psychological studies ever conducted

was the Stanford Prison Experiment.

It's mentioned in almost every intro to psychology textbook.

They tend to focus on how unethical it was,

and are less critical of its supposed conclusion.

August 14th, 1971.

Palo Alto, California.

Twelve young men are rounded up from their homes by police,

placed under arrest,

and brought to a makeshift prison

in the basement of Stanford University.

It all begins as a study on the psychology of prison life,

led by Stanford psychology professor Dr. Philip Zimbardo.

24 volunteers--

12 guards and 12 prisoners.

--have agreed to spend the next two weeks

recreating life in a correctional facility.

[guard]

The prisoners are booked and stripped nude.

They're no longer individuals,

forced to wear smocks, stocking caps and shackles.

Identified only by their prisoner numbers.

The guards quickly adapt to their new profession.

Given anonymity by their mirrored sunglasses,

some of them start to control the meager food rations,

restrict prisoners' bathroom use.

And, as tensions rise,

so do their cruel methods.

Within just six days of the planned two-week study,

conditions are so bad

that the entire operation is shut down.

[man]

Goddamn it...

The study makes international headlines.

Zimbardo's fame skyrockets,

and his conclusions are taught to students worldwide,

used as a defense in criminal trials

and are even submitted to Congress

to explain the abuses inflicted at Abu Ghraib.

The study brings up a question

just as important then as it is today:

is evil caused by the environment,

or the personalities in it?

Zimbardo's shocking conclusion

is that when people feel anonymous

and have power over depersonalized others,

they can easily become evil.

And it occurs more often than we'd like to admit.

But while it's true that people were mean to each other

during the Stanford Prison Experiment,

what if what truly caused that behavior

wasn't what we've always been told?

The Stanford Prison Experiment

has always had its controversies.

But a wave of recent revelations

have pushed it back into the spotlight

47 years later.

Today, I'm going to speak with journalist Ben Blum,

whose recent writings have brought criticism

of the experiment to a larger audience

than ever before.

How did you get involved in the Stanford Prison Experiment

in the first place?

Well, my involvement was quite personal.

Like everyone, I had kind of absorbed

the basic lesson of the experiment

through the cultural ether.

And then my cousin Alex was arrested for bank robbery.

This was a team of mostly military guys with AK-47s.

Alex was the driver.

He was a 19-year-old U.S. Army Ranger.

And it was a superior of his on the Rangers

that organized and led the bank robbery.

Alex thought the whole thing was a training exercise.

He was just so brainwashed in this intense Ranger training

that when a superior proposed this bank robbery,

he took it as just one more kind of tactical thought experiment.

Then Dr. Philip Zimbardo participated

in his legal defense.

Zimbardo submits a letter to the court,

advocating leniency in sentencing on the grounds

that Alex, my cousin, had been so transformed

by the social environment of the Ranger battalion

that he participated in the bank robbery

without exercising his own free will.

Well, how did that affect Alex's sentencing?

He received an extraordinarily lenient sentence of 16 months.

So Zimbardo was a family hero.

But over time, Alex, finally he did admit to me,

you know what, I knew this was a bank robbery by the end,

and I just didn't have the moral courage to back out.

Oh, wow.

Alex, myself and our whole family

came to view the Zimbardo argument

as a way to shirk personal culpability,

and to put all the blame on the situation.

So you start looking

at the Stanford Prison Experiment in particular.

You reached out to Dr. Zimbardo himself,

as well as some of those who participated.

What did you learn?

I learned, to my deep surprise,

that quite a number of the participants

had stories of their experience that completely contradicted

the official narrative.

Which is, look, these regular people,

good people, came together,

and because of the situation, became evil.

[Ben] Right.

Zimbardo has claimed that the guards

were put in the situation,

and then the kind of hidden wellspring of sadism

that apparently lies in all of us

unfolded organically.

[Zimbardo]

There was an orientation meeting for the guards.

They had been told quite explicitly

to oppress the prisoners.

That falls under the heading of what psychologists call

demand characteristics.

Experimental subjects tend to be motivated

to give experimenters what they want.

[Michael] Demand characteristics occur

whenever participants being studied

act differently than they normally would

because they've guessed what hypothesis is being tested

and feel that a certain kind of behavior is being demanded.

There was a recording of explicitly correcting a guard

who wasn't being tough enough.

