Review of The Stanford Prison Experiment: Unlocking the Truth (2024)
Seen in 2026.
I saw a three-part series.
Participants and an independent investigator recount the 1971 Stanford prison experiment, as a counterpoint to the spin its creator put on it. For one thing, the most active student playing a guard was an actor. Being anti-establishment, he decided to do a pastiche of a cruel guard in Cool Hand Luke (1967), a movie he had recently seen. Another student hired to play a guard simply refused to do it because, from the experimenter’s instructions, he accurately predicted the results.
The man behind the experiment, Philip Zimbardo, participates in the documentary, which came out a month after his death. There’s no narrator delivering judgement on him, and he does not address the most damning objections to his version of the story. Instead, he does a pretty good job delivering nuance to the interpretation of what is, by modern standards, a poorly designed experiment that should not be used to conclude anything about human nature.