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Philip Zimbardo reflects on ‘The Stanford Prison Experiment’ movie

Today, Philip Zimbardo, professor emeritus of psychology at Stanford, will see the story of his famously controversial Stanford Prison Experiment unfold on the big screen.

Conducted in 1971, the experiment simulated a prison environment with a group of 22 male college students. The young men, hand-picked for their physical and mental maturity, among other factors, were randomly assigned the role of “prisoner” or “guard.” While the students were specifically instructed against the use of physical punishment, they were given no further instructions. Throughout the six-day study , half of the prisoners suffered from “extreme emotional depression, crying, rage, and acute anxiety” and had to be excused from the experiment.

Since the study was conducted, Zimbardo has written “The Lucifer Effect,” a book in which he discusses the gradual changes experienced within the subjects and himself throughout the experiment. The research has been widely studied by psychology students and beyond, serving as a controversial but poignant example of the effect of a prison environment.

With “The Stanford Prison Experiment” set to premiere today, Zimbardo spoke with The Daily about the original study, as well as his thoughts about the motion picture.

The Stanford Daily (TSD): What were your initial expectations for the original experiment?

Philip Zimbardo (PZ): [We wanted to expand on] Milgram’s experiment on obedience through authority, in which he showed that situational factors can get good people to do bad things… Our study was a follow-up of that, in which we focus less on powerful authority and obedience…

In the earlier research – in most psychological research – it [the study] only goes for a single hour. We wanted to observe the gradual transformation of people into their character, into their role… What’s dramatic about the research – and now what’s dramatic about the movie – is that you see for the first time character transformations – people becoming their role, becoming guards, becoming prisoners – in a relatively short time.

TSD: Why did you decide to conduct the study with college-age males?

PZ: I wanted to have bright, intelligent college students. And unlike Milgram’s study, we gave them personality tests. We only picked the most normal and healthy. The bottom line is, I want to say, here we have normal, intelligent, bright, college students who should understand things about [themselves]. Even more than ordinary, uneducated people. And the point is, it works for them as well as for the ordinary men in Milgram’s study.

TSD: In some of the interviews after the experiment, students explained that the prison became more than just an experiment, that they really grew into their roles as prisoners and guards. Did you also grow into your role as prison superintendent? How did this it affect your research?

PZ: Oh, absolutely. I made the mistake of playing two roles simultaneously. One role was principal investigator of the research project, and in that role I am objective; I am distant; I am emotionally neutral. But then I made the mistake of also being the prison superintendent, and my undergraduate assistant David Chassey played the role of the warden, and my two graduate students…played the two attendants. But we all had a prison-life role to play.

Over time, hour-by-hour, day-by-day, I fell into that role, and in that role I observed guards brutalizing prisoners – in some cases sadistically… And I did not stop it. The only thing I stopped was physical force, but I didn’t stop psychological force, which, in the long run is much worse. I had become, without my awareness, the indifferent superintendent of the Stanford Prison Experiment. And in my book “The Lucifer Effect,” I write about it in great detail – that this was a mistake I made. I should have had someone else play that role.

PZ: When I finished this study, I wrote a few articles about it, because it was really, to me, not a big deal… And then what happened was Abu Ghraib in 2004 – there were obvious parallels with the prison study. Military guards put bags over prisoners’ heads, stripped them naked, humiliated them, just as our guards had done. And so I became an excellent witness to one of those military guards and got to know everything about that horrendous military situation in Iraq. And then I decided I should really go back and review what happened in the Stanford Prison Study, which was 30 years earlier.

And so what I did is I looked at 12 hours of our videotape along with two students who didn’t know anything about this study… And what I decided to do is write a book in which we basically detail what happened in the study. We basically have a chapter of each day, and of course a chapter of setting it [the experiment] up, and other chapters on other things and other kinds of evil situations. My book, “The Lucifer Effect,” [has] been a great success. It’s been in 20 different languages around the world; it’s being used not only by college students and psychologists but in military situations and even in mental hospitals.

TSD: Was there a particular time when your role started to shift from principal investigator to prison superintendent, or was it gradual?

PZ: It’s totally gradual. The point is that we all – I mean I lived there, I slept in my office – hadn’t noticed [the changes] at all. That is, we lived the experiment.

The other problem was we – we meaning my research team – were really not prepared for the intensity an experiment that goes 24/7. Because there are endless logistical things to do – prisoners have to be fed morning, lunch, evening. In order to make it realistic we had parole board hearings two times, with an ex-convict heading it. The secretaries had visiting days two times, with parents, boyfriends, girlfriends. We had a visiting by a prison chaplain…

But the changes are gradual. The changes occur, as I said, a little bit more each day. It’s not a single dramatic thing.

TSD: You mentioned that your two-week study was terminated after just six days; why did you make the decision to conclude the study at the point that you did?

PZ: It’s a critical dramatic instance of heroic action by a young woman, who brought me to my senses…On Thursday night, one of those former graduate students [coming to help with the study], a young woman named Christina Maslach [Ph.D. ’71] – she had been my graduate student at Stanford and also my teaching assistant, and she had just graduated in June – had gotten a job at Berkeley as an assistant professor in psychology and was on her way [to Stanford]…

We had just decided in addition in the beginning of August that we would move in together. We were having a romantic relationship…  So she happened to be at Stanford on Thursday working in the library, and contacted me and said, “Hey, can we get together for dinner at the end of the night shift?” And I said, “Sure, why don’t you come down and just check out what’s happening.”

And she comes down and observes guards brutalizing prisoners with bags over their head, yelling, screaming, chaining their legs together, and when I looked at what was happening on the monitor it was nothing more than the 10 o’clock toilet shift – because 10 o’clock was the last time prisoners could go to a real toilet… She begins to tear up, and runs out and says “I can’t look at this”…

I’m arguing about why this is such an important study, and then she [asks], how could I not see the suffering that was so obvious to her? And if this was the real me, because what she had known me before – the professor, who was a caring, loving teacher… I’m not sure I want to continue my romantic relationship with you. And at that point it was really stunning because it was exactly what I needed to shake me loose from my fantasy, from my craziness… At this point it’s like 11 o’clock at night, and I say, “All right, I’m going to end the study tomorrow… ” We ended the study on Friday, the next day.

TSD: Shifting focus from the actual study to the film that’s coming out, how accurately do you think the film portrays your experiment?

PZ: It’s a remarkably accurate portrayal. Now, the only issue of course is they’re compressing six days into two hours – it is a two hour film. So in fact, they had to leave out many traumatic scenes. There are no scenes that were put in that didn’t happen in the real study. There were no scenes that had to be put in for the drama. If anything, they left out a lot of what I consider powerful scenes, which they actually had in and it just went too long so they had to cut it out. I’d say it’s roughly 90 percent accurate.

Now in addition, when I was writing “The Lucifer Effect,” I was sending to the scriptwriter Tim Talbott all of the dialogue between prisoners and guards. So in the movie almost all of what the guards say to prisoners, prisoners say to guards, came exactly from “The Lucifer Effect” (and I got a screen citation).

TSD: What was your involvement with the making of the movie?

PZ: From the beginning, I was the consultant. I reviewed the script; I made significant changes in the script; I contributed to the script. And I was on the set a couple of days. Unfortunately, I couldn’t be there all the time because I was in Europe. And even when the film was shown at Sundance, there were several parts of the movie which were just wrong psychologically, and then also we added the screen credits. Several things which are now in the movie.

TSD: There have been several documentaries and informational videos made about the experiment, but this is more of a motion picture than a documentary. How do you think the dramatization of the experiment affects the events and conclusions that are presented? Are they easier to relate to for the audience?

PZ: Our movie sticks essentially to the facts… So the movie, then, is a dramatic recreation. It’s dramatic in that it’s highlighting some things and not getting into details about something else. But it has the visiting days. It has the parole board hearing. It has at least one scene of the police arrest. It has the interaction of me and my staff making group decisions about what we should do with certain prisoners. At least more than half of the movie is just prisoner and guard interaction with no one else present.

What’s dramatic is, the audience, in looking at the movie – it’s as if they’re looking through a one-way screen, as we were doing. They are taking the place of the observers looking at the drama unfolding. But they are also observing the observers. Observing the changes in me and my graduate students as these things unfold.

I think it’s a unique movie; it’s the only movie I know where the whole movie is about a psychological experiment.

TSD: If you could change something about the movie, what would you change?

PZ: The confrontation I had with Christina is the reason we ended the study – and it makes her a hero. Because in doing what she was doing, she was willing to say two things. She doesn’t know these boys, doesn’t know anything about them. But she’s just saying “I see human suffering, and you are responsible. I don’t want to have a relationship with somebody who could do that… ” That’s heroic. Heroes defend their moral cause aware of the risk.

But they didn’t use that to end the movie. They had a confrontation, and then I go down to the dungeon, and I’m looking at the video, and the video is the worst thing that happens… They wanted a traumatic scene, wanted to have the biggest traumatic impact – which it does… And then I go down, I enter the yard and say, “Okay, this study is over.” So the way the movie does, it doesn’t give her the heroic status that she deserves.

TSD: You mentioned that the audience will be encased in the basement as well. What do you hope viewers will take away from that experience?

PZ: It’s: What kind of guard would I have been if I was in that study? Would I have been a cruel guard; would I have been a good guard; would I have stopped what the bad guards did? What kind of prisoner would I have been? Would I have been defiant? Would I have stood up for my rights? Would I have helped other prisoners who were breaking down? If I would have been the prison superintendent, what would I have done to make the situation not erupt so horribly?

Essentially, we would like them to identify with the prisoners, the guards and me and my staff. And then also the question is: Would you have allowed it to go the second week, or would you end it earlier?… The point is to reflect. We’ve got all this stuff happening, prison riots in New York and Rikers Island – it’s really about abuse of power. Abuse of police power we see everywhere.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Contact Lea Sparkman at 16lsparkman ‘at’ castilleja.org.

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The Real Lesson of the Stanford Prison Experiment

On the morning of August 17, 1971, nine young men in the Palo Alto area received visits from local police officers. While their neighbors looked on, the men were arrested for violating Penal Codes 211 and 459 (armed robbery and burglary), searched, handcuffed, and led into the rear of a waiting police car. The cars took them to a Palo Alto police station, where the men were booked, fingerprinted, moved to a holding cell, and blindfolded. Finally, they were transported to the Stanford County Prison—also known as the Stanford University psychology department.

They were willing participants in the Stanford Prison Experiment, one of the most controversial studies in the history of social psychology. (It’s the subject of a new film of the same name—a drama, not a documentary—starring Billy Crudup, of “Almost Famous,” as the lead investigator, Philip Zimbardo. It opens July 17th.) The study subjects, middle-class college students, had answered a questionnaire about their family backgrounds, physical- and mental-health histories, and social behavior, and had been deemed “normal”; a coin flip divided them into prisoners and guards. According to the lore that’s grown up around the experiment, the guards, with little to no instruction, began humiliating and psychologically abusing the prisoners within twenty-four hours of the study’s start. The prisoners, in turn, became submissive and depersonalized, taking the abuse and saying little in protest. The behavior of all involved was so extreme that the experiment, which was meant to last two weeks, was terminated after six days.

Less than a decade earlier, the Milgram obedience study had shown that ordinary people, if encouraged by an authority figure, were willing to shock their fellow-citizens with what they believed to be painful and potentially lethal levels of electricity. To many, the Stanford experiment underscored those findings, revealing the ease with which regular people, if given too much power, could transform into ruthless oppressors. Today, more than forty-five years later, many look to the study to make sense of events like the behavior of the guards at Abu Ghraib and America’s epidemic of police brutality. The Stanford Prison Experiment is cited as evidence of the atavistic impulses that lurk within us all; it’s said to show that, with a little nudge, we could all become tyrants.

And yet the lessons of the Stanford Prison Experiment aren’t so clear-cut. From the beginning, the study has been haunted by ambiguity. Even as it suggests that ordinary people harbor ugly potentialities, it also testifies to the way our circumstances shape our behavior. Was the study about our individual fallibility, or about broken institutions? Were its findings about prisons, specifically, or about life in general? What did the Stanford Prison Experiment really show?

The appeal of the experiment has a lot to do with its apparently simple setup: prisoners, guards, a fake jail, and some ground rules. But, in reality, the Stanford County Prison was a heavily manipulated environment, and the guards and prisoners acted in ways that were largely predetermined by how their roles were presented. To understand the meaning of the experiment, you have to understand that it wasn’t a blank slate; from the start, its goal was to evoke the experience of working and living in a brutal jail.

From the first, the guards’ priorities were set by Zimbardo. In a presentation to his Stanford colleagues shortly after the study’s conclusion, he described the procedures surrounding each prisoner’s arrival: each man was stripped and searched, “deloused,” and then given a uniform—a numbered gown, which Zimbardo called a “dress,” with a heavy bolted chain near the ankle, loose-fitting rubber sandals, and a cap made from a woman’s nylon stocking. “Real male prisoners don't wear dresses,” Zimbardo explained, “but real male prisoners, we have learned, do feel humiliated, do feel emasculated, and we thought we could produce the same effects very quickly by putting men in a dress without any underclothes.” The stocking caps were in lieu of shaving the prisoner’s heads. (The guards wore khaki uniforms and were given whistles, nightsticks, and mirrored sunglasses inspired by a prison guard in the movie “Cool Hand Luke.”)

