The Stanford Prison Experiment

Over the weekend my partner and I went and saw The Stanford Prison Experiment at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

For those of you who don’t know about it, The Stanford Prison Experiment was carried out by the psychologist Philip Zimbardo in the 1970s. Zimbardo set up a make-shift ‘prison’ in the basement of Stanford University, recruiting volunteers to either be ‘guards’ or ‘prisoners’. He then intended to observe how the guards and prisoners acted over a period of two weeks. You can find out more about the experiment here.

Zimbardo’s experiment only lasted five days. The guards became abusive, both physically and psychologically even within the first 24 hours, and soon enough it was becoming very clear the experiment was significantly harming the prisoners. After immense pressure Zimbardo called the whole thing off.

While I originally thought this movie was going to be a documentary, it was actually a re-enactment of the experiment. The director and production team used tapes and transcripts to recreate what happened in the experiment almost directly. And in doing so they created a unique psychological thriller. I had always thought the experiment ended up much more violently than it did. While there definitely was a little bit of physical abuse, most of the abuse was actually psychological — guards degrading and teasing prisoners until breaking point. And that was far more interesting than some physical fights.

For me, the Stanford Prison Experiment has always been interesting. It provides a unique insight into the state of the human mind, and in particular the nature of the prison industrial complex. As I have been working on Forgiveness — focusing on the life of someone after they have left prison — I have become interested in it even more.

Most people find the Stanford Prison Experiment horrifying because of what the guards did. How, even knowing the prisoners had done nothing wrong, could they get so abusive so quickly? Is human nature that bad that just given the right settings we will quickly turn around and abuse anyone we can at the drop of a hat? Are we really that bad?

While clearly this is fascinating, I think the impact the experiment had on the prisoners is also fascinating. Most of the prisoners became immediately submissive to the abuse of the guards, simply following orders even knowing they, in reality, didn’t have to. They lost all of their power in a moment, not even willing to stand up to the abuse the guards doled out.

The movie concluded with a range of interviews with the different participants, recreated exactly based on transcripts of interviews the research team conducted after the experiment was done. In one of these one of the prisoners said that even within the five days he felt he started to lose his identity — he started to forget who he was at all. Even in five days he became a number (all the prisoners were referred to by their numbers) and not a person.

If that’s what happened in five days, then imagine what would happen within five years? Or even ten or twenty or thirty? I can’t, in all honesty, imagine it. I hope I never do.

In my book I am attempting to write about someone who has left prison after fifteen years. The impact of those years is clearly huge impact on my character — it defines everything about his life after being released. But what watching the Stanford Prison Experiment made me think is, who actually is my character? I have spent a long time thinking about what my character was like before he entered prison, hoping to draw some form of identity to shape him afterwards. But is prison actually such an influence that is strips people entirely of that identity, leaving them with one based solely on the crime they’ve committed and the time they’ve spent inside?

Obviously I will (hopefully) never actually know that. Only people who have actually been to prison can give us that answer. But The Stanford Prison Experiment certainly gives us some clues, and those clues are terrifying.