A Netflix reality show evokes one of history’s most controversial scientific experiments — and the man behind it

The Stanford Prison Experiment lasted less than a week in 1971, but its claims about human nature endured for decades. Now, a new Netflix series is bringing one of psychology’s most controversial studies, and some of the biggest concerns surrounding it, back into the spotlight.

Organized by American psychologist Philip Zimbardo, the experiment involved a mock prison set up in the basement of a Stanford University building. He selected 24 male college students out of more than 70 respondents to a newspaper ad for “a psychological study of prison life” and randomly divided them into prisoners and guards. At the heart of this work was a fundamental question about good and evil.

“Zimbardo was basically trying to figure out if regular people could be willing to both give and follow orders if they were placed in a particular environment, and see what was the role of the situation at producing people’s behavior,” said Catherine Sanderson, Poler Family Professor of Psychology at Amherst College and a former student of Zimbardo’s. She was not involved with the experiment. “What he wanted to show is that normal people can do horrible things.”

The experiment, meant to last up to two weeks, rapidly got out of hand — at least according to the official narrative. Within 36 hours one of the prisoners had an apparent mental breakdown, and on the second day the inmates staged a rebellion. The guards vigorously repressed it, spraying the perpetrators with fire extinguishers, stripping them naked and locking them up in a dark closet named “the hole.”

All of this was unfolding against a backdrop of real-world unrest over prison conditions and the treatment of incarcerated people. Just weeks after the experiment ended, a prison uprising at Attica Correctional Facility in New York was thwarted with deadly force, resulting in 43 deaths . The event brought media attention to Zimbardo’s work, launching it beyond the academic realm and into the social discourse, where it has remained since.

But through the years, the profile of the Stanford Prison Experiment has dramatically changed, going from an unprecedented insight into the human psyche to a widely criticized study whose methods and conclusions have been called into question.

“Our understanding of what happened has really evolved a lot over time,” Sanderson said. “There have been not only ethical challenges posed about the study, but also about whether the behaviors occurred spontaneously, or were rather sort of instructed by Zimbardo.”

As Netflix debuts its own reimagined version of the experiment, one key question remains: Did the study reveal something fundamental about authority — or did the way it was conducted help produce the behaviors it became famous for?

Zimbardo conceived the study partly as a follow-up to famous obedience experiments conducted by American psychologist Stanley Milgram in the early 1960s. In the first of such studies, participants were told to deliver what they believed were increasingly painful electric shocks to an unseen person, for giving incorrect answers in a memory test, and 65% of participants continued to the maximum level despite hearing the person’s apparent distress.

In reality, the distress was faked by an actor, and — if planned today — both Milgram’s and Zimbardo’s experiments would face serious obstacles under modern ethical research rules because of issues with deception, psychological harm, conflict of interest and lack of informed consent about the intensity of the experience.

Duke Downey/San Francisco Chronicle/Getty Images

For starters, the Stanford experiment prisoners had no idea the study would kick off with local police realistically arresting them at their homes. Upon entering the mock prison, the inmates underwent a strip-search and then had to put on loose-fitting smocks with no underwear. They wore nylon stockings over their heads, simulating shaved hair.

The guards wore uniforms and mirrored sunglasses to avoid eye contact. The study team gave them wooden batons and instructions to not physically harm the prisoners, but maintain law and order. Zimbardo acted as the prison’s superintendent, observing and recording the experiment.

As prisoners started to show evident signs of distress early on, some relatives who were allowed to visit expressed the intention of contacting lawyers to stop the study. Within the first four days, three inmates had been released after showing signs of distress.

On the fifth day, Christina Maslach, then a recent Stanford graduate in social psychology who would later marry Zimbardo, visited the prison and was horrified by what she saw. Zimbardo ended the experiment the next day.

Audio and video evidence from the experiment, as well as post-study interviews with the participants, later revealed that Zimbardo, who died in 2024, directly influenced the study’s outcome by interacting with the participants and coaching the guards, as well as preventing some inmates from leaving the mock prison when they first requested it.