Often, the guards operated without explicit, moment-to-moment instructions. But that didn’t mean that they were fully autonomous: Zimbardo himself took part in the experiment, playing the role of the prison superintendent. (The prison’s “warden” was also a researcher.) /Occasionally, disputes between prisoner and guards got out of hand, violating an explicit injunction against physical force that both prisoners and guards had read prior to enrolling in the study. When the “superintendent” and “warden” overlooked these incidents, the message to the guards was clear: all is well; keep going as you are. The participants knew that an audience was watching, and so a lack of feedback could be read as tacit approval. And the sense of being watched may also have encouraged them to perform. Dave Eshelman, one of the guards, recalled that he “consciously created” his guard persona. “I was in all kinds of drama productions in high school and college. It was something I was very familiar with: to take on another personality before you step out on the stage,” Eshelman said. In fact, he continued, “I was kind of running my own experiment in there, by saying, ‘How far can I push these things and how much abuse will these people take before they say, ‘Knock it off?’ ”

Other, more subtle factors also shaped the experiment. It’s often said that the study participants were ordinary guys—and they were, indeed, determined to be “normal” and healthy by a battery of tests. But they were also a self-selected group who responded to a newspaper advertisement seeking volunteers for “a psychological study of prison life.” In a 2007 study, the psychologists Thomas Carnahan and Sam McFarland asked whether that wording itself may have stacked the odds. They recreated the original ad, and then ran a separate ad omitting the phrase “prison life.” They found that the people who responded to the two ads scored differently on a set of psychological tests. Those who thought that they would be participating in a prison study had significantly higher levels of aggressiveness, authoritarianism, Machiavellianism, narcissism, and social dominance, and they scored lower on measures of empathy and altruism.

Moreover, even within that self-selected sample, behavioral patterns were far from homogeneous. Much of the study’s cachet depends on the idea that the students responded en masse, giving up their individual identities to become submissive “prisoners” and tyrannical “guards.” But, in fact, the participants responded to the prison environment in all sorts of ways. While some guard shifts were especially cruel, others remained humane. Many of the supposedly passive prisoners rebelled. Richard Yacco, a prisoner, remembered “resisting what one guard was telling me to do and being willing to go into solitary confinement. As prisoners, we developed solidarity—we realized that we could join together and do passive resistance and cause some problems.”

What emerges from these details isn’t a perfectly lucid photograph but an ambiguous watercolor. While it’s true that some guards and prisoners behaved in alarming ways, it’s also the case that their environment was designed to encourage—and, in some cases, to require—those behaviors. Zimbardo himself has always been forthcoming about the details and the nature of his prison experiment: he thoroughly explained the setup in his original study and, in an early write-up , in which the experiment was described in broad strokes only, he pointed out that only “about a third of the guards became tyrannical in their arbitrary use of power.” (That’s about four people in total.) So how did the myth of the Stanford Prison Experiment—“Lord of the Flies” in the psych lab—come to diverge so profoundly from the reality?

In part, Zimbardo’s earliest statements about the experiment are to blame. In October, 1971, soon after the study’s completion—and before a single methodologically and analytically rigorous result had been published—Zimbardo was asked to testify before Congress about prison reform. His dramatic testimony , even as it clearly explained how the experiment worked, also allowed listeners to overlook how coercive the environment really was. He described the study as “an attempt to understand just what it means psychologically to be a prisoner or a prison guard.” But he also emphasized that the students in the study had been “the cream of the crop of this generation,” and said that the guards were given no specific instructions, and left free to make “up their own rules for maintaining law, order, and respect.” In explaining the results, he said that the “majority” of participants found themselves “no longer able to clearly differentiate between role-playing and self,” and that, in the six days the study took to unfold, “the experience of imprisonment undid, although temporarily, a lifetime of learning; human values were suspended, self-concepts were challenged, and the ugliest, most base, pathological side of human nature surfaced.” In describing another, related study and its implications for prison life, he said that “the mere act of assigning labels to people, calling some people prisoners and others guards, is sufficient to elicit pathological behavior.”

Zimbardo released video to NBC, which ran a feature on November 26, 1971. An article ran in the Times Magazine in April of 1973. In various ways, these accounts reiterated the claim that relatively small changes in circumstances could turn the best and brightest into monsters or depersonalized serfs. By the time Zimbardo published a formal paper about the study , in a 1973 issue of the International Journal of Crim__i__nology and Penology , a streamlined and unequivocal version of events had become entrenched in the national consciousness—so much so that a 1975 methodological critique fell largely on deaf ears.

Forty years later, Zimbardo still doesn’t shy away from popular attention. He served as a consultant on the new film, which follows his original study in detail, relying on direct transcripts from the experimental recordings and taking few dramatic liberties. In many ways, the film is critical of the study: Crudup plays Zimbardo as an overzealous researcher overstepping his bounds, trying to create a very specific outcome among the students he observes. The filmmakers even underscore the flimsiness of the experimental design, inserting characters who point out that Zimbardo is not a disinterested observer. They highlight a real-life conversation in which another psychologist asks Zimbardo whether he has an “independent variable.” In describing the study to his Stanford colleagues shortly after it ended, Zimbardo recalled that conversation: “To my surprise, I got really angry at him,” he said. “The security of my men and the stability of my prison was at stake, and I have to contend with this bleeding-heart, liberal, academic, effete dingdong whose only concern was for a ridiculous thing like an independent variable. The next thing he’d be asking me about was rehabilitation programs, the dummy! It wasn’t until sometime later that I realized how far into the experiment I was at that point.”

In a broad sense, the film reaffirms the opinion of John Mark, one of the guards, who, looking back, has said that Zimbardo’s interpretation of events was too shaped by his expectations to be meaningful: “He wanted to be able to say that college students, people from middle-class backgrounds ... will turn on each other just because they’re given a role and given power. Based on my experience, and what I saw and what I felt, I think that was a real stretch.”

If the Stanford Prison Experiment had simulated a less brutal environment, would the prisoners and guards have acted differently? In December, 2001 , two psychologists, Stephen Reicher and Alexander Haslam, tried to find out. They worked with the documentaries unit of the BBC to partially recreate Zimbardo’s setup over the course of an eight-day experiment. Their guards also had uniforms, and were given latitude to dole out rewards and punishments; their prisoners were placed in three-person cells that followed the layout of the Stanford County Jail almost exactly. The main difference was that, in this prison, the preset expectations were gone. The guards were asked to come up with rules prior to the prisoners’ arrival, and were told only to make the prison run smoothly. (The BBC Prison Study, as it came to be called, differed from the Stanford experiment in a few other ways, including prisoner dress; for a while, moreover, the prisoners were told that they could become guards through good behavior, although, on the third day, that offer was revoked, and the roles were made permanent.)

Within the first few days of the BBC study, it became clear that the guards weren’t cohering as a group. “Several guards were wary of assuming and exerting their authority,” the researchers wrote. The prisoners, on the other hand, developed a collective identity. In a change from the Stanford study, the psychologists asked each participant to complete a daily survey that measured the degree to which he felt solidarity with his group; it showed that, as the guards grew further apart, the prisoners were growing closer together. On the fourth day, three cellmates decided to test their luck. At lunchtime, one threw his plate down and demanded better food, another asked to smoke, and the third asked for medical attention for a blister on his foot. The guards became disorganized; one even offered the smoker a cigarette. Reicher and Haslam reported that, after the prisoners returned to their cells, they “literally danced with joy.” (“That was fucking sweet,” one prisoner remarked.) Soon, more prisoners began to challenge the guards. They acted out during roll call, complained about the food, and talked back. At the end of the sixth day, the three insubordinate cellmates broke out and occupied the guards’ quarters. “At this point,” the researchers wrote, “the guards’ regime was seen by all to be unworkable and at an end.”

Taken together, these two studies don’t suggest that we all have an innate capacity for tyranny or victimhood. Instead, they suggest that our behavior largely conforms to our preconceived expectations. All else being equal, we act as we think we’re expected to act—especially if that expectation comes from above. Suggest, as the Stanford setup did, that we should behave in stereotypical tough-guard fashion, and we strive to fit that role. Tell us, as the BBC experimenters did, that we shouldn’t give up hope of social mobility, and we act accordingly.

This understanding might seem to diminish the power of the Stanford Prison Experiment. But, in fact, it sharpens and clarifies the study’s meaning. Last weekend brought the tragic news of Kalief Browder’s suicide . At sixteen, Browder was arrested, in the Bronx, for allegedly stealing a backpack; after the arrest, he was imprisoned at Rikers for three years without trial . (Ultimately, the case against him was dismissed.) While at Rikers, Browder was the object of violence from both prisoners and guards, some of which was captured on video . It’s possible to think that prisons are the way they are because human nature tends toward the pathological. But the Stanford Prison Experiment suggests that extreme behavior flows from extreme institutions. Prisons aren’t blank slates. Guards do indeed self-select into their jobs, as Zimbardo’s students self-selected into a study of prison life. Like Zimbardo’s men, they are bombarded with expectations from the first and shaped by preëxisting norms and patterns of behavior. The lesson of Stanford isn’t that any random human being is capable of descending into sadism and tyranny. It’s that certain institutions and environments demand those behaviors—and, perhaps, can change them.

Entertainment

What To Know About The Stanford Prison Experiment

The new movie The Stanford Prison Experiment , which will be released for a limited run in theaters July 17, looks creepily good. The film tells the story of a psychological experiment in which two dozen young men are randomly assigned to roleplay either prisoners or guards in a mock prison setup. It's so unsettling as to seem real — so is The Stanford Prison Experiment is based on a true story ? As any psychology major can tell you, oh, yes, it is.

The film, which features names such as Billy Crudup and Ezra Miller and won multiple awards at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival , is said to be very accurate in representing the events of the original experiment. This can be attributed in part to the fact that experiment researcher Dr. Philip Zimbardo was a consultant on the movie. If you've ever taken a Psych 101 class, you may already be somewhat familiar with Zimbardo and his controversial plan. However, there are a lot of details about the study that aren't common knowledge. Here are a few things you should know about the real Stanford Prison Experiment:

1. The Roles Were Enforced Early On

Although the roles of prisoners and guards were randomly assigned by a coin flip, once subjects had been assigned, they were treated in such a way to reinforce their roles. The goal was to recreate both the physical and psychological feeling of a prison , and so steps were taken to create mindsets in the subjects that were consisted with the roles to which they had been assigned. For example, the "prisoners" were actually picked up from their homes (without prior notification) by police officers, then were strip-searched and forced to don uniforms of loose dresses and caps made from stockings. These measures were taken to induce the feelings of humiliation and emasculation that prisoners have reported experiencing. In contrast, the guards were given costume-like uniforms with nightsticks, whistles, and reflective sunglasses. Although they were not given constant instructions, they were given a basic message: do what you need to keep things under control.

2. Not All Of The Guards Acted The Same Way

Although the basic gist of the story is that "the guards went out of control," it was in fact only a third of the men playing guards who "became tyrannical" in their behavior towards the prisoners. Other guards were described as being "tough but fair," while still others were friendly towards the prisoners and did small favors for them. Zimbardo has noted, however, that none of the "good" guards did anything to stop the experiment or intervene when other guards were mistreating the prisoners. This failure to act on the part of the "good" guards could be seen as even more harmful than the outwardly aggressive behavior, as it helped both perpetuate the prison environment and keep the prisoners docile.

3. The Experiment Couldn't Be Done Today

At the time it was conducted, the experiment met all the criteria to satisfy the American Psychological Association's ethical standards. The study had also been approved by Stanford's Human Subjects Research Committee. However, after the dramatic results of the experiment, the APA's criteria were modified to no longer allow for human-subject simulations like those of the Stanford Prison Experiment. Zimbardo has acknowledged , "No behavioral research that puts people in that kind of setting can ever be done again in America."

4. It's Been The Subject Of Many Movies

In 2001 a German film called Das Experiment was released and claimed to be inspired by the Stanford Prison Experiment . However, the movie portrayed many events — particularly acts of violence — which never occurred during the actual experiment. Dr. Zimbardo said the movie was "irresponsible" for its unrealistic and negative portrayal of psychological research. An American version of The Experiment , however, was made in 2010, starring Adrien Brody (above) which was similarly fictionalized. For viewers seeking more information about the real-life events, though, there is a documentary about the study called Quiet Rage which utilizes real video footage from the experiment as well as interviews with the participants and archival photos.

The Stanford Prison Experiment is an incredibly interesting event in the history of psychological research and raises many questions on the topics of individuality, ethics, and more. I look forward to seeing how the new film brings the study and its findings to life.

