Beyond Zimbardo: The Stanford Prison Experiment

The Stanford Prison Experiment, arguably one of the most controversial experiments of the 20^th century, has polarised opinions for over 50 years:

To its supporters, the transformation of perfectly decent college students into brutal guards or compliant prisoners demonstrated the power of situations to determine behaviour.

To its detractors, the study is a perfect storm of unethical behaviours and outrageous researcher interventions that created what Le Texier concluded was “an incredibly flawed study”.

While acknowledging the importance of this debate, Professor Stephen Reicher argues that to truly understand the significance of the Experiment we need to go “Beyond Zimbardo” in a way that gives your students both a fresh insight into – and a more-critical perspective on – the underlying rationale of the Stanford Prison Experiment.

This short film gives students an insight into both the Experiment itself and the more-recent evidence from the Stanford Archive about how it was constructed and conducted.

More-importantly perhaps it builds on this evidence to argue that the researchers were not neutral observers but active participants in a complex experiment centred around social identities and the implications this interpretation has for our understanding of brutal behaviours.