“One of the hallmarks of good experimental design is that we don’t have the experimenter in charge of the study interacting with the participants,” Sanderson said. “The fact that Zimbardo was so heavily involved is a major problem, because he did have particular beliefs, expectations — one might even say goals — in conducting the study.”

But at the time, the results were well regarded and Zimbardo leaned into a newfound fame: “In the public eye, like lecturing to a large class, you are a performer and so must put on a good performance and learn from mistakes to be more effective next time,” he said in 2009 interview.

Zimbardo was a very powerful and compelling speaker, according to Sanderson: “The Stanford prison study had brought him a lot of fame, and he was very charismatic. This sort of lure meant that people weren’t paying a lot of attention to maybe some of the details about what actually happened.”

Still, the revelations about his involvement did serve to undermine the findings about authority and human nature that Zimbardo championed.

“I think there is certainly a general view that good people can do bad things under particular circumstances, such as being anonymous, or being ordered to do so,” Sanderson said. “However, the Stanford prison study is not a good example of evidence for that.”

That skepticism reflects a broader reckoning within psychology over the reliability of study results. In 2015, an attempt to replicate 100 studies published in leading psychology journals resulted in only 36% of replications achieving statistically significant results, compared with 97% in the original studies. This “replicability crisis” has exposed flaws in how psychological research is conducted and published, including small sample sizes and pressure to produce striking results rather than robust, reproducible findings.

The first major attempt to revisit the Stanford experiment did, in fact, produce a completely different outcome. But that initial redo, commissioned by the BBC , also started by shaking up the approach.

The BBC broadcast its take on Zimbardo’s work in 2002 as a television series called “The Experiment.”

The study involved 15 male volunteers — six guards and nine prisoners — in prison built on a movie studio lot. But the guards did not become tyrannical, as in the Stanford experiment. Instead, the prisoners challenged the guards and gained the upper hand. Even more surprisingly, they later built a shared community.

According to Stephen Reicher, Bishop Wardlaw Professor of Psychology at the University of St. Andrews in England who conducted the research along with Alex Haslam, then a psychologist at the University of Exeter, the striking difference in outcome was partly due to the fact that the guards were not coached beforehand by an authoritative figure like Zimbardo.

“Normally in an experiment you are neutral,” Reicher said. “Zimbardo actually positioned himself as head guard. In broad terms, he tells them what to do. He tells them to impose power. He tells them to make people feel helpless.”

In the BBC version, there is no such leadership: “We took seriously the notion that we should just put people in the role and see what happens. Without clear leadership, we found that the guards didn’t want to impose power, didn’t want to be brutal, and therefore they became powerless. They didn’t cohere as a group. They didn’t know what to do,” Reicher noted. “Conversely, the prisoners did cohere as a group, did have a clear sense of how to act, and actually that reversed the power relations in our study.”

The revisited experiment, although made for TV, was designed as a scientific study, Reicher said.

“We took it through a scientific ethics committee,” he added. “We designed it as we would any other study. We didn’t just film what people did, we did surveys every day. We even took hormonal data.”

However, even though the prisoners came together to create a more equal system, they could not truly control what was going on: “So they felt more and more helpless, and they became more and more attracted to a strong man, to authoritarianism,” Reicher said. “What we found was that the failure of groups to be able to control their own environment makes them attracted to authoritarian regimes, which I think is actually quite an important message given what’s going on in the world today.”

Zimbardo’s construct that a bad situation can make a good person do evil things, Reicher said, is dangerous: “When you look at examples of brutality in history, afterwards those responsible nearly always try to deny accountability. The excuse is they were only following orders, they couldn’t help it,” he said. “The explanation given by Zimbardo is not only scientifically wrong; it is socially and morally dangerous because it gives perpetrators an out.”