Images: IFC Films (4); Stage 6 Film

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What Really Happened With the Stanford Prison Experiment

The trailer for The Stanford Prison Experiment was recently released, and if you were appalled just watching it, think of how the experience must have been for the men who had to live it. The movie, starring Ezra Miller and Michael Angarano and due in theaters on July 17, is based on the true story of a trial conducted by Dr. Philip Zimbardo (played by Billy Crudup in the movie) at Stanford University in 1971. If you learned about this in school, you probably remember the general gist of the experiment: A sampling of male volunteers were split into two groups, guards and prisoners. They lived in a faux prison setting, and as the trial went on, their behavior and personalities appeared to be greatly influenced by their assigned roles. Here's a basic breakdown of the study — the details of which you can find at the experiment's official website — and the incredibly disturbing results.

It started with a newspaper ad; more than 70 applicants responded to Dr. Zimbardo's call for volunteers to participate in a study about the psychological effects of imprisonment. Researchers whittled the group down to 24 students and paid them $15 per day for their participation. Based on preliminary psych examinations, the volunteers were assigned the role of either prisoner or guard. The prisoners were "arrested" at their homes, brought to the police station, left blindfolded in a cell, and eventually transferred to the "Stanford County Jail" — the basement of the psychology building that had been renovated into a jail — where they were strip-searched. They were given ID numbers and stockings to wear on their heads in lieu of shaved heads.

Meanwhile, those selected to be guards (plus one "warden") were told to do whatever necessary to maintain order in the jail. They were given identical khaki uniforms, a whistle, a billy club, and mirrored sunglasses. (Dr. Zimbardo got the idea for the glasses, which were meant to prevent the prisoners from seeing the guards' eyes and add to the anonymity, from the movie Cool Hand Luke .) They worked in eight-hour shifts, while the prisoners were locked away all day, every day, with no release. On the first night, guards regularly woke up the prisoners in the middle of the night for "counts," in which they counted off each prisoner by their ID number. As punishment for indiscretions, guards would force prisoners to do push-ups.

Though the first day went without incident, the prisoners revolted the next day. The guards called in reinforcements (those not working their shifts that day) and broke up the rebellion by blasting a fire extinguisher in the prisoners' faces, stripping them down, taking their beds away, and putting the leaders in solitary confinement. Using psychological tactics, the guards gave clothing and food to some prisoners but not the others, confusing the inmates. They also became more aggressive with punishment and surveillance and forced prisoners to defecate in buckets, rather than toilets. One prisoner began having fits of rage and uncontrollable crying on the third day and was so disruptive that he was released.

On the fourth day, researchers allowed parents and friends to visit, none of whom really questioned what was going on. Guards got wind of a rumored escape plan after visiting hours, but when it never came to fruition, they punished the prisoners with push-ups, jumping jacks, and menial tasks. Later, when another prisoner broke down emotionally, the guards had his fellow inmates chant: "Prisoner #819 did a bad thing." Dr. Zimbardo found the boy sobbing hysterically in his cell and ended up breaking the illusion of the experiment, calling him by his name and telling him the guards were just students, like him. You can see the footage above.

The study was supposed to last two weeks, but the researchers called it off after just six days. They had observed that the guards were abusing the prisoners at night when they didn't think they were being monitored. They didn't explain what kind of abuse they witnessed on cameras, but the website calls it "pornographic and degrading." Dr. Zimbardo, pictured above with Crudup, who plays him in the movie, went on to write The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil . The experiment remains one of the most high-profile psychological studies of all time.

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Bay area may see rain amid cooler temperatures sunday, monday, things to do, stanford prison experiment: how accurate is the movie philip zimbardo weighs in.

Michael Angarano as Christopher Archer, Ki Hong Lee as Gavin Lee/3401, Brett Davern as Hubbie Whitlow/7258, Tye Sheridan as Peter Mitchell/819, Johnny Simmons as Jeff Jansen/1037, Ezra Miller as Daniel Culp/8612,and Chris Sheffield as Tom Thompson/2093 in 'The Stanford Prison Experiment.' (Steve Dietls/IFC)

Michael Angarano as Christopher Archer, Ki Hong Lee as Gavin Lee/3401, Brett Davern as Hubbie Whitlow/7258, Tye Sheridan as Peter Mitchell/819, Johnny Simmons as Jeff Jansen/1037, Ezra Miller as Daniel Culp/8612,and Chris Sheffield as Tom Thompson/2093 in 'The Stanford Prison Experiment.' (Steve Dietls/IFC)

In August 1971, male undergraduates at Stanford University subjected one another to psychological abuse, sleep deprivation and sexual degradation in the basement of Jordan Hall. This wasn’t some sick fraternity hazing ritual, but a university-approved study about prison behavior headed by Philip Zimbardo, a 38-year-old professor in the psychology department.

The Stanford Prison Experiment has since became famous — or infamous — and is seen either as a dangerous exercise in academic hubris or a groundbreaking demonstration on the nature of evil. Over the years, its lessons have been applied to everything from bullying in schools to societies swept up in war and genocide.

On Friday, the feature film “The Stanford Prison Experiment” opens in the Bay Area, potentially reigniting debate about the experiment’s lessons — especially in light of President Obama’s calls for prison reform and renewed concerns about abuse of authority in law enforcement.

Critics, including other psychologists and some participants, continue to question the validity of the study, which Zimbardo insists demonstrates that the dynamics of certain situations can lead ordinary people to behave badly. They also fault Zimbardo for inserting himself into the experiment and not stopping the mistreatment until challenged by his colleague and future wife Christina Maslach.

Zimbardo, whose professional fame is largely tied to the study, acknowledges its flaws but stands by his thesis.

In an interview at a San Francisco cafe, the retired Stanford professor says the new film offers a chilling, accurate re-creation of the experiment. Now 82, Zimbardo still sports his signature black goatee. Speaking in a soft, friendly voice that carries a hint of his South Bronx childhood, he notes that the film doesn’t spare him from judgment. This is true in one particular scene that’s “seared” into his memory in which his on-screen counterpart, played Billy Crudup, has become so caught up in an authoritarian mentality that he dismisses a visiting mother’s concerns about her son’s haggard appearance.

“Without thinking, I turn to the husband and ask, ‘Do you think your boy can handle it? Do you think he’s tough enough?'”

Later that night, the student broke down emotionally and had to leave the experiment, Zimbardo recalls, almost shuddering at the memory.

In his 2007 book “The Lucifer Effect,” Zimbardo focused on the study’s relevance to dehumanizing practices in U.S. prisons and says it illuminates systemic factors that led U.S. soldiers to abuse detainees at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison.

“Abu Ghraib was the Stanford experiment on steroids,” says Zimbardo, who served as a defense expert for one of the U.S. soldiers.

Zimbardo admits he didn’t know much about prisons before launching his study.

The subjects were 24 psychologically healthy male college students, paid $15 a day to participate and randomly assigned to play prisoners or guards. Zimbardo outfitted the guards in khaki uniforms and mirrored sunglasses and told them to create an atmosphere in which the prisoners felt “powerless.” The experiment took place in Jordan Hall’s basement where offices, vacated for the summer, were transformed into the Stanford County Prison.

For audiences watching the movie filmed in a studio facsimile the claustrophobic environment Zimbardo created is palpable. With no windows or clocks, the setting contributed to prisoners’ losing their sense of time, identity and connection to the outside world.

For the prisoners, that sense began almost immediately when cooperating Palo Alto police officers “arrested” and blindfolded them, and transported them to the mock prison. Once there, what appears in the film to be teenage boys playing guards, order a prisoner to strip and tell him he will only be known by the number on the dress he’s given to wear.

But things didn’t get truly ugly until Day Two, when some prisoners revolted by tearing the numbers off their dresses and barricading themselves in their cells.

With Zimbardo’s permission, the guards stepped up their aggressive tactics. One guard, nicknamed John Wayne, adopted the persona of a Southern prison guard, a la “Cool Hand Luke,” forcing prisoners out of bed in the middle of the night and ordering them to complete arbitrary tasks. Toward the end, he ordered prisoners to feign sexual contact.

“John Wayne” is Dave Eshelman, then the 18-year-old son of a Stanford engineering professor.

Eshelman, now a successful mortgage broker in Saratoga, denies that the situation intoxicated him with power. Rather, the former star of his high school plays says he felt obligated to earn his $15 a day.

“I decided I was going to make something happen and be the nastiest guard possible,” he says in a phone interview. He borrowed his intimidation tactics from his freshman fraternity hazing rituals. He knows that his teenage self was insensitive to the discomfort he caused others and is grateful that no one was permanently harmed. Because he says he was giving Zimbardo’s team what he believed they wanted, he says the study “was good theater,” but notes, “It’s an open question if it was good science.”

Another student, Douglas Korpi, also featured prominently in the film as Daniel Culp, has described a mix of reactions to participating in the experiment over the years. As prisoner 8612, Korpi became the first to leave the study after breaking down crying and screaming.

In an interview for “Quiet Rage,” the 1992 documentary about the experiment, Korpi, now an East Bay forensic psychologist, validates some of Zimbardo’s assertions. He said the Stanford prison was “benign” compared with real prisons he’s worked in. Still, he said, “It promoted everything a regular prison promotes. The guard role promotes sadism. The prisoner role promotes confusion and shame.” In later interviews, however, Korpi said he exaggerated his distress in order to be released from the experiment early.

While Zimbardo and director Kyle Alvarez hope the film adds to a new national discussion about prison reform, Alvarez says its messages about the abuse of power will “be relevant 40 years later.” The film’s messages aren’t all “grim,” he says. It also highlights the ways ordinary people can be “heroes.”

To him, the film’s hero is his wife, the only person to openly question his ethics after she saw student prisoners, wearing paper bags on their heads, being led to the toilet. He says she’s the one who got him to see it was wrong to cause suffering to “boys, not experimental subjects.” He suspended the study the next morning.

“It’s not enough to not do a bad thing,” says Zimbardo. “The question is how we can use situational power for good and transform bystanders into what you call proactive agents of change.”

Meet Philip Zimbardo

Retired Stanford psychology professor Philip Zimbardo and director Kyle Patrick Alvarez will answer questions following screenings of “The Stanford Prison Experiment” this weekend.

• Friday, 7:30 p.m. at the Embarcadero Center Cinema, Embarcadero 1, San Francisco.

More information can be found at:

• www.prisonexp.org
• www.zimbardo.com
• www.lucifereffect.com
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The Quiet Ones: History vs. Hollywood

Is the girl in the movie, Jane Harper, based on a real person?

Did the real experiments take place at Oxford University?

No. The Quiet Ones true story reveals that the real experiments were conducted in Toronto, Canada under the patronage of the Toronto Society for Psychical Research (TSPR), founded in 1970 and not affiliated with a university. The group was led by participant Iris May Owen and was operated under the scientific advisement of her husband, Dr. Alan Robert George Owen (Dr. A.R.G. Owen), a former fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge where he was a professor of mathematics. He had also worked as a lecturer in genetics at Cambridge until 1970, the year he acted on an invitation for his family to immigrate to Canada, where he was to direct the parapsychology research of the Toronto-based New Horizons Research Foundation. Together with his wife Iris Owen, they agreed to conduct full-time research for the foundation for a period of five years. Dr. Owen specialized in psychic research with an emphasis on poltergeists.

What year did the real experiment (the Philip Experiment) take place?

Dr. A.R.G. Owen and the eight participants of the research group began conducting the Philip Experiment in 1972. In the movie, Professor Joseph Coupland (Jared Harris) conducts his experiments in 1974. George Owen's wife, Iris, who was the leader of the group involved in the Philip Experiment, wrote the 1976 book Conjuring Up Philip: An Adventure in Psychokinesis , which chronicled the experiment and its findings in detail. Fellow participant Sue Sparrow was her coauthor.

Who were the members of the real research group?

What was the purpose of the Philip Experiment?

In researching The Quiet Ones true story, we discovered that the purpose of the real experiment was to prove that the supernatural is a manifestation of what already exists in the mind. Proving such a hypothesis true doesn't necessarily mean that ghosts aren't real. It just means that they are created by us, instead of coming from somewhere else. For example, if you grew up fearing that an evil old woman lurks under your bed and will grab your ankles when you step onto the floor, you imagining the woman in detail could be enough to manifest her into an actual demonic spirit. Basically, thinking of a ghost and providing it an identity might be enough to conjure it into existence. Taking that theory even further, the researchers behind the Philip Experiment gave the character they were imagining a full life, including a name, a nationality, a past and a personality. During their séances, they tried to converse with Philip, their once fictional character. They believed that giving Philip such realistic traits and attempting to communicate with him would help to conjure up an actual ghost.

Is Philip, the entity from the real experiment, anything like Evey, the entity in the movie?

Did the professor's son really die in an asylum?

