Name: Participants Speak Out: The Real Story of the Stanford Prison Experiment (Full Episode) | Nat Geo
Uploaded: 2026-01-31T17:01:39.000Z
Duration: 44 min 21 s
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Past perfect

In the 50 years since the experiment, no one had done as extensive research as you.

I used to do found footage films and I discovered the Stanford Prison Experiment.

I'd heard about it, but never really digged into it.

I decided to fund a trip to Stanford to go through the archive because I wanted to build a film from the archive.

I thought it was fascinating to investigate this.

It's really a story about good and evil, about these innocent young students behaving like tough guards just because they were given power in the situation.

It plays on the inner fears of people, that there's a monster inside of all of us.

The monster isn't out there, it's in you.

The Stanford Prison Experiment became rapidly famous.

Are you aware of the Stanford Prison Experiment, Dr. Z?

My legacy is to make psychology appetizing to the general public.

You have a rock band called Stanford Prison Experiment.

You, you have series talking about it and you have feature films, a German one, an American one.

It's important to get it right, but to me it's equally important to make it interesting.

It was in many books, books about group violence, World War II, obesity.

It was taught in colleges everywhere in the U.S. i'm Dr. Zimbardo.

I have six participants involved in something I call the Stanford Prison.

He has become more of a pop culture item than a scientific item.

His Holiness, the Dalai Lama and Professor Phil Zimbardo.

Zimbardo says that the Stanford Prison Experiments explains how millions of people could agree with mass murdering in rwanda.

People killed 800,000 of their neighbors.

He has a very simple explanation to this very complex world events.

Maybe it was a bad barrel that corrupted them.

You really feel like you understand human nature after you've learned about the Stanford Prison Experiment.

Zimbardo became worldwide famous from this and other topics.

But after going through the archive, I started to realize that the official narrative was a lie.

I hope that the message gets carried to the public.

What do people think it proves or what does Zimbardo say of troops?

Well, you know, the popular narrative for this thing, as you probably know, is that you take these normal people and you put them in this evil environment and suddenly they become evil.

I don't think you can draw conclusions from it because of the way that it was done and the effect that he had in tipping the scale, so to speak.

Zimbardo had a perspective he wanted to advance when he did the experiment, that the guards did do evil things and the prisoners did become more passive than they might otherwise.

If you want to have an experiment where everyone's the same, you should use fruit flies.

We all behave because we have reasons to behave the way that we do.

It's very good theater, but I don't think it qualifies as good science.

In the archive, you had pretty much everything that was recorded during the experiment.

You had the forms that the prisoners and the guard had to fill, reports that the guards had to write every day.

There was about six hours of films and 15 hours of audio material.

For the next two weeks, I sat every morning at the library and went through these boxes.

I also went through all the articles and books written by Zimbardo.

I discovered in the archive elements that I found shocking.

Can you walk me through what happened on day one?

I found in the archive that there was a whole training day for the guards.

And Zimbardo talked about this training day in his articles and in his books.

But he's saying that it's just to restrain them from using violence, for instance.

If the prisoners escape, the study is over, maintain law and order, but no physical abuse.

Essentially, they were given no training in how to be a guard.

Actually, in the archives, you can see that it was a real training session.

We got these clubs, they'll have no privacy.

And the discovery of Ken Carter was another red flag.

I'm the guy that you've never heard about, that you should be hearing about, because I am the guy that quit.

I was born in the Midwest and came to California as soon as I could.

Everybody was doing drugs and smoking pot.

I did odd jobs, handyman stuff, and I was doing experiments at Stanford.

In fact, I don't really remember any of them.

I just remember making the money, and that was a good thing.

Other than the prison experiment, I signed up for this experiment and walked in to this room and found out that I'd been chosen as a guard.

They had all the guards come to this meeting to explain what they were doing in the experiment.

Essentially, we're setting up a physical prison here to study what that does.

Nothing they do will go unobserved, can create boredom, can create a sense of frustration, can create a sense of fear, and

My feeling about Zimbardo was distrust and suspicion.

There was something about the way that he conducted himself in the meeting, but

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Participants Speak Out: The Real Story of the Stanford Prison Experiment (Full Episode) | Nat Geo

mental

tough

material

situation