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More than half a century after one of psychology's most famous and controversial studies was prematurely terminated amid allegations that volunteers suffered abuse and severe emotional distress, the Stanford Prison Experiment has been adapted into a six-episode reality show for Netflix.
The New Stanford Prison Experiment, which pits 30 volunteers as guards and prisoners in a decommissioned section of a real prison, promises to be a modern version of American psychologist Philip Zimbardo's 1971 study.
The show, which launched on October 21, has reignited debate about the original experiment and raised new questions about where the line between science and entertainment lies.
Zimbardo, then a professor at Stanford University, wanted to explore how people responded to authority and confinement.
He recruited 24 young men and randomly assigned them to play either prisoners or guards in a mock prison in the basement of the campus's psychology department.
The experiment, which was scheduled to last for two weeks, was halted after just six days.
According to Zimbardo, some guards became increasingly overbearing and abusive, while several inmates suffered severe emotional distress.
image copyrightPrisonExpo.org
The findings are widely seen as evidence that ordinary people can behave cruelly in positions of power and oppressive circumstances.
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The research was written up in psychology textbooks and inspired several films and documentaries. But critics say the study is flawed and should not be considered reliable evidence.
Some say the participants' behavior was influenced by the researchers' expectations -- so-called "demand characteristics" -- rather than spontaneous behavior.
Questions have also been raised about Zimbardo's dual role as lead researcher and "prison warden" and the extent to which prison guards were encouraged to behave in certain ways.
But Scott Plous, Zimbardo's student at Stanford and now a psychology professor at Wesleyan University, said the idea that Zimbardo improperly influenced participants' behavior "has long been refuted."
However, many scholars disagree with this interpretation. Even Poulos, who remained close friends with Zimbardo until his death in 2024, acknowledged that the ethics of the study had serious flaws.
He told the BBC: "By modern standards of research ethics, the Stanford Prison Experiment had two key flaws, both of which Professor Zimbardo himself has publicly acknowledged."
"The simulated prisoners and guards were not fully informed of the risks of participation...and they were misled into thinking they could not withdraw from the study."
Stanford University has acknowledged that the experiment would not have been approved by modern research standards.
The BBC's own The Prison Study, conducted in 2002 by social psychologists Alex Haslam and Stephen Reicher, was broadcast as a documentary. The study also assigned participants to prison guard and prisoner roles but came to different conclusions.
The researchers found that guards did not necessarily become oppressive and prisoners did not necessarily become compliant; group identity, leadership and collective action were the factors that shaped behavior.
They proposed that tyranny is not an automatic product of power, but only emerges under specific social conditions.
Poulos said comparing the two studies is often misleading.
"The BBC prison study has been widely misunderstood as an attempt to replicate the Stanford prison experiment," he said.
In an effort to correct this misunderstanding, researchers from both projects issued a joint statement in 2018, saying the BBC study "is not a direct replication of previous research."
But Noah Cohen, associate lecturer in police studies at Western Sydney University, said both the BBC study and Netflix's reality show were inevitably shaped by the legacy of the original experiments.
"The mere fact that these reconstructions are based on such a well-known study would kill any room for other changes in the future," he said.
Giving participants arbitrary power in a prison setting can also breed "frustration and tension" that makes it difficult to produce meaningful scientific discoveries.
Media reviews also generally believe that "The New Stanford Prison Experiment" is better as social entertainment than as behavioral science.
The Guardian said the show "pretends to be science" but is actually "condescending reality TV" where participants "act for the camera" rather than act naturally.
Meanwhile, The New York Times called the series "a stiff sentence."
"You are basically sentenced to endure the tedium of a show that is neither as scandalous as you feared nor as enlightening as its producers hoped," the newspaper wrote.
Poulos said that the first episode of the show, which boasted itself as an improvement over the 1971 experiment and promised "no intervention, no bias, just observation," actually contained far more intervention than the original experiment - interviews with prisoners and prison guards during filming, cameras and boom microphones in plain view, and "intervention sessions" deliberately designed to elicit "fear, humiliation, anger and resentment."
Regardless, any attempt to reproduce the Stanford experiment faces a fundamental difficulty.
“If we accept the ethical principle that people should always have the right to freely withdraw from a project, including a study that is televised, then it becomes impossible to realistically simulate the experience of a real prisoner in a cell,” Poulos said.
Netflix participants can exit at any time by saying the safe word "pineapple," which one inmate called a "get out of jail" option. And in 1971, participants were led to believe they couldn't leave.
"This distinction means that Netflix's prisoners are not really incarcerated in any material sense," Poulos said.
Cohen said Netflix borrowed little from Zimbardo's research, other than borrowing its name and some basic rules from the Stanford Prison Experiment.
"It was deliberately designed to attract viewers and increase ratings, not for research, but for entertainment," he said.
The program's structured staging, changing power dynamics, and focus on "intergroup rhetoric and strife" are all designed to "amplify tensions" rather than produce meaningful scientific discoveries.
"A complete failure"
According to Netflix, participants underwent psychological screening and had access to psychologists at any time throughout filming.
Executive producer Jane Lipsitz said her team spent more than a year developing the project and establishing safeguards that the original study lacked.
"When the show was first announced, a lot of people were outraged that anyone would want to try the Stanford Prison Experiment again — and I totally understand that reaction, given the results of the original experiment," she told Netflix.
"It would be against our conscience if we simply reproduced the original experiment."
Poulos was not convinced.
"Overall, I think this Netflix series is pretty good as a reality show," he said.
"But when it comes to what it claims to do to 'restart the experiment,' it fails completely."
This article was originally written in English. We used artificial intelligence to assist in translation and was reviewed by BBC journalists before publication. Learn more about how we use artificial intelligence.
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