No. Dr. A.R.G. Owen, a former professor of genetics at Cambridge, never had a son who died in an asylum from self-inflicted wounds. Dr. Owen did have a son, Robin E. Owen (born May 21, 1955), who observed and assisted the Philip Experiment as the recorder and photographer. Unlike the professor in the movie, Dr. Owen was trying to help the researchers prove that it's possible for a group of focused participants to create an apparition. In the movie, Professor Joseph Coupland (Jared Harris) plays a more central role and is trying to prove that poltergeists aren't real. He believes they exist solely in the mind of a seemingly possessed subject and are expressed through the negative telekinetic energy projected by the subject. Of course, Coupland eventually discovers he's wrong.

Did they really hold séances to communicate with the entity?

Did the true story involve a cult?

No. Not only didn't the true story behind The Quiet Ones movie involve a girl, it also never involved a devil-worshiping cult, which is part of the girl's past in the movie's story.

Did the real professor use unorthodox methods?

Did the spirit really become violent like in the movie?

No. The spirit of Philip, real or not, never branded members of the team with a demonic symbol, nor did he ever cause their bodies to levitate, slam into doors, etc. The apparition Philip also never caused bathwater to boil, a doll to start burning, a girl to catch on fire or a demonic spirit to spiral out of a possessed girl's mouth (the real Philip never possessed anyone). And as you probably guessed, the alleged ghost Philip never killed people.

Are photos of the real people shown during the movie's end credits?

No. The vintage looking photos shown during the end credits of The Quiet Ones movie are not the real people who inspired the movie's story. The photos, which are fake, are intended to represent real people, but they are actually just actors. As you've probably realized by now, the movie is almost entirely fiction.

Did they really videotape the experiments?

Yes, like in The Quiet Ones movie, the true story confirms that the séances were often filmed. Watch footage from several Philip Experiment séances . Dr. Owen's son, Robin E. Owen, often took the photos and did the filming.

Did the real Quiet Ones experiment work?

If by work, we mean, did the spirit of Philip ever actually materialize? Then, no, the Philip Experiment did not work. However, the Owen group believed that the experiment let them achieve far more than they'ed ever imagined possible.

Is it possible that the Philip Experiment was a hoax?

Have any other experiments been done that were similar to the Philip Experiment?

Yes. The Philip Experiment has been replicated several times. The most notable of these efforts is the Skippy Experiment, sometimes called the "Sydney Experiment," conducted in Sydney, Australia in the 2000s. The researchers devised the story of a 14-year-old girl named Skippy Cartman. She was impregnated by her Catholic schoolteacher, who later murdered her so the church wouldn't find out. After the initial table used by the researchers didn't produce any results, they found success sitting around a light, three-legged card table. They reported similar knocking and scratching sounds heard during the Philip Experiment. They also said that the table moved and spun around on one leg. However, they never managed to capture any audio or visual evidence.

Watch real Philip Experiment footage and witness the table-tilting phenomena for yourself. Is a spirit to blame or are the group's members perpetuating a hoax? Also view a dramatized documentary that chronicles the details and findings of the Philip Experiment.

• Biography of Paranormal Researcher Dr. A.R.G. Owen
• Welcome to the Experiment - An Interactive Quiet Ones Website that Sets Up the Movie
• The Quiet Ones Official Lionsgate Website

37 Facts About The Movie The Stanford Prison Experiment

Written by Karine Doe

Modified & Updated: 09 Jun 2024

Reviewed by Jessica Corbett

The Stanford Prison Experiment is a gripping and thought-provoking movie that delves deep into the dark and disturbing realm of human behavior. Based on the infamous 1971 psychological study of the same name conducted by Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo, this film takes viewers on a harrowing journey as it explores the depths to which ordinary people can descend when placed in positions of power and control.

Directed by Kyle Patrick Alvarez, The Stanford Prison Experiment boasts a stellar cast including Billy Crudup, Ezra Miller, and Michael Angarano, who deliver exceptional performances that bring the intense story to life. This movie not only captivates viewers with its raw and unsettling portrayal of the experiment, but it also raises important ethical and moral questions about the nature of authority, conformity, and the inherent darkness that may lurk within us all.

Key Takeaways:

• The Stanford Prison Experiment movie, based on real events, explores the dark side of human behavior and raises important ethical questions about scientific research and human subjects.
• The film’s realistic portrayal and thought-provoking themes sparked renewed interest in the original experiment, highlighting the influence of situational factors on behavior and the potential dangers of unchecked power dynamics.

The Stanford Prison Experiment was released in 2015.

The film depicts the infamous psychological study conducted at Stanford University in 1971.

The movie is based on real events.

The storyline closely follows the actual events that took place during the experiment.

The film was directed by Kyle Patrick Alvarez.

Alvarez expertly captured the tension and psychological dynamics of the experiment.

The screenplay was written by Tim Talbott.

Talbott’s script delves deep into the ethical and moral implications of the study.

The movie stars Billy Crudup as Dr. Philip Zimbardo.

Crudup’s portrayal of the renowned psychologist is captivating and thought-provoking.

The cast also includes Michael Angarano, Ezra Miller, and Tye Sheridan.

These talented actors bring the roles of the prisoners and guards to life.

The film explores the dark side of human behavior.

It delves into the psychological effects of power and authority on individuals.

The Stanford Prison Experiment was met with critical acclaim.

It received positive reviews for its realistic portrayal and thought-provoking themes.

The movie won the Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival.

This award recognizes films with a scientific or technological theme.

The Stanford Prison Experiment was shot in just 21 days.

The production team worked tirelessly to recreate the prison environment.

The film conveys a sense of claustrophobia and tension.

The confined setting adds to the intensity of the story and the psychological pressure experienced by the participants.

The movie raises important ethical questions.

It challenges the boundaries of scientific research and the treatment of human subjects.

The Stanford Prison Experiment received numerous accolades.

It was recognized for its screenplay, direction, and ensemble cast.

The film’s release sparked a renewed interest in the original experiment.

Many viewers sought out the documentary and other materials related to the study.

The movie unfolds in a documentary-style format.

This adds to the authenticity of the story and creates a sense of realism.

The events portrayed in the movie shocked the public in real life.

They brought attention to the potential dangers of unchecked power dynamics.

The Stanford Prison Experiment highlights the influence of situational factors on behavior.

It demonstrates how individuals can be easily influenced by their environment.

The movie’s production design accurately recreates the prison setting.

The attention to detail enhances the film’s authenticity and immersion.

The Stanford Prison Experiment has a runtime of 122 minutes.

This allows for a thorough exploration of the experiment and its consequences.

The film’s soundtrack enhances the suspenseful atmosphere.

The music intensifies the psychological tension and creates an unsettling mood.

The Stanford Prison Experiment received positive audience reactions.

It sparked discussions about human behavior and the impacts of authority.

The movie showcases the emotional toll the experiment had on the participants.

It reveals the psychological distress caused by the simulated prison environment.

The Stanford Prison Experiment portrays the controversial methods used in the study.

It raises questions about the boundaries of ethical research practices.

The film presents the role of Dr. Philip Zimbardo in a complex light.

It explores his motivations, decisions, and the ethical dilemmas he faced.

The Stanford Prison Experiment offers a chilling commentary on human nature.

It shows how easily individuals can be drawn into abusive roles and behaviors.

The movie delves into the psychological effects of deindividuation.

It examines how individuals can surrender their personal identities in a group setting.

The Stanford Prison Experiment emphasizes the power of social roles.

It demonstrates how people can be influenced to conform to assigned roles.

The film’s cinematography adds to the feeling of unease.

The use of close-ups and low lighting contributes to the film’s unsettling atmosphere.

The Stanford Prison Experiment aims to provoke thought and discussion.

It encourages viewers to reflect on the darker aspects of human behavior.

The movie remains faithful to the core findings of the original study.

It stays true to the psychological principles and dynamics observed during the experiment.

The Stanford Prison Experiment challenges traditional notions of good and evil.

It shows how circumstances can influence individuals to act in cruel or compassionate ways.

The film’s performances have been praised for their authenticity.

The actors effectively convey the emotional turmoil experienced by the participants.

The Stanford Prison Experiment shines a light on the dark side of human psychology.

It reveals the potential for cruelty and abuse that lies within all individuals.

The movie explores the concept of individual identity within a group setting.

It examines how the experiment blurred the boundaries between self and role.

The Stanford Prison Experiment serves as a cautionary tale.

It reminds us of the dangers of unchecked power and the need for ethical safeguards.

The film’s conclusion leaves viewers contemplating the lasting effects of the experiment.

It raises questions about the long-term psychological impact on the participants.

The Stanford Prison Experiment is a thought-provoking and unsettling film.

It shines a spotlight on the dark aspects of human nature and the power of situational factors.

The Stanford Prison Experiment is a thought-provoking and deeply disturbing film that offers a chilling insight into the dark side of human nature. The movie explores the psychological effects of power and authority, raising important questions about the ethics of conducting experiments on human subjects. With its gripping storytelling and powerful performances, The Stanford Prison Experiment leaves a lasting impact on viewers, forcing them to confront uncomfortable truths about the potential for both good and evil within us all.

Q: Is The Stanford Prison Experiment based on a true story?

A: Yes, the movie is based on the true events of a psychological experiment conducted at Stanford University in 1971.

Q: What is the premise of The Stanford Prison Experiment?

A: The film depicts the experiment in which a group of college students were divided into prisoners and guards to simulate a prison environment, highlighting the effects of power dynamics on human behavior.

Q: Who directed The Stanford Prison Experiment?

A: The movie was directed by Kyle Patrick Alvarez.

Q: Which actors starred in The Stanford Prison Experiment?

A: The film features an ensemble cast, including Billy Crudup , Michael Angarano, Ezra Miller, and Tye Sheridan.

Q: What is the significance of The Stanford Prison Experiment?

A: The experiment and subsequent movie shed light on the potential for ordinary individuals to succumb to abusive behavior when placed in positions of power and authority.

Q: Are there any ethical concerns surrounding The Stanford Prison Experiment?

A: Yes, the experiment faced significant ethical criticism for the psychological harm it caused to the participants, leading to the discontinuation of the study.

Q: Can The Stanford Prison Experiment be viewed as an accurate portrayal of the actual events?

A: While the movie provides a dramatized version of the experiment, it captures the essence of the events and the psychological implications of the study.

Q: Is The Stanford Prison Experiment a documentary or a fictional film?

A: The movie is a fictionalized account of the real-life experiment, blending elements of drama and psychological thriller.

Q: How does The Stanford Prison Experiment provoke discussion and debate?

A: The film ignites conversations about the effects of power, human behavior, and the ethical considerations when conducting experiments on human subjects.

Q: Where can I watch The Stanford Prison Experiment?

A: The movie is available for streaming on various platforms, such as Netflix and Amazon Prime.

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• Published: June 5, 2017
• Movies , Narration

56: The Experiment

Did you enjoy this episode help support the next one, 2018 updates.

• The Lifespan of a Lie – Trust Issues – Medium
• How the Stanford Prison Experiment Worked | Stuff You Should Know
• New evidence shows Stanford Prison Experiment conclusions | Cosmos
• Was the Stanford Prison Experiment a sham? A Q&A with the writer who exposed the celebrated study | News | Palo Alto Online |

Original Resources

• Feature Film – The Stanford Prison Experiment (Documentary) – YouTube
• Amazon.com: Das Experiment- Black Box. Versuch mit tödlichem Ausgang. Roman zum Film. (9783499230462): Mario Giordano, Moritz Bleibtreu, Oliver Hirschbiegel: Books
• The Experiment (2010) – IMDb
• The Experiment (2010 film) – Wikipedia
• The Experiment (2010) – Full Cast & Crew – IMDb
• The Stanford Prison Experiment (film) – Wikipedia
• Stanford Prison Experiment
• Stanford prison experiment – Wikipedia
• Stanford Prison Experiment | Simply Psychology
• The Real Lesson of the Stanford Prison Experiment – The New Yorker
• Is it time to stop doing any more Milgram experiments? | Aeon Essays
• Milgram Experiment | Simply Psychology
• Milgram’s Experiments: The Perils of Obedience
• Milgram Experiment – Will People Do Anything If Ordered?
• Philip Zimbardo | Speaker | TED.com
• Narration.pdf
• Slavich_ToP_2009.pdf
• Stanford Prison Experiment – Roles Define Your Behavior
• The Experiment by Paul Scheuring Synopsis – Plot Summary – Fandango
• The Stanford Prison Experiment: History’s Most Controversial Psychology Study Turns 40 – Brain Pickings
• Mario Giordano (writer) – Wikipedia
• Stanford Magazine – Article
• Shocking “prison” study 40 years later: What happened at Stanford? – Photo 1 – Pictures – CBS News
• The Stanford Prison Experiment: Still powerful after all these years (1/97)
• Stanford Prison Experiment: How accurate is the movie? Philip Zimbardo weighs in – The Mercury News

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Note: This transcript is automatically generated. There will be mistakes, so please don’t use them for quotes. It is provided for reference use to find things better in the audio.