So a conclusion you could make

from the Stanford Prison Experiment

is that when you tell people to be cruel,

they'll do it if you tell them

it's for a greater good, like science.

-Right. -Who would have thought?

I think the study stands still as a fascinating spur

to further more careful research

as a demonstration that should make anyone curious

as to how such extreme behavior could arise

in such a short time.

The experiment could still be useful,

but it might need to be reinterpreted.

Its data might lead to different conclusions

than the one that we've been telling for so many decades.

Right.

The flaws in the experiment

that Ben and other critics bring up

call into question large portions of the narrative

surrounding the study.

So I want to hear from someone who was actually there.

Dave Eshelman, the study's most infamous guard,

agreed to tell me his side of the story.

It's really an honor to meet you.

You're a living, walking piece of psychology history.

I'm never recognized in the street or anything like that,

although I still get some hate mail.

-Are you serious? -Yeah, absolutely.

Well, what do you say to them when they react that way?

I say, well, there's probably a lot about that

that didn't happen quite the way it's been portrayed.

Well, Dave, before we go too far,

I'd like to watch the footage we have here

so we can kind of talk about what we see.

[Dave] That's me there, by the way.

-[Michael] Look at that look. -[Dave] Mm-hmm.

So how did you get involved with a Stanford Prison Experiment?

My father was a professor at Stanford,

and I was home for summer, looking for a summer job.

So I'm looking through the want ads.

$15 a day.

You know, in 1971 that wasn't bad.

The way it was introduced to the guards,

the whole concept of this experiment,

we were never led to believe

that we were part of the experiment.

We were led to believe that our job

was to get results from the prisoners,

that they were the ones the researchers

are really studying.

The researchers were behind the wall.

And we all knew they were filming.

And we can often hear the researchers

commenting on the action from the other side of the wall.

You know, like, "Oh, gosh, did you see that?

Here. Make sure you get a close-up of that."

Okay? So if they want to show that prison is a bad experience,

I'm going to make it bad.

But how did you feel doing stuff like that?

Didn't you feel bad?

I don't know if this is a revelation to you,

but 18-year-old boys are not the most sensitive creatures.

-Sure. -My agenda was to be

the worst guard I could possibly be.

-And it's pretty serious. -Mm-hmm.

This is my favorite part of all the footage we have

-from the experiment. -Mm-hmm.

It's you and a prisoner confronting each other

after the experiment.

I remember the guy saying, "I hate you, man."

-Yeah. -"I hate you."

Each day I said, well, what can we do to ramp up

what we did yesterday?

How can we build on that?

Why did you want to ramp things up?

Two reasons, I think.

One was because I really believed

I was helping the researchers with some better understanding

of human behavior.

On the other hand,

it was personally interesting to me.

You know, I cannot say that I did not enjoy what I was doing.

Maybe, you know, having so much power

over these poor, defenseless prisoners,

you know, maybe you kind of get off on that a little bit.

You weren't entirely following a script from a director.

Right.

But you also felt like

Zimbardo wanted something from you.

-Yes. -And you gave that to him.

I believe I did. I think I decided

I was going to do a better job than anybody there

of delivering what he wanted.

But does that excuse me from what I was doing?

Certainly it started out with me playing a role.

So the question is, was there a point where I stopped acting

and I started living, so to speak?

The standard narrative is that Dave Eshelman did what he did

because when people are given power,

it's easier than we think for abuse to happen.

That may be true,

but how predisposed to aggression was Dave?

I mean, he signed up to something called

a "prison study," after all.

Also, his feeling that cruelty was encouraged

and helped the experiment, may have affected his behavior.

What I'd like to see is,

in the absence of outside influence,

can anonymity, power, and depersonalization alone

lead to evil?

To answer that question,

I'd like to design

a demonstration of my own.

So I'm meeting with Dr. Jared Bartels

of William Jewell College,

a psychologist who has written extensively

about the Stanford Prison Experiment

and how it is taught.

I would love to do the Stanford Prison Experiment again.

You could probably make it more ethical,

but still find the same conclusions.

That's my hypothesis.

I absolutely think it's worthwhile.

It's important. It's interesting.

Probably the best approach

is eliminate as best as possible the demand characteristics

by eliminating that prisoner/guard dynamic.

Why do we even need to call one group "guards"

and one "prisoners"?

There's a lot of expectations

around those roles.