Questions about prisoner abuse and accountability took on renewed urgency in 2004, when photographs of US soldiers and Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib, a prison outside of Baghdad, shocked the world. The images prompted comparisons with the Stanford experiment and Zimbardo became a prominent commentator on the Abu Ghraib scandal, arguing that the abuses could not be understood solely as the actions of a few individuals.

Zimbardo even testified for the defense of an Abu Ghraib guard, and his observations coalesced into a 2007 book titled “The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil,” in which he wrote, “Any deed that any human being has ever committed, however horrible, is possible for any of us — under the right or wrong situational circumstances.”

The renewed popularity of the experiment led, in 2015, to a Hollywood movie starring Billy Crudup titled “The Stanford Prison Experiment,” which included Zimbardo as a consultant and largely adheres to his own version of the events.

Steve Dietls/Coup D'Etat/Sandbar/Abandon/Ifc/Kobal/Shutterstock

The fiercest critique of Zimbardo’s work showed up shortly after, in 2018, when Thibault Le Texier, a French historian and associate researcher at the Centre for European Sociology and Political Science in Paris, first published a French-language book about the experiment, then summarized it in a 2019 study titled “Debunking the Stanford Prison Experiment.”

Le Texier reconstructed the experiment’s entire timeline after spending weeks analyzing archival material such as recordings and transcripts at Stanford University.

“From the very beginning, the Stanford Prison Experiment was organized and planned as a show,” Le Texier told CNN. “It was more theater than science.”

Le Texier also said that while Zimbardo admitted to giving the guards broad directions, in reality either Zimbardo or his associates instructed them very specifically about how to behave during the experiment — so much that the guards were given “a blueprint” on how to act.

“They’ll have no privacy at all, there will be constant surveillance—nothing they do will go unobserved,” Zimbardo said during a guard orientation session captured on video . “They will have no freedom of action. They can do nothing and say nothing that we don’t permit. We’ll take away their individuality in various ways.”

Zimbardo’s apparent influence dashes any hopes scientists might have of gleaning firm conclusions from the Stanford prison Experiment, Le Texier said. “The only scientific conclusion you can draw is a reminder that scientists can do really bad science.”

U.S. Army/Criminal Investigation Command

According to Le Texier, Zimbardo intentionally made it difficult for prisoners to leave the experiment even if they asked to do so, and created uncomfortable living conditions for them: “They couldn’t read, they couldn’t watch TV, they couldn’t go to the toilets at night, they had absolutely nothing to do during the day, the conditions were harsher than even a real prison, simply because Zimbardo was scared that if the prisoners had a good time nothing would happen, and the experiment would be a failure,” Le Texier said.

In 2018, Zimbardo published a lengthy response to criticism of the experiment — including from Le Texier — in which he defended the experiment’s methods, arguing that participants could leave and that the guards’ behavior was not scripted. Le Texier rejects the response as “bulls**t,” saying that, while it served to “praise the experiment,” it did not address his criticism specifically.

The frequent parallels between the experiment and theatrical productions eventually drew the attention of Stephen Scott-Bottom, a professor of contemporary theater, drama and film at the University of Manchester.

“My first interest was thinking of it as a constructed situation where people are being asked to play roles,” he said. “If you ask people to role play in a scenario, and then get a different group of people to play that scenario again, you’ll end up with completely different results, depending on the particular combination of personalities.”

Zimbardo and his colleagues, Scott-Bottoms argued, wanted to emphasize the importance of the situation, so they downplayed the importance of individual personalities.

For a study about the experiment he published in 2020, Scott-Bottoms tracked down and interviewed several of the guards and prisoners, including the inmate whose apparent breakdown, about 36 hours into the study, became one of its most famous episodes: “The first emotional breakdown that you hear about in all the documentation was faked, by a guy who was just trying to get out,” Scott-Bottoms said.

The prisoner in question, Doug Korpi, had also admitted that his agony was an act to journalist Ben Blum, who included the revelation in a broader takedown of the experiment published in 2018. Korpi wanted to leave the experiment because he wasn’t allowed to study for an upcoming graduate school admission test, and was getting worried about being unprepared.

