by Zimbardo, Korpi told a different story.
"It was an experience of being out of control.
Both of the situation and my feelings."
Meet John Wayne
One guard in particular was noted for his sadistic tendencies.
His real name was Dave Eshelman, but the prisoners called him "John Wayne," though in fact he
consciously modeled himself after the villainous prison warden from the Paul Newman movie Cool
Hand Luke, going so far as to use a Southern accent when speaking to the prisoners.
Eshelmen orchestrated all sorts of terrible hazing, forcing the prisoners to play leapfrog
so their gowns would ride up and expose their privates.
He once ordered two prisoners to act as "Frankenstein" and the "Bride of Frankenstein," forcing them
to embrace while saying, "I love you."
As his final infamous act, Eshelman forced several of the prisoners to simulate intercourse.
Tellingly, the other guards didn't stop his actions.
"i started to get so insane but still other people didn't say anything."
According to Eshelman, though, he's not really sadistic at all, but actually a good guy who
was simply trying to expose
"...the evils inherent in a prison-type environment."
He told Stanford Magazine,
"I set out with a definite plan in mind, to try to force the action, force something to
happen, so that the researchers would have something to work with."
From Eshelman's perspective, any blame lies with Zimbardo.
"Nobody was telling me I shouldn't be doing this.
Professor is the authority here.
You know, he's the prison warden.
He's not stopping me."
Things fall apart
Over the course of less than one week, five students playing prisoners had to be released
due to severe psychological issues caused by the abuse of their guards.
Perhaps the worst was the case of Prisoner #819, who broke down weeping.
When Zimbardo allowed him to rest in a nearby room, however, the prison guards lined up
all the other inmates outside the door and forced them to chant "Prisoner #819 did a
bad thing," over and over again until the poor guy was reduced to a blubbering wreck.
"Prisoner #819 did a bad thing"
He was eventually replaced by a new guinea pig, Prison #416, who was so horrified by
what he saw in the prison he immediately staged a hunger strike in protest.
Guards responded by tossing him into solitary confinement.
The experiment had gone off the rails, and the only man who could stop it had lost all
perspective.
As Zimbardo put it himself,
"I had become the superintendent of the Stanford county jail.
That was who I was.
I'm not the researcher at all."
Luckily, someone with perspective showed up on day five.
Zimbardo's then-girlfriend, Christina Maslack, was an assistant professor at Berkeley.
After showing up to help with the experiment, she was appalled to see the prisoners chained
together with paper bags over their heads.
She confronted him that night.
"We had a long argument, at the end of it he decided 'this is it, I have to shut down
the prison.'
So then the next day, everything stopped.
The experiment was supposed to run for two weeks.
It had only lasted six days.
Aftermath
Shortly after the experiment ended, the horrific uprising at Attica prison took place, thrusting
Zimbardo and his research into the spotlight.
Researchers are still arguing about what it all means.
Zimbardo himself has said it goes to show how normal people can be turned evil by circumstance,
telling the BBC,
"The study is the classic demonstration of the power of situations and systems to overwhelm
good intentions of participants and transform ordinary, normal young men into sadistic guards…"
Others aren't so sure, as some critics think Zimbardo unintentionally skewed his results
with his methods, which may have attracted participants who were much more aggressive
and less empathetic than the general populace.
Plus, Zimbardo wasn't just a scientific observer, he actively participated, and even encouraged
violence and brutality, corrupting his data in the process.
Tellingly, when psychologists conducted a similar experiment in 2001, they remained
observers, and the guards never got anywhere near as aggressive as John Wayne and his cohorts
did at Stanford.
The significance of the Stanford Prison Experiment came into question again in 2004, when a group
of American soldiers tortured and humiliated Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison.
Zimbardo was called to testify as an expert on behalf of one of the defendants, who claimed
the system encouraged the guards to act violently.
Zimbardo agreed, saying
"Abu Ghraib was the Stanford Prison Study on steroids."
The defendant still received eight years behind bars, however, which some might consider an
ironically fitting epilogue to the saga of the Stanford Prison Experiment.
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