The movie begins by mentioning it’s based on a novel called Black Box. That novel was written by a German author named Mario Giordano. In fact, it was Mario who was also the co-writer for The Experiment along with Paul Scheuring. So while the movie may not have been based on a true story directly, the novel called Black Box was based on a true story.

This isn’t really anything new, it’s sort of like what we saw with the movie 300 that was actually based on the graphic novel of the same name instead of the history itself.

As a little side note, there was also a German movie named Das Experiement that was released in 2001 also based on Mario’s novel. Oh, and there was another movie released in 2015 called The Stanford Prison Experiment that doesn’t have anything to do with Mario’s book except that both that movie and Mario’s book are based on the same true story.

Anyway, during this introduction to the film we see Adrien Brody’s character, Travis, as he gets laid off from a job at a retirement home. Soon after losing his job, he meets a girl who he instantly gets a crush on.

All of this is made up for the movie, but the story points here are important to set up the scene. The character of Travis wasn’t a real person, and neither was the girl he likes. Oh, her character name is Bay and she’s played by Maggie Grace.

If there was a real person that closely resembles some of the things we saw Travis do in the movie it’d probably be Clay Ramsey. We’ll learn more about Clay a bit later.

Despite being fictional and despite the movie never really telling us exactly what year it is, there’s some reality to what we see in the film.

The year was 1971 and the setting was Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. For the past 16 years, the United States had been deadlocked in a bloody war with Vietnam.

With each passing day, there were more and more protests about the war. Americans across the country kept protesting and asking why they were still involved in the conflict. This growing pressure to end the war also added to a growing dislike for governmental authority in general. Military, police, it didn’t really matter—lots of people were growing tired of governmental control over their lives.

So when we saw Adrien Brody’s character, Travis, joining a protest march, that’s something that was common in the early 1970s. The general sense of despising violence that we get from Travis as he talks with his new crush, Maggie Grace’s character, Bay, was also a common trend in the 1970s culture.

It was the 70s. Peace, love and happiness for all, right?

Except the movie isn’t set in the 70s. This is pretty obvious right away from the technology in the movie alone. For example, the LED light on Travis’ bosses desk when he gets fired. Although technically LEDs were invented in the 1960s, another clue comes from the flat screen computer monitor right next to the LED light—or another one in the bar when Travis is chatting with Bay.

Anyway, the point is that the timeline in the movie is not set in the 1970s like the real events. And as I mentioned just a moment ago, there isn’t a timeline indicated in the film but my speculation is that it’s set around the same time as the movie was made.

The reason I’m guessing that is because when the movie was released there was also a backdrop of growing dislike in the United States for a foreign conflict. It wasn’t the Vietnam War like the 1970s, but instead the war in Iraq that lasted from 2003 until 2011.

And since The Experiment was released in 2010, it’d make sense for the film to be present-day when it was released.

Back in the movie, Adrien Brody’s Travis is trying to find a job after getting laid off when he sees an ad in the classifieds of the newspaper.

That’s actually pretty close to reality, because the real Stanford Prison Experiment began with an ad in the classifieds of the newspaper, too. Although the ad itself was different than what we saw in the movie.

In the film the ad stated subjects were wanted for a behavioral experiment. According to the ad it’d be two weeks long, no experience necessary and perhaps most importantly it said the experiment would be safe. Payment was $1,000 per day.

In truth, the classified ad did say the experiment was two weeks long, but it didn’t mention anything about it being safe. Although that’s probably because the thought of it not being safe wasn’t even on anyone’s mind—sort of like how an ad for most jobs don’t bother to claim the job is safe. Some things are just assumed.

Still, the ad was fairly simple and unassuming as it called for male college students to participate in a psychological study of prison life. The duration expected was anywhere from one to two weeks and for further information or to apply, show up in person at Room 248, Jordan Hall at Stanford University.

Minor detail, perhaps, but there was no phone number listed like we saw in the movie. Perhaps a bit more substantial of a difference was the compensation. In the movie they were offered $1,000 per day for two weeks, or a total of $14,000.

In truth participants were offered only $15 a day for the duration of either one or two weeks. So that’d be anywhere from $105 to $210 overall.

$15 in 1971 is about the same as $91 today, or about $81 in 2010 when we’re assuming the movie takes place. That’s a far cry from the $1,000 a day we saw in the movie.

Speaking of which, after Travis sees the ad he obviously decides to apply since we see him in the next scene in a waiting room with a bunch of other applicants. One of those is Forest Whitaker’s character, Michael Barris. Or just Barris as most people refer to him throughout the movie.

Like Travis, Michael Barris is a fictional character. If there’s a real person who the character of Michael Barris closely resembles it’s probably Dave Eshleman. More on that later.

In the movie, the man conducting the experiment is a psychologist named Dr. Archaleta, who’s played by Fisher Stevens. According to the doctor, any of the applicants who have a history of violence or incarceration are immediately disqualified.

That’s true. Well, Dr. Achaleta isn’t a real person, the real psychologist at Stanford University who was in charge of the experiment was a man named Dr. Philip Zimbardo. Before choosing the final students to participate in the study, Dr. Zimbardo ran a series of tests on them to filter out anyone who might have mental health concerns.

You’ll notice I said students. That’s because in the real study the people chosen were all college students, although not all of them were attending Stanford. Some of them just happened to be in the area at the time. So in the movie when it makes things seem like Travis and Barris weren’t students but were just showing up just because they’re between jobs, that’s not really true.

Well, some of the students certainly were between jobs. Remember Clay Ramsey? After the study, Clay explained the reason he signed up for the experiment was because he was about to go to Stanford in September and wanted to earn some quick cash at a summer job before the Fall semester started. Except it was August, so an experiment that’d only last one or two weeks seemed perfect.

He wasn’t one of the initial students selected, but was rather put onto a list of reserves for the experiment.

In the movie, 26 final people are chosen. In truth, there were 24 people who were selected. Although they were all males, like the movie shows.

According to the movie, the 26 selected men show up like they’re going to work and hop on a bus that takes them to the middle of nowhere. Well, it’s in the middle of a corn field, but it seems like the middle of nowhere.

There’s some elements of truth in this, but the true story is much worse than what we saw in the movie.

Before we get to that, though, there seems to be a bit of fogginess with a lot of online sources about the exact dates for the experiment.

We know from the official presentation that Dr. Zimbardo made with his findings after the experiment, which you can still find elements of on Stanford’s website, that the experiment began on a Sunday morning in August of 1971.

According to some online sources, the study started on Sunday, August 17th, 1971. Except there’s a little problem with that because there was no Sunday, August 17th, 1971. A simple look at the calendar for the year 1971 shows August 17th as a Tuesday.

However, according to Dr. Zimbardo’s aforementioned presentation we know the experiment was prematurely ended on August 20th and that it lasted only six days of the originally planned two weeks, the experiment would’ve started on August 14th, 1971. That’s a Saturday, and likely when Dr. Zimbardo and his colleagues began preparing for the experiment.

After they’d set up the space, on Sunday the participants arrived. Not in a bus, but Dr. Zimbardo arranged for the Palo Alto Police Department to surprise the participants at their homes. The “prisoners” were arrested and charged with Penal Code 211: Armed robbery and burglary.

As far as the participants knew, the arrest was real. Oh sure, they knew they’d signed up for a prison experiment a few weeks earlier, but there were 70 people who signed up. And they knew not everyone would get in. A total of 24 participants out of those 70 were selected.

About half of the 24 total participants ended up being prisoners, the other half being guards. Of those 24, only 18 were the primary participants. The others, like Clay Ramsey, were reserves.

The selection process for which student would be a prisoner and who’d be a guard was done with the flip of a coin to keep it random.

So this is how the experiment began. With a very real police officer arriving at the home of the participants who’d been unlucky enough to be picked to be prisoners. The officer charged them with armed robbery, frisking them spread-eagle against the cop car, cuffing them and putting them in the back of the car to be carried off to the police station.

At the police station—which was a real station—the cops blindfolded the participants and left them in a holding cell for a while. Finally, they were put into a car, still blindfolded, and told they were going to Stanford County Jail for processing.

This is where the switch was made. Instead of going to a county jail, the “prisoners” were sent to the Dr. Zimbardo’s new prison at Stanford University.

Unlike the prison in the middle of corn fields in the movie, the fake prison set up by Dr. Zimbardo was done in the basement of Stanford’s Psychology Department building. Before the prisoners arrived, Dr. Zimbardo’s team used a consultant to help transform a typical school building into a prison environment. That consultant was a man named Carlo Prescott, who himself had spent 17 years in prison. Through Carlo’s consultations and introductions to other ex-cons and corrections officers, Dr. Zimbardo was able to transform the basement of Stanford’s Psychology Department building into a prison.

Rooms that were once laboratories had their doors removed and replaced with steel doors with bars and cell numbers on them. The small hallway outside these new cells was dubbed as the only place that prisoners would be allowed to eat, exercise or even walk outside their cells.

On the opposite side of the hallway from the cells was a storage closet. As is typical for storage rooms, there was no windows in this room, so when the door was closed there’d be no outside light. The prison consultant recommended they set up as solitary confinement there.

At the end of the hallway, a fake wall was put up with a small opening so a camera and audio recording equipment could capture everything that was happening.

Inside the prison environment, there weren’t any restrooms. Instead the guards would have to take prisoners to the restrooms outside the prison area and keep a close eye on them as they did.

In the movie, after arriving in the nondescript brick building, Dr. Achaleta mentions this is the last chance to back out. When no one does, he randomly assigns men to be either prisoners or guards. He then pulls the guards aside and explains the rules to them.

He goes on to say it’s the guards’ job to enforce the rules. If a rule is broken, they’ll have 30 minutes to fix things. If they don’t, the big red light will go off and the experiment will be over. No one will get paid.

We already learned about how the real Dr. Zimbardo determined prisoners and guards with a flip of the coin, but unlike the fictional Dr. Achaleta, the real Dr. Zimbardo didn’t disappear after setting up the scenario. There was no big red light, no 30 minutes to fix things for the guards.

Dr. Zimbardo may not have been the only one coordinating the experiment, but he was leading the experiment and also took on the role of the Superintendent of the fake prison. This dual-role was something he’d admit was a mistake later on.

When the “prisoners” arrived, as Superintendent, Dr. Zimbardo was the one who greeted them by informing them of the seriousness of the armed robbery charges, their new roles as prisoners. All of this to try to make it seem as realistic as possible.

There never was the threat of not paying the $15 a day to the participants. Money was never mentioned.

The new prisoners were, however, stripped naked and sprayed with a hose like we saw in the movie. All of this after getting arrested helped give the prisoners a good sense of their new roles as…well, prisoners.

In the movie, during day one of the experiment the guards are put to the test right away. It’s during rec time when the prisoners are playing basketball. One of the prisoners passes the ball to a guard, who doesn’t see it before it hits him in the face. With a bloody nose, the guards are left to wonder if this instance would break the rule of not touching a guard. Would the experiment be over in the first day if they don’t respond?

The guards in the film decide not to test the big red light and order the prisoners ten pushups as punishment. After punishment is issued, 30 minutes pass and the red light doesn’t go off. The guards assume they dealt with the situation as they should have.

All of that is made up.

Remember, the prison Dr. Zimbardo set up was in the basement of a Stanford University building made from a single hallway and converted lab rooms. There wasn’t a basketball court, high tech cameras or big cages like we see in the movie.

In truth, there were a total of three lab rooms turned cells that had just enough room to hold three cots for the prisoners. So there were nine prisoners total with three on the reserve list.

On the guard’s side there were also nine guards and their shifts were broken up into eight hour shifts. So three guards working three eight hour shifts to keep an eye on the nine prisoners 24 hours a day.

However, it is very true that the guards in the real experiment used push-ups as a means of punishment. This was something Dr. Zimbardo’s team thought wasn’t a very impressive form of punishment until much later, when further research found out that Nazi guards often used push-ups as a form of punishment in concentration camps.

Although, again, the movie is a little lighter on the punishment as the push-ups are done without incident. In reality, one of the guards liked to make things a little more difficult for the prisoners by stepping on the prisoners as they did push-ups or forcing other prisoners to sit on the backs of others to make the push-ups harder.

But that’s getting a little ahead of our story.

In truth, the first day didn’t have any punishments. After the flurry of activity to bring prisoners into their new environment, it was rather uneventful. Dr. Zimbardo would later recall that he was concerned after all of the work to set things up, get assistance from the Palo Alto PD with the arrest and so on, that after the first day he thought nothing would happen in the experiment.

He was wrong.

Oh, as a little side note here, the movie was actually correct in how the prisoners were referred by their assigned numbers instead of names. And while the movie doesn’t have this, during the real experiment they also had a chain wrapped around and locked on their ankle. It was symbolic, but it also meant every time they moved they’d hear the jingle of the chains.

Lastly, all of the guards were told to wear sunglasses even though there wasn’t any sort of windows or even clocks around to know what time of day it was. The reason for the glasses, which we don’t see the guards wearing in the movie, was so the prisoners couldn’t look the guards in the eye. This added a layer of separation from humanity.