Zimbardo’s role in the prison, Scott-Bottoms said, was focused on preventing the experiment from stagnating: “I regard him as a media artist as much as a scientist,” Scott-Bottoms said. “He was very good at finding an angle or a hook to get your attention, so that you’ll listen to the thing that he really wants to talk about, rightly or wrongly.”

Lea Suzuki/The San Francisco Chronicle/Getty Images

Just a month after Zimbardo died in October 2024, a three-part documentary titled “The Stanford Prison Experiment: Unlocking the Truth” premiered on the National Geographic channel. It included one of Zimbardo’s final interviews.

In the documentary, several of the guards and prisoners from the original study challenge Zimbardo’s account of the event, and refer to him as “a salesman,” “kind of a clown,” “a huckster,” while repeatedly using the word “fraud” in association with the experiment.

Dave Eshleman, who emerged in the mock prison as the most ill-tempered among the guards — earning himself the nickname “John Wayne” — goes as far as calling his role within the experiment “an acting job,” and speaks of “getting in character” before entering the prison. He says Zimbardo made it appear as though the guards were not considered to be subjects in the experiment: “If it was made clear to us that we were there to be studied, not to help study prisoners, we would have acted completely differently,” he said.

In his interview, Zimbardo responds to these accusations by saying that Eshleman and the others had to justify what they did, and the easiest way to do that is to say they were acting. They could also no longer distinguish “the improv from real sadistic impulses,” the psychologist added. The fact that everybody fell into their roles, Zimbardo said, speaks to “the validity of the experiment.”

He also made no secret about the experiment’s theatrical nature: “I thought about the experiment as an improvisational drama — the basement yard, it was the stage, the actors were prisoners and guards with different uniforms and the video camera was the audience.”

The new Netflix show “The New Stanford Prison Experiment” — which was filmed in a real prison and consists of six 45-minute episodes — is not structured like the original at all, and its creators aren’t trying to conduct a scientific experiment.

“If we were simply recreating the original experiment, that would be unconscionable,” said Jane Lipsitz, the show’s executive producer, statement . “But this is a different time, with different participants, different safeguards and, ultimately, a very different journey.”

“It felt like the right time to revisit that question with a new generation and ask whether power inevitably changes us — or whether we’re capable of resisting the roles, the rules and the systems we’re placed into. What we discovered during this process was something we never saw coming,” she added.

The producers of the Netflix show said they put “several guardrails” in place to protect participants, including psychological screenings and the ability to leave at any moment just by uttering a safe word. The 30 people — including three women — involved also make up a far more diverse group than either the original study or the BBC’s work.

The guards are split into two groups and do receive an initial training, during which they are told to “take control.” But in stark contrast with the BBC revisitation and the requirements of a scientific experiment, the Netflix show is heavily structured and introduces radical changes to its setup as it progresses — with entertaining, if unrealistic, results.

Even half a century on, there are still interesting aspects of the original Stanford experiment, despite its flaws, Reicher noted. The new show is perhaps testament to that.

“The study is still in the textbooks. There are also still people who reject it entirely. And there are others who say there are things to learn from it, specifically about the role of leadership,” Reicher said. “In the end, in any study, you don’t describe everything. You describe what you think is important.”

斯坦福监狱实验于1971年进行，持续时间不到一周，但其关于人性的论断却流传了几十年。如今，一部新的Netflix剧集将这项心理学史上最具争议的研究之一，以及围绕它的一些最令人担忧的问题，重新带回了公众视野。

这项实验由美国心理学家菲利普·津巴多组织，在斯坦福大学一栋建筑的地下室搭建了一个模拟监狱。他从70多名响应报纸广告“监狱生活心理学研究”的应征者中挑选了24名男大学生，并将他们随机分为囚犯和狱警两组。这项研究的核心问题是关于善与恶的根本性问题。

