The Stanford Prison Experiment

At Stanford in 1971 the psychologist Philip Zimbardo recruited twenty-four students through a newspaper advertisement, divided them at random into guards and prisoners and shut them in a mock prison built in the basement of the psychology department. It was to run two weeks. It was stopped in six days. The film follows those six days almost in real time. Kyle Patrick Alvarez directed from a screenplay by Tim Talbott. Billy Crudup plays Zimbardo, with Michael Angarano, Ezra Miller, Tye Sheridan, Keir Gilchrist, Olivia Thirlby and Nelsan Ellis. It won two awards at the Sundance Film Festival including Best Screenplay, and was made with Zimbardo's close participation. After the film, the experiment itself collapsed. In 2018 Ben Blum's article and the French researcher Thibault Le Texier's book History of a Lie accused it outright of fraud. The main objections: data collected selectively and incompletely, concealment of how much it drew on a similar study run by students in one of Zimbardo's classes three months earlier, guards given explicit instructions on how to treat the prisoners, and most participants never actually immersed in the situation at all. It emerged that the student guards had been coached to dehumanise the prisoners. So the film tells, at face value, an experiment that has since been largely discredited. Who it is for: viewers who like confined thrillers and are interested in the history of psychology. Who it is not for: anyone who will take what is shown as established science. The experiment was seriously undermined three years after the film, and the film does not carry that information.