The idea for the sunglasses was something Dr. Zimbardo got from Cool Hand Luke. Oddly, that’s not the last time Paul Newman’s classic film would come into play for our story.

Back in the movie, during day two there’s more tension building between prisoners and guards. There’s a food fight started when Adrien Brody’s character, Travis, refuses to eat the horrible cafeteria food. It’s during this food fight that a guard named Chase, who was taking the lead during the first day, starts to take a back seat as Forest Whitaker’s character, Barris, starts to feel the effects of the power he’s been given as a guard.

The character of Chase is played by Cam Gigandet.

Earlier, I mentioned the character of Barris is most likely based on a man named Dave Eshleman. Actually, I think that there’s a bit of Dave Eshleman that went into both Chase and Barris.

In the real experiment, Dave quickly emerged as a leader among the guards. After the experiment, Dave would recall that he, too, used Cool Hand Luke as an inspiration for how to assert authority over the prisoners in his new role as a prison guard.

One of the ways the guards asserted authority was with a roll call. The first of these happened at 2:30 AM on the second day while the prisoners were sleeping in their cells. The prisoners sleepily complied, lining up with their hands against the wall as the guards did their count.

Of course, it’s not like any of these fake prisoners were attempting to escape, but that just shows how the guards were trying to do things they’d seen elsewhere to do what they thought prison guards were supposed to do.

At the time, no one thought much of it.

Later in the morning of the second day, the prisoners rebelled against their confinement. None of this is depicted in the movie, but the prisoners had removed their prisoner ID numbers from their shirts, taken off the stocking caps they’d been forced to wear upon arriving to simulate shaving their heads—no one actually had their head shaved like we saw in the movie—and jammed their beds up against the doors to prevent the guards from entering the cells.

It was only the second day, and already the guards were faced with a predicament. How do they respond?

Unfortunately, they responded with force. But before they did, they waited to bolster their ranks. They called in the three off-duty guards from their homes. Also, the guards from the night shift volunteered to stay extra hours to help with the revolt. So there were all nine guards to deal with the revolt from the nine prisoners.

To get past the barricaded cells, the guards then made use of a tool that’d been left because of a concern for fire threats during the experiment. Using fire extinguishers, they sprayed them into the cells to get the prisoners away from the doors. As they did this, other guards forced the doors open.

Once inside, the guards removed the beds that the prisoners used to barricade the cell doors. They also stripped the prisoners naked yet again, forcing some of the prisoners they thought were the leaders of the rebellion into the storage closet they used as solitary confinement.

After this, the guards decided to try psychological tactics since they couldn’t keep all nine guards on staff the entire time. To do this, they decided to change the cells. Instead of having three prisoners in each of the three cells, they put all of the prisoners into two of the cells and dubbed the third cell a special privilege cell.

Prisoners who had the guard’s favor were allowed into the special privilege cell. In there, the beds the guards had removed from the other cells were replaced. They could also brush their teeth and use the sinks to wash—both things the guards wouldn’t let the prisoners in the other cells do. They’d also restrict any but the prisoners in the special privilege cell from eating from time to time so as to help give the sense that it was, well, a special privilege to be in that cell.

In the afternoon of the second day, the guards really messed with the prisoners heads by taking all of the “good” prisoners in the special privilege cell and putting them back in the other “bad” cells. Then they took a few of the former “bad” prisoners and put them in the special privilege cell.

This tactic, which is something that real prison guards do, was successful in making the prisoners who had led the rebellion think that perhaps some of the other prisoners who were transferred from the “bad” to “good” cells must’ve done something to earn that transfer. Obviously they must’ve snitched on the other prisoners.

Of course, they’d done nothing of the sort, but it didn’t matter. The prisoners began to break apart into groups that didn’t trust each other. As a result, it was much easier for only three guards on shift at any given time to keep all nine prisoners from rebelling together.

So while the specifics of what happened in day two might’ve been different from what we saw in the movie, the gist of guards exercising their power over the prisoners pretty quickly was very true.

And just like what we saw in the movie, by the end of the second day it was more than just an experiment. In the minds of all participants, it was a real prison with real guards and real prisoners.

In the movie, on day three we learn that one of the prisoners, Benjy, is sick. He’s played by Ethan Cohn in the film, and after falling ill he admits to Adrien Brody’s character that he’s diabetic. He needs insulin.

As you can probably guess, Benjy isn’t real. Neither is the situation of one of the prisoners secretly being diabetic. Dr. Zimbardo and other doctors at Stanford had effectively scanned all of the participants for health before being selected, so there were no immediate health threats like we saw in the movie.

However, that doesn’t mean the intense situations didn’t cause mental health issues. And like the movie implies, that started to show itself on day three.

It was a student named Douglas Korpi. Of course, inside the experiment he wasn’t Douglas. He was Prisoner #8612, and by the third day he started to break down into intense fits of crying and screaming uncontrollably. He asked Dr. Zimbardo if he could leave the experiment.

Interestingly, the guards and prisoners weren’t the only ones who had started to conform to their new roles. Dr. Zimbardo had himself taken on the role of prison Superintendent, and along with his prison consultants—the former ex-cons who’d help design the experiment along with some other Stanford University professors—had all started to feel like they were actually controlling a prison.

So when Prisoner #8612 came to them asking to leave, their first instinct was distrust. They thought he was faking his mental breakdowns just so he could be released.

Instead of offering to release Prisoner #8612, they offered a deal. In exchange for being an informant on the other prisoners, Dr. Zimbardo and his team would make sure the guards didn’t harass Prisoner #8612 anymore. They asked him to go back to his cell and think over their offer.

An unintended consequence of this was that when Prisoner #8612 returned to his cell, he told the others in his cell that he wasn’t allowed to leave. The message quickly spread that they couldn’t leave the experiment. What kind of experiment is this that you can’t leave? Maybe it actually is a prison.

Throughout the day, Prisoner #8612 continued to scream and go into fits. Finally, Dr. Zimbardo was convinced he wasn’t faking and let him be released.

The movie doesn’t mention this at all, but it was also on day three when Dr. Zimbardo’s team had set up a family visitation as part of the experiment. Since things had started to get bad, they were afraid the parents would pull their kids from the experiment if they saw how things really were.

So all of the prisoners washed, shaved and were ordered to clean their cells. About a dozen visitors came to see the “prisoners”, and were made to wait for about half an hour before being let in. They were also limited to ten minutes of visiting time—again, trying to keep things as realistic as possible.

None of the parents tried to pull their kids. Instead, to the surprise of Dr. Zimbardo and his team, after seeing how distressed they were, some of the parents tried to appeal to the prison authorities to make the situation better. Never did they question “the system”, and instead they complied with the rules.

Back in the movie, the events during day four continue to escalate matters. In an attempt to make an example out of Travis, Barris and the other guards force him to clean the toilet. Meanwhile, another guard, Chase, tries to get one of the prisoners named Oscar, who’s played by Jason Lew, to give him oral sex.

That didn’t happen.

Well, the second thing. The cleaning the toilet thing happened.

After Prisoner #8612 was released on the third day, one of the guards overheard prisoners talking about Prisoner #8612 returning to break out the rest of the prisoners. Immediately, the guard thought that Prisoner #8612 had been faking all along and reported this to the rest of the authorities.

Dr. Zimbardo would later admit this is where he started to fail in his duty as a psychological doctor. Instead of merely recording the events, after hearing of the supposed return of Prisoner #8612 to help the prisoners escape, he acted like a prison Superintendent.

He went back the Palo Alto Police Department who had helped arrest the participants to begin with, and asked if he could transfer his prisoners to their jail. They refused due to insurance reasons.

Later, Dr. Zimbardo would recall how upset he was that two corrections institutions couldn’t help each other out. The mere fact that he put his little prison on par with an actual police station shows how much he’d fallen into the role. It wasn’t just a role anymore. It was real.

Without the help of the police, Dr. Zimbardo returned to his prison and with the guard’s help chained all of the prisoners together, put bags over their heads and moved them to the fifth floor of the building. Meanwhile, as the prisoners were being watched by some of the guards in a storage room, the rest of the guards along with Dr. Zimbardo and the other prison authorities got to work disassembling the prison.

The plan was for when Prisoner #8612 arrived to break his fellow prisoners free, he’d arrive to Dr. Zimbardo sitting alone in the hallway. After explaining the experiment was over and everyone was sent home, Dr. Zimbardo would send Prisoner #8612 away. Then they’d bring the prisoners back, set up the prison again and double the guards on duty.

That never happened.

With the plan ready, Dr. Zimbardo waited in an empty hallway. Prisoner #8612 never came. The rumored escape plan was just that, a rumor. It never happened.

What did happen is that one of Dr. Zimbardo’s colleagues at the Stanford Psychology Department entered. He’d apparently heard about the experiment and wanted to check in on his friend and colleague, Dr. Zimbardo, to see how it was going. On the other hand, Dr. Zimbardo got really upset with the psychologist for interrupting him right at the moment when he was expecting a prison break.

After explaining what was going on, Dr. Zimbardo recalled his colleague, a psychologist named Gordon Bower, asked one simple question. What’s the independent variable in this study?

That set Dr. Zimbardo off. He ushered Dr. Bower out and without a prison break he and the other guards brought the prisoners back and set about forcing them to clean toilets with their bare hands.

But that question kept nagging at the back of Dr. Zimbardo’s mind.

In the movie, during day five things start to spiral out of control. One of the guards, Bosch, who’s played by David Banner, is beaten by the other guards for trying to help get Benjy’s insulin. Barris then announces that Bosch will be joining the prisoner population.

This causes Travis to protest, who rushes to a camera to exclaim the experiment is over. In a flurry, the guards pull Travis down and Benjy rushes the guards to get off his friend. It’s an instantaneous reaction when Barris hits Benjy on the head with a nightstick. A bloodied Benjy falls to the ground.

None of that’s true. None of the guards became prisoners and none of the prisoners were bloodied with a nightstick.

But things did continue to escalate.

Like the movie shows, there was a new prisoner added. But he wasn’t a guard. After Prisoner #8612 left, another prisoner was brought in immediately from the reserve list. This was Clay Ramsey, or Prisoner #416.

Coming into the situation from the outside world, Prisoner #416 immediately wanted back out. Told by the other prisoners that it was a real prison and once he was in he couldn’t get back out, Prisoner #416 staged a protest by refusing to eat.

So I guess in some ways that’s similar to what we saw Adrien Brody’s character do on day two in the movie.

The guards tried to get Prisoner #416 to eat by putting him in solitary confinement and even turning other prisoners against him. While he was in solitary, Dave Eshleman said he’d release Prisoner #416 from solitary if they gave up their blankets. None of the prisoners were willing to do that.

Later that day, on day five, Dr. Zimbardo asked a former prison chaplain to come to his prison and talk to the prisoners. During the questioning, it became even more clear how realistic the situation had become. When asked how the prisoners would get out, the response was that the only way to get out of prison was to get help from a lawyer. Some prisoners went so far as to ask the chaplain to help them get legal assistance.

Oh, and none of the prisoners introduced themselves to the chaplain as their real names. They all used the prisoner ID numbers without being prompted.

Well, not all of them. One of the prisoners, Prisoner #819, claimed he was sick and wanted to see a doctor instead of the chaplain. After much persuasion, he agreed to go talk to Dr. Zimbardo, who was always referred to as the Superintendent, and the chaplain. Then he broke down.

As Dr. Zimbardo was taking Prisoner #819 to get something to eat, guard Dave Eshleman orchestrated a chant with the rest of the prisoners. They kept chanting that Prisoner #819 is a bad prisoner over and over.

He heard it and began sobbing. Dr. Zimbardo suggested he leave, but now it was Prisoner #819 who refused to go. He wanted to show to his fellow prisoners that he wasn’t a bad prisoner.

Dr. Zimbardo explained he’s not Prisoner #819. Those are students, not other prisoners. This isn’t a prison. This is just an experiment.

After this, he agreed to leave and Dr. Zimbardo started to realize the experiment wouldn’t last the full two weeks.

Day six is when everything comes to a climax in the movie. There’s a prison riot, the guards flee and poor Benjy dies. As you can probably guess, none of that is true.

No one died during the experiment.

What happened was that on the evening of day five, Dr. Zimbardo got a visit from parents of one of the prisoners. They demanded he contact a lawyer to get their son out. Apparently the chaplain had told the parents a lawyer was the only way they’d be able to get their son out. Considering the chaplain had been there that day, that tells you how fast they responded.

And understandably so—none of the students had done anything wrong!

In the movie, everything ends much in the same way it began. After the brawl between prisoners and guards, the red lights go off and a garage door opens. Then a bus comes and picks them all up and takes them away from the prison.

I’m sure I don’t even need to say it, but I will anyway: all of that is made up.

In truth, the final straw was when Dr. Christina Maslach, a colleague of Dr. Zimbardo’s at Stanford, came to help with the experiment. Her role was to conduct some interviews with the guards and prisoners. She knew about the experiment, as did many others at Stanford, but this was her first time going into the prison environment.