“津巴多基本上是想弄清楚，如果把普通人置于特定的环境中，他们是否愿意既发出命令又服从命令，并观察情境在塑造人们行为方面起着怎样的作用，”阿默斯特学院波勒家族心理学教授、津巴多的学生凯瑟琳·桑德森说道。她并未参与这项实验。“他想证明的是，普通人也会做出可怕的事情。”

这项原计划持续两周的实验很快就失控了——至少官方是这么说的。36小时内，一名囚犯明显精神崩溃，第二天，囚犯们发动了暴动。狱警们强力镇压了暴动，用灭火器喷射暴动者，剥光他们的衣服，并将他们关进一个被称为“洞”的黑暗壁橱里。

所有这一切都发生在社会上因监狱条件和囚犯待遇而引发的动荡背景下。实验结束后仅仅几周，纽约阿提卡监狱就爆发了一场暴动，最终被警方以致命武力镇压，造成43人死亡。这一事件使津巴多的研究成果引起了媒体的关注，使其超越了学术范畴，进入了社会讨论领域，并一直持续至今。

但多年来，斯坦福监狱实验的形象发生了巨大变化，从对人类心理前所未有的洞察，变成了一项受到广泛批评的研究，其方法和结论都受到了质疑。

桑德森说：“随着时间的推移，我们对所发生的事情的理解已经有了很大的发展。这项研究不仅面临着伦理方面的挑战，而且还面临着这些行为是自发发生的，还是某种程度上是津巴多指示的这一问题。”

随着 Netflix 推出其重新构想的实验版本，一个关键问题仍然存在：这项研究是否揭示了权威的某些根本性问题——或者，它的进行方式是否导致了它后来闻名遐迩的行为？

津巴多构思这项研究的部分原因是想延续美国心理学家斯坦利·米尔格拉姆在 20 世纪 60 年代初进行的著名服从实验。在米尔格拉姆的第一次服从实验中，参与者被告知要对一个看不见的人施加他们认为越来越痛苦的电击，以惩罚其在记忆测试中答​​错题。尽管听到了被电击者的明显痛苦，仍有 65% 的参与者继续施加电击直至达到最大强度。

事实上，这种痛苦是由一名演员伪装出来的。如果今天再进行米尔格拉姆和津巴多的实验，由于存在欺骗、心理伤害、利益冲突以及缺乏对实验强度的知情同意等问题，这些实验都将在现代伦理研究规则下面临严重的障碍。

Duke Downey/旧金山纪事报/Getty Images

首先，斯坦福大学实验中的“囚犯”们事先并不知道，这项研究会以当地警察上门逮捕他们为开端。进入模拟监狱后，他们接受了脱衣搜身，然后穿上宽松的无内裤囚服。为了模拟剃光头的效果，他们头上套着尼龙丝袜。

狱警身着制服，戴着反光太阳镜以避免与囚犯目光接触。研究小组给他们配备了木棍，并指示他们不得对囚犯造成身体伤害，但要维护监狱秩序。津巴多扮演监狱长的角色，观察并记录了整个实验过程。

由于囚犯们很早就开始出现明显的痛苦迹象，一些获准探视的家属表示打算联系律师，要求停止这项研究。在最初的四天内，已有三名囚犯因出现痛苦迹象而被释放。

第五天，克里斯蒂娜·马斯拉赫（Christina Maslach，当时刚从斯坦福大学社会心理学专业毕业，后来嫁给了津巴多）参观了监狱，她被眼前的景象震惊了。津巴多第二天就终止了这项实验。

实验的音频和视频证据，以及研究结束后对参与者的采访，后来揭示，2024 年去世的津巴多通过与参与者互动、指导狱警，以及阻止一些囚犯在第一次提出离开模拟监狱的要求，直接影响了研究结果。

桑德森说：“优秀实验设计的一个标志是，我们不会安排负责研究的实验者与参与者互动。津巴多深度参与其中是一个重大问题，因为他在进行这项研究时确实抱有特定的信念、期望——甚至可以说目标。”

