The notorious college psychology experiment dramatized in The Stanford Prison Experiment was one of several scientific tests of the human condition during the 1960s and ‘70s that found its participants willing to behave with great cruelty to each other—if given license and encouragement. It stars Billy Crudup as the real-life Philip Zimbardo, the Stanford professor whose pursuit of the scientific method pushed several of his student volunteers over the edge in his 1971 experiment.
Recreating a prison environment, Zimbardo hired a cast of students to act as guards and inmates to test the psychological effects of imprisonment. The projected two-week experiment was cut short after six days when Zimbardo realized that the situation had gotten out of hand as the make-believe guards escalated their abuse of the make-believe prisoners.
The film version, directed by Kyle Patrick Alvarez and written by Tim Talbott, simplifies the actual scenario while hewing closely to true events. Crudup plays Zimbardo as the Captain Ahab of the Stanford psychology department, pursuing his objectives despite all perils. He is a sinister figure at the controls of closed-circuit cameras, monitoring the experiment and becoming complicit with its unintended results.
According to the film, the roles of guards and prisoners were chosen with a coin flip; all of the subjects were deemed physically and psychologically fit. And yet, the playacting turned hateful. By the end of day one, the guards were hectoring and harassing the inmates. Day two was worse still as the thrill of power intoxicated the guards. Some of the prisoners fought back, only to be overwhelmed by force (the guards had clubs and fire extinguishers). Others complied through apathy or fear. As hinted in the screenplay, one of the guards modeled himself after the sadistic warden in Paul Newman’s Cool Hand Luke.
Zimbardo’s experiment became a textbook case, yet the results were subject to many interpretations. For some it proved that environment determined behavior. Given uniforms and broad authority over captives already dehumanized by being stripped of their names and identified only by numbers, might anybody behave like those guards? Other authorities accuse Zimbardo of assembling an unstable human Petri dish. The advertisement for a “study of prison life” might have drawn certain personalities whose latent cruelty was given license to flourish. The arguments were revived during the scandal over the Iraqi captives in Abu Ghraib. Zimbardo was called as an expert witness in the court martial of abusive guards.
The film is edited with swift efficiency, introducing and establishing characters quickly. It revels in the retro accouterments—the typewriters, reel-to-reel tape decks and the inevitable ashtray on the conference table—without losing sight of the theme of power, abuse and degradation.