When she saw the prisoners being chained together and bags put on their heads for a simple toilet run, she spoke out immediately. Dr. Zimbardo would later recall that they had about 50 people outside the experiment interact with the prison. From police to the parents to chaplains, Dr. Maslach was the very first to speak up.

Later, Dr. Maslach said she was in tears over what she saw. Even worse, her colleagues involved in the experiment mocked her for speaking out. She recalled having second thoughts about her relationship with the man who was leading the experiment—yes, she was seeing Dr. Zimbardo at the time.

After six days, on August 20th, 1971, Dr. Philip Zimbardo finally put an end to the Stanford prison experiment.

Although the experiment may have ended prematurely, it’s affects live on to this day.

The year after the study’s end, in 1972, Dr. Christina Maslach and Dr. Philip Zimbardo were married. Although in recent years, Dr. Maslach has transitioned into studies around why and how people get burned out at their jobs, Dr. Zimbardo has continued to publish books, interviews and a wide range of influential materials from the experiment.

I wish I could say everyone lived happily ever after, but this is a story that has a rather conflicting ending.

While many of the participants in the study have understandably wanted to stay anonymous, it was an experience that had effects on everyone involved.

Prisoner #8612, the very first prisoner who was released from the experiment, would go on to become a respected forensic psychologist in San Francisco, then a consultant for judges trying to determine if they should approve a prisoners motion for release.

Perhaps the biggest change that the Stanford prison experiment has brought about was when Congress was directly influenced by the experiment to change the law so juveniles accused of federal crimes can’t be put into cells with adult prisoners prior to their trial.

Along with undergraduate students, Dr. Zimbardo also produced a documentary called Quiet Rage about the experiment that’s still used in military and law enforcement entities as a means of training their personnel about what prison life is really like.

Despite these positive changes, Dr. Zimbardo has endured an onslaught of criticisms from peers and the general public alike. Many have likened the prison experiment to an experiment Stanley Milgram did in 1965 to see if people would be willing to deliver electric shocks to others simply because they’re being told to do so—it’s their job. This study found eerily similar results to Dr. Zimbardo’s in that, as it turned out, two thirds of those involved in Milgram’s experiment were willing to deliver fatal levels of electric shocks to a stranger.

As a little side note, Stanley Milgram was a high school classmate of Dr. Zimbardo.

To this day, the Stanford prison experiment is considered a highly controversial topic. Were guards like Dave Eshelman and even Dr. Zimbardo evil, sadistic people?

Or is this an example of how good people can drift into doing evil things when they’re “just doing their job”? Should we be allowed to perform human experiments like this?

It might be easy to say an experiment like the one done at Stanford was unethical and should’ve never happened in the first place, let alone ever have a similar study take place again. Some would argue that’s not a question so easily answered.

Even Dr. Zimbardo has admitted to being conflicted about the ethical nature of the experiment. On one hand, he explained in an article in the Stanford News that a lot of research is becoming pencil and paper tests, and it’s really hard to truly understand how humans behave in certain situations if you simply ask them the questions.

At one speech, Dr. Zimbardo stated that he believes the prison experiment was simultaneously ethical and unethical. He went on to explain that it was ethical because it was fully approved by the university. There wasn’t any deception about what was being done, everyone was told that if they were picked to be prisoners they’d have their rights stripped and likely only have minimal food for the duration of the study.

Everything was explained as much as possible and everyone agreed. Moreover, as we learned about a little bit ago, there were some 50 or so people who were outsiders and came to check on the progress at some point. What more could you ask of a study?

On the other hand, Dr. Zimbardo readily admits that the study was unethical because, “people suffered and others were allowed to inflict pain and humiliation on their fellows over an extended period of time.”

Probably one of the more recent comparisons to the Stanford prison experiment was in 2003 when the prisoner torture and abuse came to light at the Abu Ghraib prison. After damning evidence of abuse by way of photos of prisoners subjected horrific conditions—naked prisoners, rape, sodomy, even murder by the guards—when this started to be released to the media, the public demanded that someone had to be held accountable.

A number of international trials began, spanning multiple years and accusations started, going all the way up to the then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. One of the expert witnesses called on to testify about human behavior in prison during those trials?

Dr. Philip Zimbardo.

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Stanford Prison Experiment

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Stanford Prison Experiment , a social psychology study in which college students became prisoners or guards in a simulated prison environment . The experiment, funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research, took place at Stanford University in August 1971. It was intended to measure the effect of role-playing, labeling, and social expectations on behaviour over a period of two weeks. However, mistreatment of prisoners escalated so alarmingly that principal investigator Philip G. Zimbardo terminated the experiment after only six days.

More than 70 young men responded to an advertisement about a “psychological study of prison life,” and experimenters selected 24 applicants who were judged to be physically and mentally healthy. The paid subjects—they received $15 a day—were divided randomly into equal numbers of guards and prisoners. Guards were ordered not to physically abuse prisoners and were issued mirrored sunglasses that prevented any eye contact. Prisoners were “arrested” by actual police and handed over to the experimenters in a mock prison in the basement of a campus building. Prisoners were then subjected to indignities that were intended to simulate the environment of a real-life prison. In keeping with Zimbardo’s intention to create very quickly an “atmosphere of oppression,” each prisoner was made to wear a “dress” as a uniform and to carry a chain padlocked around one ankle. All participants were observed and videotaped by the experimenters.

On only the second day the prisoners staged a rebellion. Guards then worked out a system of rewards and punishments to manage the prisoners. Within the first four days, three prisoners had become so traumatized that they were released. Over the course of the experiment, some of the guards became cruel and tyrannical, while a number of the prisoners became depressed and disoriented. However, only after an outside observer came upon the scene and registered shock did Zimbardo conclude the experiment, less than a week after it had started.

The Stanford Prison Experiment immediately came under attack on methodological and ethical grounds. Zimbardo admitted that during the experiment he had sometimes felt more like a prison superintendent than a research psychologist. Later on, he claimed that the experiment’s “social forces and environmental contingencies” had led the guards to behave badly. However, others claimed that the original advertisement attracted people who were predisposed to authoritarianism . The most conspicuous challenge to the Stanford findings came decades later in the form of the BBC Prison Study, a differently organized experiment documented in a British Broadcasting Corporation series called The Experiment (2002). The BBC’s mock prisoners turned out to be more assertive than Zimbardo’s. The British experimenters called the Stanford experiment “a study of what happens when a powerful authority figure (Zimbardo) imposes tyranny.”

The Stanford Prison Experiment became widely known outside academia . It was the acknowledged inspiration for Das Experiment (2001), a German movie that was remade in the United States as the direct-to-video film The Experiment (2010). The Stanford Prison Experiment (2015) was created with Zimbardo’s active participation; the dramatic film more closely followed actual events.

The Untold Truth Of The Philadelphia Experiment

The 1984 film The Philadelphia Experiment is a romance, a war-time period piece, a time-travel movie, and depending on who you ask, is "based on actual events." Released under the auspices of Roger Corman's New World Pictures, known for its exploitation flick ethos, the film bears all the outward hallmarks of a high-concept b-movie, yet offers ambitious storytelling that aims higher than it needs to.

The film features Michael Pare, a young star continuing his rise after roles in Eddie and the Cruisers and Walter Hill's Streets of Fire . Appearing in their third film together, actors Nancy Allen and Bobby DiCicco also play pivotal parts.

Behind the scenes, several production changes suggest that this could have arrived as a much different movie than we know today, with more of an emphasis on horror and no romantic angles at all. A famous director was asked to helm the film but passed. On paper, if not in a military harbor near you, there's even a scientific theory to back up the wild MacGuffin that drives the movie's plot.

This is the untold truth of The Philadelphia Experiment .

Actual events in air quotes

"The Philadelphia Experiment" is an urban legend about a U.S. Naval experiment that purportedly took place in 1943 at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard in Pennsylvania, with the U.S. Navy destroyer escort USS Eldridge being rendered invisible to detection systems.

The tides of World War II had turned with the surrender of Italy to the Allies. With a sense that Germany was on the ropes, there was a great desire for the U.S. to shore up the gains the Allied forces had made. If they could get war craft into enemy waters without being seen, bringing with them the advantage of surprise, the war could end in short order. A ship with a cloaking device onboard could do the trick.

One problem: it's not true.

In 1955, writer and astronomer Morris K. Jessup purportedly received letters from unknown sources describing the experiment . Known for his belief in the supernatural and extraterrestrial, Jessup published books including The Case for the UFO (1955), The UFO Annual (1956), and The Expanding Case for the UFO (1957).

According to David Ritchie's 1994 book UFO: The Definitive Guide to Unidentified Flying Objects and Related Phenomena , Jessup claimed to have made a breakthrough regarding the Philadelphia Experiment on April 19, 1959. Just one day later, he was found dead in his car from carbon monoxide poisoning. The death was ruled a suicide , although conspiracy theorists believed he was silenced to keep from revealing things he was not meant to know.

John Carpenter's Philadelphia Experiment

The movie we know today as The Philadelphia Experiment could have been far different. It started as a script written by horror film icon John Carpenter , who was taken by the legend. In an interview , Carpenter said, "Great shaggy dog story. Absolute bull****, but what a great story. While I was writing it, I couldn't figure out the third act. A friend suggested the revenge of the crew against the people who put them there, but I thought it was too much like The Fog . Absolute bull****."

It is unclear how much of Carpenter's original story made it to the final shooting script. What eventually made it to the screen was a time-travel story wherein two sailors involved with the experiment are plucked off of the USS Eldridge in 1943 and deposited in 1984. Romantic elements between one of the sailors and a good Samaritan were added in later drafts.

Carpenter was given an Executive Producer credit, but did not get a screenwriting or story credit for The Philadelphia Experiment .

While it might seem strange that Carpenter would simply relinquish a script this way, it was not unprecedented. In the mid-1970s, he delivered a treatment and two drafts of a screenplay titled Eyes to Columbia Pictures. The script went through several revisions, ultimately arriving in theaters in 1978 as The Eyes of Laura Mars , directed by Irvin Kershner ( The Empire Strikes Back ).

Director Stewart Raffill: pirates, wormholes and aliens

The Philadelphia Experiment wound up being the second 1984 effort for director Stewart Raffill , following the sci-fi comedy The Ice Pirates .

It is not uncommon for a director to take a pass at the script to align it with his or her vision, nor is it uncommon for a script to have many other writers involved. Raffill is an uncredited screenwriter for The Philadelphia Experiment . He re-wrote the screenplay to include a love story between the lead characters while also toning down the science-based exposition. Other writers on the project besides John Carpenter and Raffill included Wallace Bennett and Don Jakoby ( Lifeforce, Arachnophobia ), who received story credits, while Michael Janover and William Gray ( The Changeling, Prom Night ) earned screenplay credits.

More consequential to pop culture, perhaps, is Raffill's follow-up feature, the 1988 movie Mac and Me . If you do not recognize the name, this is the thinly-veiled E.T. homage mercilessly teased by actor Paul Rudd on numerous appearances on The Conan O'Brien Show .

The cast of The Philadelphia Experiment

Leading the cast was Michael Pare, whose previous star turns included Eddie and the Cruisers and Streets of Fire . Joining him were Nancy Allen and Bobby DiCicco, who were castmates in two films before The Philadelphia Experiment : Steven Spielberg's 1941 (written by Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale, of Back to the Future fame) and I Wanna Hold Your Hand (co-written and directed by Zemeckis).

Pare and DiCicco play two ill-fated sailors on board the USS Eldridge during the experiment who are sucked into a time vortex, winding up in the '80s on the grounds where a military installation has suddenly vanished. Allen plays a bystander who helps the two (after being carjacked by them), all the while being pursued by the U.S. military.

Miles McNamara and Eric Christmas play Dr. James Longstreet (in 1943 and 1984, respectively). Longstreet is the scientist behind the prototype cloaking device. Keen-eyed viewers will also spot character actor Stephen Tobolowsky ("Ned Ryerson" from Groundhog Day ) in one of his earliest roles as an assistant on the experiment.

A long, strange trip

The central conceit of The Philadelphia Experiment 's plot is the time vortex which has ripped the USS Eldridge and a military town in the Nevada desert out of their respective eras. The cause of this is the cloaking technology developed by Dr. James Longstreet who tempted fate once in 1943 during the experiment and then again in 1984, having not learned his lesson the first time. The technology has created a start and endpoint for the time vortex, bridging a Philadelphia harbor and a Nevada town, and trapping both in the middle of the wormhole.

One can make strong parallels between the Longstreet character and that of John Hammond, the eccentric entrepreneur from the first two Jurassic Park films. Both characters display unbound hubris that leads to disastrous results. In other words, the characters exemplify the admonition given in the latter film: "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."

The time travel narrative device has found its way into many different forms of pop culture, from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court to multiple episodes of the original Star Trek series to the Back to the Future series. The unique fingerprint The Philadelphia Experiment leaves on the trope is that the main protagonist is dragged into the future and not the past.