但当时，研究结果广受好评，津巴多也欣然接受了新获得的声望：“在公众眼中，就像给一大群学生讲课一样，你是一名表演者，所以你必须表现出色，并从错误中吸取教训，以便下次做得更好，”他在 2009 年的一次采访中说道。

桑德森认为，津巴多是一位极具感染力和说服力的演说家：“斯坦福监狱研究为他带来了巨大的名声，他本人也极具个人魅力。这种吸引力使得人们不太关注实际发生的事情的一些细节。”

然而，有关他参与其中的爆料确实削弱了津巴多所倡导的关于权威和人性的研究成果。

桑德森说：“我认为人们普遍认为，好人在特定情况下也会做坏事，例如匿名或被命令这样做。然而，斯坦福监狱研究并不能很好地证明这一点。”

这种怀疑反映了心理学界对研究结果可靠性的普遍反思。2015年，一项对发表在顶级心理学期刊上的100项研究进行重复验证的尝试，结果显示只有36%的重复验证结果具有统计学意义，而原始研究的这一比例高达97%。这场“可重复性危机”暴露了心理学研究开展和发表方式中的缺陷，包括样本量过小以及为了追求引人注目的结果而非稳健、可重复的研究结果而施加的压力。

事实上，首次对斯坦福实验进行大规模重新研究的尝试确实得出了截然不同的结果。但这项由BBC委托进行的初步研究，也首先改变了研究方法。

2002 年，BBC 将津巴多的作品改编成电视系列片《实验》。

这项研究招募了15名男性志愿者——6名狱警和9名囚犯——他们被安置在一座建于电影制片厂内的监狱中。但与斯坦福大学的实验不同，狱警并没有变得专横跋扈。相反，囚犯们挑战狱警并最终占据了上风。更令人惊讶的是，他们后来还建立了一个共同的社区。

据英国圣安德鲁斯大学沃德劳主教心理学教授斯蒂芬·雷切尔（Stephen Reicher）称，他与当时在埃克塞特大学担任心理学家的亚历克斯·哈斯拉姆（Alex Haslam）一起进行了这项研究，结果的显著差异部分原因是，这些警卫事先没有接受像津巴多这样的权威人物的指导。

“通常在实验中，你会保持中立，”赖歇尔说。“但津巴多实际上把自己定位成了头号守卫。总的来说，他告诉他们该怎么做。他告诉他们要滥用权力。他告诉他们要让人们感到无助。”

在BBC的版本中，并没有这样的领导：“我们认真考虑过直接把人安排到这个岗位上，看看会发生什么。如果没有明确的领导，我们发现狱警们不想行使权力，不想使用暴力，因此他们变得无能为力。他们无法形成一个团结的群体，也不知道该做什么，”赖歇尔指出。“相反，囚犯们却能形成一个团结的群体，他们清楚地知道如何行动，这实际上颠覆了我们研究中的权力关系。”

赖歇尔说，虽然重新进行的实验是为了上电视，但它被设计成一项科学研究。

他补充说：“我们已经通过了科学伦理委员会的审核。我们的设计与其他任何研究一样。我们不仅拍摄了人们的行为，还每天进行调查。我们甚至收集了激素数据。”

然而，尽管囚犯们团结起来建立了一个更加平等的制度，他们却无法真正掌控局势：“所以他们感到越来越无助，也越来越被强人、被独裁主义所吸引，”赖歇尔说。“我们发现，群体无法掌控自身环境会让他们倾向于独裁政权，鉴于当今世界正在发生的事情，我认为这确实是一个非常重要的信息。”

赖歇尔表示，津巴多提出的“糟糕的处境会使好人作恶”的观点是危险的：“纵观历史上的暴行，事后肇事者几乎总是试图推卸责任。他们的借口是，他们只是奉命行事，身不由己。”他说道，“津巴多的解释不仅在科学上是错误的，而且在社会和道德上也是危险的，因为它给了作恶者一个开脱的理由。”

