The new National Geographic documentary “The Stanford Prison Experiment: Unlocking the Truth” will make you question what you thought you knew and even, perhaps, how psychological studies are presented to the public.
Using archival material, re-enactments and contemporary interviews, this three-episode limited series breaks down into “The Hallway,” “The Unraveling” and “A Beautiful Lie” and gives you a lot to digest.
The indisputable facts are this. The experiment took place at Stanford University in 1971, August 15-21. The participants were paid $15 a day. The Attica Prison Riot occurred soon after, 9-13 September 1971. Lead researcher Philip Zimbardo became famous and was on TV programs as an expert. The ethics came under fire resulting in ethical guidelines set by the American Psychological Association or the British Psychological Society.
On 14 August (Saturday), the guards were given an orientation, briefed and given uniforms.
Day 1 (Sunday, August 15), the participants assigned inmate status were “arrested” by Palo Alto police. The participants were not informed they would be arrested. After being Miranda’d, fingerprinted and getting their mug shots taken, the inmates were taken to the mock prison cells. They were strip searched and given inmate identification numbers. They were given smocks and stocking caps (to simulate having their heads shaved) and not allowed to have underwear. The guards were instructed to address the inmates by their ID numbers.
Day 2 (Monday, August 16), there was an early morning rebellion by the prisoners. The guards retaliated by removing mattresses and the instigating inmates were confined t a special cell.
Day 3 (Tuesday, August 17), the guards reacted to the rebellion trying to prevent further acts of disobedience. Prisoner 8612, Douglas Korpi, had a mental breakdown.
Day 4 (Wednesday, August 18), there was a hunger strike by prisoner 819. Prisoner 819 asked for a medical doctor and was removed by Zimbardo.
Day 5 (Thursday, August 19), visitation by friends and family of the inmates resulted in such concern that some parents planned to seek legal intervention. In addition, Zimbardo’s colleague, Gordon H. Bower and Zimbardo’s girlfriend, Christina Maslach, who later married Zimbardo, expressed concern over the ethics.
Day 6 (August 20), Zimbardo ended the experiment.
However, “The Stanford Prison Experiment: Unlocking the Truth” shows that the behavior or misbehavior of the guards was not all spontaneous and asks if the lead researcher Philip Zimbardo correctly assessed some of the behavior.
The documentary centers on the participants and there’s a lot of focus on the guard, Dave Eshelman, who became known as John Wayne. Eshelman still received hate mail, but says he felt he was playing a role. At the time, he had recently gone through hazing in a fraternity and watched the film “Cool Hand Luke.” Chuck Burton became his “sidekick.” (“The Stanford Prison Experiment: Unlocking the Truth,” Episode 1, “The Hallway”). Eshelman compares what they did to the prisoners as tame compared to the treatment given to fraternity pledges.
Doug Korpi (prisoner #8612) explains his so-called “emotional breakdown” differently than Zimbardo. He needed to study for the GRE. “I thought it was the perfect job,” he recalls. Yet he found out that he wasn’t going to be able to study as he had supposed. Then what? “What do prisoners do? They get to act naughty.” (“The Stanford Prison Experiment: Unlocking the Truth,” Episode 1, “The Hallway”).
We should consider: If he was studying for the GRE, he wasn’t the typical person since the average White male likely wasn’t going for graduate school. He eventually concluded, “This is a bad, bad job. I got to get out of here.”
According to Korpi, Zimbardo told Korpi he couldn’t leave because they were making history and Korpi was the leader of the rebellion. Korpi did get out and his girlfriend, now his wife, did come to pick him up, but she characterized him as very angry.
The documentary “The Stanford Prison Experiment: Unlocking the Truth” also reminds us that this took place during a time period (1971) when there was a lot of negative characterization of authority and in that area, Northern California, there were student protests. In 1971, students at UC Berkeley were involved in anti-war protests against continued US involvement in Vietnam. In May of that year, 41 protesters were arrested by the police in Berkeley.
Zimbardo has built his reputation on the Stanford Prison Experiment and has a whole website devoted to it and includes a rebuttal to some of the criticism toward his work. The documentary does show a change in what Korpi has said over the years and this is something Zimbardo also points out on his website. Yet the documentary indicates that in Zimbardo’s own words, Zimbardo being interviewed today, is lying about what Zimbardo said previously. In the documentary, “Unlocking the Truth,” Zimbardo says of Doug Korpi, “He was the first prisoner to break down in 36 hours. And he was ashamed of it…and then he said, “I was faking it (Korpi’s breakdown).'”
Korpi in a separate interview for “Unlocking the Truth” says, “All I was thinking was, ‘This is a really bad job. What kind of job can you not leave? ‘”
Zimbardo, in a separate interview, then notes, “In this experiment at any time, if you choose to not be part of this experiment all you have to say is: ‘I want to, I choose to quit this experiment,’ but Doug Korpi didn’t say that.”
However, the documentary then cuts to a tape from the archives of this experiment and we hear Zimbardo saying on tape: “So the interesting thing was that the guys are in yesterday and said they wanted to leave. And I said, ‘No, there’s only two conditions under which you can leave: medical, health or psychiatric.'”
Yet this isn’t the only problem. Thibault Le Texier of the University of Nice researched the archives of the experiment including videos, recordings and Zimbardo’s handwritten notes. From these, he concluded that the guards were given clear instructions and were made to believe they were something like research assistants to Philip Zimbardo.