The science of The Philadelphia Experiment

Are wormholes possible? Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity says that space and time are inextricably tied and are, in fact, different descriptions of the same thing. A broad example is when you look up at the stars at night. The light you see from those stars was cast a very long time ago, and you are essentially looking into the past when you view them.

Further, any presence of mass, like the planets themselves, or energy will warp the fabric of space-time. That warping creates folds that can be "torn" and "patched," facilitating shortcuts between point "A" and point "B." These are wormholes. Problem is that they're only theoretical, with the math only suggesting their feasibility right now.

The first kind of wormholes to be theorized were  Einstein Rosen Bridges , which describe black holes as portals to parallel universes. However, such bridges would be highly unstable, and if it did not collapse upon entry, the pathway between endpoints would take a very long time to traverse — hardly a conventional shortcut.

What does this have to do with  The Philadelphia Experiment ? Well, in director Stewart Raffill's script rewrite, the love story between Michael Pare and Nancy Allen's characters was added, and science-based exposition was toned way down. Its absence doesn't harm the story. In fact, had it been included, it likely would have slowed down the narrative. But if the question is "Are wormholes possible?" the answer is "yes," at least on paper.

Urban legends

The genesis of The Philadelphia Experiment lies in the urban legend of the USS Eldridge and the debate over whether the incident actually occurred or not. It is not the only example of a work of fiction relying on such anecdotes with sketchy provenance.

The most famous of these would be Men in Black (1997), which relied heavily on the mythology of men dressed in black suits claiming to be government agents and using intimidation to silence UFO witnesses. Although the films starring Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones are the most widely-known examples, there are several instances both before and after these using the same themes. The X-Files episode "Jose Chung's From Outer Space," for example, featured Jesse Ventura and Alex Trebek as men in black.

Fiction abounds with stories about wormholes, the time-space shortcuts that allow the Millennium Falcon to jump through hyperspace, the Enterprise to go to warp speed, and  Doctor Who 's  TARDIS to move from Earth to Gallifrey. The creation and manipulation of wormholes is the crucial mechanism for the videogame  Portal .

So it is with The Philadelphia Experiment . Dr. James Longstreet has essentially created a black hole in 1943 and another in 1984. Caught between these is a rift in space-time where both the USS Eldridge and the military town are essentially held hostage.

Life after the Experiment

The American Film Institute Catalog suggests that the budget for The Philadelphia Experiment was $9 million. Its worldwide take as reported by Box Office Mojo was $8,103,330. Measure that against the 10th highest-grossing film of 1984, Splash , with a worldwide gross of $69,821,334, and it becomes clear that the film underperformed.

Rotten Tomatoes only has 10 reviews logged, with a lowly 50% rating, but there is public goodwill for the film. Although tame by Roger Corman/New World Pictures standards, it retains the renegade spirit found in the studio's other efforts. One could imagine the studio heads saw it as a kind of Terminator -in-reverse with the protagonist arriving from the past instead of the future. It is a movie that brings its a-game to a b-movie milieu.

As an early entry in the videocassette rental boom of the 1980s and a stalwart of cable television, the movie earned enough name recognition to merit a sequel ... sort of. Philadelphia Experiment II , released in 1993, featured a different cast and crew. The SyFy network offered a made-for-television remake in 2012. Michael Pare returned in this version, but in a different role.

In the end, The Philadelphia Experiment has become a cult favorite thanks to audiences connecting with concepts that punched above their weight and with the underlying romance that was tacked on at a very late stage. It's a film that was never likely to transcend its limitations but earns points for earnestly willing to make the attempt.

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The Philip Experiment: The True Story That Inspired ‘The Quiet Ones’

Horror returns to the big screen this coming weekend with The Quiet Ones , the latest production from legendary company Hammer Films. Co-written and directed by John Pogue – who previously wrote Ghost Ship and wrote/directed Quarantine 2: Terminal – the film centers on a university professor and a team of students who attempt to use negative human energy to literally create a poltergeist.

The Quiet Ones is marketed as being based on actual events, and a similar experiment was indeed conducted back in the 1970s, by a team of Canadian parapsychologists. So before you head out and see the movie this weekend, let’s learn a bit about that true story that inspired it, shall we?!

Led by poltergeist expert Dr. George Owen, the goal of The Philip Experiment was to prove the theory that the human mind could essentially be coaxed into producing paranormal entities, through certain suggestions and visualizations. No doubt one of the more fascinating and interesting experiments ever conducted in the field, the experiment was named after Philip Aylesford; a completely fictional entity that Owen and his team hoped to conjure up, and make contact with.

The series of experiments began in Toronto, Canada in 1972, and the first order of business was to create a biography for Mr. Aylesford, the same way an actor comes up with a backstory for a character he’s playing. Philip was an Englishman that lived in the 1600s, they decided, making sure to write up a life story that would be conducive to him not being at peace, in death.

The basic gist of the character’s story was that he was a married man who cheated on his wife with a gypsy woman. After being caught, his wife had the woman hanged for witchcraft, and in the wake of her murder, Philip was so grief-stricken that he took his own life. The group even went so far as to draw up a picture of the character (right), making him seem as real as possible, before they attempted to bring him to life.

Over the course of the next year, Owen and his Toronto Society for Psychical Research conducted extensive seances, surrounding themselves with objects from the time period in which Philip lived, and discussing details about his life. They would call out to Philip, engaging him in conversation, and their first contact with the fictional entity came in the form of a faint knocking sound on their table, which became their main means of communicating with him; one knock meant yes, two meant no.

It wasn’t long before Philip made his presence known in other ways, moving the table from side to side and at one point lifting it up off the ground. He would turn the lights in the room on and off, at the request of the group, and several members even reported hearing his voice when questions were asked of him. Philip was becoming more and more real with each session and he was almost always able to answer questions pertaining to his life, which matched up with the biography that was written up prior to contact being made.

Proof of the imaginary ghost was eventually made public with a live seance that was filmed for a television special, which saw Philip levitating the table and turning the lights on and off, just as he had done in the private sessions. Owen and his researchers had indeed proven that paranormal events could literally be created by the human mind, it seemed, though Philip never actually manifested himself in any sort of physical form, as they had hoped.

In later years, similar experiments successfully resulted in the creation of other paranormal entities, though table taps and strange electrical malfunctions were again the extent of the so-called contact.

Were The Philip Experiment and others like it merely hoaxes or do we truly have the power to create paranormal entities? And if the answer to that question is the latter choice, what does that say about the spirit world at large? Is there even such thing as ‘ghosts,’ or have those who have seen and heard them simply convinced themselves that they saw and heard things that weren’t really there? These are questions we will perhaps never know the answers to, and The Philip Experiment ultimately served to make a mystifying topic of discussion all the more fascinating and thought-provoking.

The Quiet Ones is of course only loosely based on The Philip Experiment, and we can be sure that an entity much less friendly than Philip Aylesford will be conjured up in it. Be sure to head out to your local theater this weekend, to see the horrifying results of the film’s inspired by true events experiment!

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• The Devastating True Story Behind <i>Into the Fire: The Lost Daughter</i>

The Devastating True Story Behind  Into the Fire: The Lost Daughter

T hirty-six years after she gave birth to a baby girl and placed her for adoption , a woman learned that the child had been missing for 21 years.

That’s not the plot of a mystery novel or a fictional film. It’s how the docu-series Into the Fire: The Lost Daughter begins. Out on Netflix Sep. 12, the two-part series follows Cathy Terkanian’s quest to find her daughter, Aundria Bowman. While she did not raise the child, Terkanian’s motherly instinct comes through in the series, in the way she connects with the friends of her daughter and the online sleuths who help her crack the case. As Terkanian sums up her motivation for the search, “I saw the fire, and I walked right in it.”

Here’s how Into the Fire: The Lost Daughter uncovers what happened to  Bowman and how her birth mother became involved in the search. 

The search for a lost daughter

Terkanian gave birth to Bowman in 1974 when she was 16. In the series, she makes it clear that she did not want to give her baby up, but that her mother persuaded her to do so, convincing her that at a young age, she couldn’t handle the responsibility . It was a closed adoption, and Terkanian didn’t try to look for the child, figuring that they might connect when she was older.

But she never got the chance. In April 2010, Terkanian received a letter from the adoption agency informing her that the child had gone missing when she was 14 years old, in 1989. An unidentified body had been found next to a cornfield, and the police needed Terkanian’s DNA to see if it was her daughter. 

It was not a match, but Terkanian became determined to find her daughter. She knew her daughter’s birth date, and that’s all she needed to bring up her file in the missing persons section of the Michigan state police department. She learned that her daughter was renamed Aundria Michelle Bowman, and that she lived in Hamilton, Michigan.

When she started a Facebook page called “Find Aundria Bowman,” she started getting flooded with messages of support and learned more about her daughter. She learned that the adoptive parents were Dennis and Brenda Bowman. She connected with Carl Koppelman, an accountant who searched for missing persons in his spare time and appears in the docu-series. Also featured is a child kidnapping survivor, Metta McLeod, who reached out to Terkanian because she believed that Dennis looked like the same guy who kidnapped her as a child—though it could never be proven—and Terkanian became like a mother to McLeod.

The docu-series depicts a troubling picture of life at home for Aundria. During filming, Terkanian connected in person for the first time with people she met online who knew Aundria growing up, who claimed her father would hit her. One describes being over for dinner one night and the parents eating hamburgers , while Aundria and her friend were given sandwiches with just ketchup, mustard, and relish inside. The friend recalled that when Aundria told her friend that was all she was allowed to eat, Dennis came over and hit her so hard she almost fell off of her chair.

How Aundria Bowman was found

Terkanian did important work to keep the case top of mind for law enforcement. But to figure out what happened to her, law enforcement had to solve another murder case first. 

A detective, Jon Smith, who was charged with investigating cold cases for the Norfolk, Virginia police department, re-examined the case of the 1980 rape and murder of a local woman named Kathleen Doyle, the wife of a U.S. navy pilot. There was a bedspread from the crime scene that had been preserved, and Dennis Bowman came up as a possible DNA match. After investigating his criminal history, Smith learned that Dennis did a two-week stint with the Navy in Norfolk. He went to visit Dennis, and afterwards, took a cup Dennis was drinking out of to do a DNA test. It matched the DNA on the bedspread. Dennis was arrested in 2019, and confessed to the murder.

At one point, Dennis requested to meet with his wife Brenda and footage of the conversation is in the docu-series. He told authorities to have their cameras rolling. “Aundria’s dead,” he tells her. “She’s been dead from the start.” 

Then he admits that he got into an argument with Aundria at home, and she tried to run away, saying she’d tell the police that he molested her. He says he hit her, and she fell backwards down the stairwell of their home. He said he cut her legs off, stuffed the remains in a barrel, and then put the barrel out with the neighbors’ trash cans.

But throughout the docu-series, Dennis changes his story in letters—read by an actor—and phone calls exchanged with Brenda while he was in prison. In one key phone call excerpted in the film, he tells Brenda that Aundria is actually buried in her backyard. The authorities sent a bulldozer to the property, and the bulldozer turned up the barrel that Dennis was talking about. The remains were found in a trash can of diapers and a Peppermint Pattie candy wrapper that had the date 1989, the year Aundria disappeared.

Ryan White, director of Into the Fire: The Lost Daughter , argues that Dennis only confessed to the murder when he was told he could serve his life sentences in Michigan—closer to his wife and daughter—rather than in Virginia. Early on in the series, there are snippets from police interviews with Dennis in which he vehemently denied killing Aundria. “I still am not sure that Dennis has ever told the full truth about what happened to Aundria,” White says.

On Feb. 7, 2022, Dennis was sentenced to second degree murder. He is now serving two life sentences for the murders of Aundria and Doyle in a Virginia prison.

The documentary ends with Terkanian hysterical about having to meet the child she gave birth to in the worst possible way—by receiving half of her cremated remains, while the other half went to her adoptive mother Brenda. (Brenda Bowman did not provide a comment for the series.)

The filmmakers hope that a docu-series on Dennis on a platform on a big platform like Netflix will inspire those pursuing cold cases to persevere and inspire anyone else who has encountered Dennis to come forward with their stories.

“It's very important that his face is out there,” White says. “We're hopeful that, in the documentary coming out, others might be able to connect some dots that have never been connected, just like Cathy did.”

Correction, Sep. 13

The original version of this story misstated the circumstances of Dennis Bowman's DNA test. An investigator tested a cup Bowman was drinking out of; he did not expressly agree to the test.

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• Cast & crew

The True Story of the Philadelphia Experiment

• Episode aired 2002

A dangerous experiment with time and space. A mystery more live than ever. A dangerous experiment with time and space. A mystery more live than ever. A dangerous experiment with time and space. A mystery more live than ever.

• Craig Constantine
• David Ackroyd
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• Robert Goerman

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• (archive footage)
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• 2002 (United States)
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