2004年，美军士兵和伊拉克囚犯在巴格达郊外阿布格莱布监狱遭受虐待的照片震惊世界，囚犯虐待和问责问题再次变得紧迫起来。这些照片引发了人们对斯坦福大学实验的比较，津巴多也成为阿布格莱布丑闻的重要评论员，他认为这些虐待行为不能仅仅归咎于少数人的行为。

津巴多甚至为一名阿布格莱布监狱的狱警作证，他的观察结果汇集成 2007 年出版的《路西法效应：了解好人如何变坏》一书。他在书中写道：“任何人犯下的任何罪行，无论多么可怕，在正确或错误的情况下，我们每个人都有可能犯下同样的罪行。”

该实验的再次流行，促成了 2015 年一部由比利·克鲁德普主演的好莱坞电影《斯坦福监狱实验》的上映，该片邀请津巴多担任顾问，并很大程度上遵循了他自己对事件的描述。

Steve Dietls/Coup D'Etat/Sandbar/Abandon/Ifc/Kobal/Shutterstock

对津巴多的研究最激烈的批评出现在不久之后的 2018 年，当时法国历史学家、巴黎欧洲社会学和政治学中心副研究员蒂博·勒泰克西耶 (Thibault Le Texier) 首先出版了一本关于该实验的法语书籍，然后在 2019 年发表了一篇题为《揭穿斯坦福监狱实验》的研究报告，对其进行了总结。

勒泰克西耶在斯坦福大学花费数周时间分析档案材料（如录音和文字记录），重建了整个实验的时间线。

勒泰克西耶告诉CNN：“从一开始，斯坦福监狱实验就是一场表演，与其说是科学，不如说是一场作秀。”

勒泰克西耶还表示，虽然津巴多承认给守卫们下了大致的指示，但实际上，津巴多或他的同事们非常具体地指示了他们在实验期间应该如何行事——以至于守卫们得到了“行动蓝图”。

“他们将完全没有隐私，将受到无休止的监视——他们的一举一动都会被监视，”津巴多在一段被录像记录的警卫入职培训会上说道。“他们将没有任何行动自由。他们不能做任何我们不允许的事，也不能说任何我们不允许的话。我们将以各种方式剥夺他们的个性。”

勒泰克西耶表示，津巴多的明显影响力粉碎了科学家们从斯坦福监狱实验中得出确切结论的任何希望。“你唯一能得出的科学结论就是，科学家也会做出非常糟糕的科学实验。”

美国陆军/刑事调查司令部

勒泰克西耶表示，津巴多故意让囚犯即使提出要求也难以离开实验，并为他们创造了不舒服的生活条件：“他们不能读书，不能看电视，晚上不能上厕所，白天也完全无所事事，条件甚至比真正的监狱还要恶劣，仅仅是因为津巴多害怕如果囚犯们过得好，就不会发生任何事情，实验就会失败。”

2018年，津巴多发表了一篇长文，回应了包括勒泰克西耶在内的各方对该实验的批评。他在文中为实验方法辩护，认为参与者可以随时离开，而且警卫的行为并非事先安排好的。勒泰克西耶则斥之为“胡说八道”，称津巴多的回应虽然“赞扬了实验”，但并未具体回应他的批评。

实验与戏剧作品之间频繁的相似之处最终引起了曼彻斯特大学当代戏剧、戏剧和电影教授斯蒂芬·斯科特-博特姆的注意。

“我最初的想法是把它看作是一个人为构建的情境，人们被要求扮演不同的角色，”他说。“如果你让人们在一个场景中进行角色扮演，然后再让另一组人再次扮演同样的场景，你会得到完全不同的结果，这取决于不同性格组合的影响。”

斯科特-博特姆斯认为，津巴多和他的同事们想要强调局势的重要性，所以他们淡化了个人性格的重要性。

为了撰写一篇关于他在 2020 年发表的实验研究报告，斯科特-博特姆斯追踪并采访了几名狱警和囚犯，其中包括一名囚犯，他在实验开始约 36 小时后情绪崩溃，这成为了该实验中最著名的事件之一：“你在所有记录中听到的第一个情绪崩溃是伪造的，是一个只想逃跑的人伪造的，”斯科特-博特姆斯说。