Moreover, the documentary reveals there were people who dissented. There was a guard who left the experiment: Kent Cotter (“The Stanford Prison Experiment: Unlocking the Truth,” Episode 2, “The Unraveling”). Cotter says, “I’m the guy that you never hear about that you should be hearing about because I am the guy that quit.” I believe this is true. We should be studying and comparing him to his fellow guards.
Cotter currently lives in Sonoma, California, but was born and raised in the Midwest. We see a photo of him with long hair. He did odd jobs to survive, including participating in experiments at Stanford. Here (“The Stanford Prison Experiment: Unlocking the Truth,” Episode 2, “The Unraveling” ) we see the Day 0 guard training. Zimbardo is explaining, “Essentially we’re setting up a physical prison here, to study what that does. There will be constant surveillance. Nothing they do will go unobserved. We can create boredom. We can create a sense of frustration. We can create a sense of fear in them. They’ll have no privacy at all…In general what all this leads to is a sense of powerlessness. We have total power in the situation and they have none.” (“The Stanford Prison Experiment: Unlocking the Truth,” Episode 2, “The Unraveling” )
Cotter’s feeling toward Zimbardo was one of distrust and suspicion. “To me it seemed like the whole thing, we were being pushed in a direction. But that’s why we were there, to do what they expected.” Cotter felt that it “escalated” and men were “really getting into it.” He felt it was hard to listen to and he felt “more and more isolated from the group.” So, he says, “I just decided I wasn’t going to participate in it.” Cotter met with Zimbardo and Zimbardo asked him to stay and try and redirect the group, but Cotter states, “I felt like this was set up for the guards to abuse.” (“The Stanford Prison Experiment: Unlocking the Truth,” Episode 2, “The Unraveling” )
Then there was John Mark who was a guard and doesn’t like his behavior to be lumped into a generic behavior pattern of becoming sadistic and controlling in 36 hours. He says he didn’t like being a guard at all. He had almost been incarcerated. He wanted to be one of the prisoners.
Yet more damaging is what he says about the research team. “One day the warden who was a graduate student of Professor Zimbardo took me aside and they said that they noticed that I wasn’t acting tough.”
From a recording we hear the warden saying on tape, “We noticed this morning you weren’t really, you know, lending a hand and I was wondering if there’s anything wrong.”
Mark wanted to be “pretty neutral.”
The warden then says on tape, “Well, you have to kind of try and get it in you. We really have to get you active and involved because the guards have to know that every guard is going to be what we call a ‘tough guard.'”
Marked concluded, “They did try to interfere with the way the experiment was going and they tried to mold it to their expectations.”
Thibault Le Texier notes, “Real scientific experiment, you would not intervene to produce the results you want. You can see the experimenters really putting their hands into the material that they’re supposed just to watch. This is bad scientific methodology.” (“The Stanford Prison Experiment: Unlocking the Truth”). Le Texier felt that Zimbardo wasn’t behaving like a scientist, but someone who “really wanted to shock the world.”
In 2022, the BBC sponsored a partial replication of Zimbardo’s experiment for a documentary (“The Experiment”). All the participants were male, but the results were not the same. Social psychologist Steve Reicher does appear in this documentary. He along with Alex Haslam conducted the BBC Prison Study and published the results.
Diversity and Gender
What the documentary doesn’t consider is diversity. While some of the “inmates” were minorities (at least one looks Asian American), it looks visually like the guards were all White or White-passing men. This might be more an indictment of White male toxicity and concepts of power as well as fraternity practices which the documentary suggested was the model for the actions of Eshelman.
Moreover, we know that not all prison systems are the same.
The volunteer participants may have expectations of what a prison should be like and what a prisoner and a guard should be like. That also might affect behavior. Eshelman says he modeled his behavior after what he saw in “Cool Hand Luke.”
This study was, like many others, using White men as the model to project the reality of humankind and stand in for the reactions of all people. Yet a recent UK Channel 4 documentary series “Boys and Girls Alone” suggests that boys alone and girls alone might behavior differently.
There was a stark difference between how the boys and girls behaved. While the girls cooked, cleaned, and organized a fashion show for entertainment purposes, the boys set about immediately trashing the house, and writing on the walls.
The prison experiments did not try to make a women’s prison run by women.
“The Stanford Prison Experiment: Unlocking the Truth” is a must-see because it not only changes what we think we know about human behavior and power, but also because it shows how the media amplified instead of investigated. Le Texier calls the media a “central character.” Sadly, Zimbardo’s narrative, his version of the truth, is still being taught to Psych 1 students in 2024 even though Le Texier’s criticism was published in 2018.
Watching this documentary rattle our mental chains and serves as a cautionary tale for media makers and consumers.
“The Stanford Prison Experiment: Unlocking the Truth” is currently streaming on Hulu and Disney+.
Age of the Geek 
This was really good. I probably won’t watch it, though.
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It really made me re-think some things and then fact-check all of the other studies (Milgram and Marshmallow) presented in that week in my Psych class.
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OK first off you might not know this but inmates have their own rules what. I saw first hand how it happens. The Inmates run the prison NOT the staff, They already know who is coming in and what crime he did.
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What you are saying may be true, but that would be anecdotal. That would mean it is a very limited database and might not be applicable to other prisons in the US and elsewhere. This essay comments on an experiment done at Stanford and which was shared as a universal.
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