涉事囚犯道格·科尔皮也曾向记者本·布鲁姆承认，他的痛苦是装出来的。布鲁姆在2018年发表的一篇全面揭露该实验的文章中提到了这一点。科尔皮想退出实验，因为他不被允许为即将到来的研究生入学考试做准备，他开始担心自己准备不足。

斯科特-博顿斯说，津巴多在监狱里的作用在于防止实验停滞不前：“我认为他既是科学家，也是媒体艺术家，”斯科特-博顿斯说。“他非常擅长找到切入点或切入点来吸引你的注意力，让你愿意倾听他真正想谈论的内容，无论对错。”

Lea Suzuki/旧金山纪事报/Getty Images

2024年10月，津巴多去世仅一个月后，一部名为《斯坦福监狱实验：揭开真相》的三集纪录片在国家地理频道首播。该片收录了津巴多生前最后一次接受采访的片段之一。

在纪录片中，最初研究中的几名狱警和囚犯对津巴多的事件描述提出了质疑，称他为“推销员”、“有点像小丑”、“骗子”，并反复使用“欺诈”一词来形容这项实验。

在模拟监狱中，戴夫·埃什勒曼（Dave Eshleman）是狱警中最脾气暴躁的一个，因此得了个绰号“约翰·韦恩”。他甚至称自己在实验中的角色是“演戏”，并表示在进入监狱前会“进入角色”。他说，津巴多似乎并没有把狱警当作实验对象：“如果我们事先被告知，我们是来被研究的，而不是来协助研究囚犯的，我们的行为就会完全不同。”

在采访中，津巴多回应了这些指控，他表示埃什勒曼和其他人必须为他们的行为辩解，而最简单的办法就是声称他们是在表演。这位心理学家还补充说，他们也无法区分“即兴发挥和真正的虐待冲动”。津巴多说，每个人都完全投入到各自的角色中，这恰恰说明了“实验的有效性”。

他也毫不掩饰该实验的戏剧性：“我把这个实验看作是一场即兴戏剧——地下室的院子就是舞台，演员是穿着不同制服的囚犯和狱警，而摄像机就是观众。”

Netflix 新剧《新斯坦福监狱实验》——在真正的监狱中拍摄，共六集，每集 45 分钟——与原版完全不同，其创作者也并非试图进行科学实验。

“如果我们只是简单地重现最初的实验，那将是不可饶恕的，”该节目的执行制片人简·利普西茨在一份声明中表示。“但现在情况不同了，参与者不同了，安全措施也不同了，最终，这将是一段截然不同的旅程。”

“我觉得现在是时候和新一代重新探讨这个问题了，问问他们权力是否必然会改变我们——或者我们是否有能力反抗我们被赋予的角色、规则和体制。我们在这个过程中发现的事情是我们始料未及的，”她补充道。

Netflix节目的制作方表示，他们设置了“多项保障措施”来保护参与者，包括心理筛查以及允许参与者随时说出安全词退出。参与的30人（包括三名女性）也比最初的研究或BBC的报道更具多样性。

守卫们被分成两组，并接受初步训练，期间他们被告知要“掌控局面”。但与BBC的重现以及科学实验的要求截然不同，Netflix的剧集结构严谨，并随着剧情发展不断对其设定进行彻底的改变——虽然结果不切实际，但却引人入胜。

赖歇尔指出，即使半个世纪过去了，斯坦福最初的实验尽管存在缺陷，但仍然有一些引人入胜之处。这部新剧或许就证明了这一点。

“这项研究仍然被收录在教科书中。但也有人完全否定它。还有人认为我们可以从中学习到一些东西，尤其是在领导力方面，”雷切尔说。“归根结底，任何研究都不可能面面俱到，你只需要描述你认为重要的部分。”