Dr Philip Zimbardo - The Stanford Prison Experiment

Full transcript: Dr Philip Zimbardo on London Real

0:00 Philip Zimbardo: We’d like to believe, “I’m not influenced by other people.” That’s a lie. Situations can corrupt almost all of us.

Brian Rose: You decided to cook up the Stanford Prison Experiment.

Philip Zimbardo: The key to the study is flipping a coin: you’re a guard, you’re a prisoner, you’re a guard, you’re a prisoner. I wanted bright, intelligent college students. They’re smart; they should be able to figure out what’s happening. In 36 hours the first prisoner had an emotional breakdown. Now one of the guards said, “These are dangerous prisoners. We’re going to have to show them who’s boss.” Each day a little worse. In five days, five prisoners had emotional breakdowns. I got corrupted. It’s out of control now. I made a big mistake. So the power of the situation gets the majority of people to do things that go against their conscience. Say to yourself: what do I have to do to be a good person? What am I going to do to make my world better?

1:21 [London Real promo removed]

3:38 Brian Rose: Take 24 students at random from Stanford University in 1971. Half become prisoners, half become guards. What happens over the next seven days? All hell breaks loose. We find that normal humans, nice university students, turn into prison guards that terrorise their victims, humiliate them, sleep-deprive them, mock them sexually, and it all goes wrong. This is the famous Stanford Prison Experiment conducted by Philip Zimbardo. It’s a fascinating look into how, as humans, we all have evil inside of us, and put in the wrong situation and given certain types of identities, we will all do things that are potentially very dangerous. Knowing that we have this evil inside us can make us more powerful, and that’s what Zimbardo talks about. He’s 85 years old, it’s his birthday on this show, and it was amazing having him here to talk about his experiments and his book The Lucifer Effect. I think we can learn a lot about ourselves by engaging with his teachings and with this experiment. So sit back and relax; you’re really going to enjoy this show.

4:48 [London Real promo removed]

6:06 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Professor Philip Zimbardo, the American psychologist and professor emeritus at Stanford University, famous for being the creator of the legendary Stanford Prison Experiment. You’ve spent the last 50 years teaching and studying psychology, and you run the non-profit organisation the Heroic Imagination Project, which teaches people to make heroic choices in their everyday lives. You’ve written over 600 publications and 60 books, including The Lucifer Effect: How Good People Turn Evil, and Shyness: What It Is, What to Do About It. And it’s your birthday. Happy birthday.

Philip Zimbardo: Thank you so much, Brian.

Brian Rose: Welcome to London Real.

Philip Zimbardo: I’m happy to be here. Yes, it’s my 85th birthday. It’s the first time I’ve given an interview of any kind on any birthday, but this is really special for me.

Brian Rose: I hope you like the cake we got you.

Philip Zimbardo: Yes, I’m eagerly waiting for the end of our interview so we can jump into it. It looks like a beautiful coffee cake.

Brian Rose: London. What is your relationship like with this city? What’s it like when you’re flying into Heathrow, and what memories does it bring back for you?

Philip Zimbardo: I’ve been coming to London for more than 20 years. I’ve come every two years for the last 16 years, because there’s a wonderful programme created by a Scottish woman, Cara Flanagan. They bring 4,000 high school kids from all over the UK, Ireland, Wales and Scotland to London for one day to hear teachers talk about the exams and term papers. Typically a British speaker talks in the morning, and then in the afternoon my wife, Christina Maslach, and I talk about our research: the prison study, the research I’ve done on shyness, new research on time perspective, and now what I’m doing, which is called Man, Interrupted, about how boys are living in a video, virtual reality. My wife is the queen of burnout, so she tells them how she went from being the heroine of the prison study to studying prison guards and people who work as poverty lawyers, and how many of them used the term “burned out” for giving too much. She’s the one who studied the mismatch between people and jobs and has come up with great solutions. So we’ve been doing that for 16 years. We come every second year, and it’s exciting, so we’ve got to know London.

Brian Rose: And she’s the woman that made you stop the prison experiment, and you married her the next year?

Philip Zimbardo: She is the heroine, and we got married the next year, which is 45 years ago.

Brian Rose: Well, congratulations.

8:45 We’re obviously going to talk about that experiment, but I wanted to talk about you and where you grew up, what that was like and how it might have affected your later research.

Philip Zimbardo: I grew up in poverty, serious poverty. My parents were second-generation Sicilian immigrants. I’m 100% Sicilian. My great-grandparents on one side came from near Palermo, and my other grandparents came from a town near Catania. One was a barber, one was a shoemaker, and they were totally uneducated. In those days, and even recently, in Sicily there was no value placed on education because of the Mafia influence. When I talk to kids there I say the only way I differ from my grandparents is that I got educated, and education is the way out of poverty. It’s the only way you gain any status in the world. And the kids would say, “Hey, it doesn’t matter what you know, it only matters who you know.” This is the idea of connections. I said that used to be true, but it’s not going to be true any more, because you’re competing with young people around the world who are getting more and more educated.

So I started a foundation to send high school kids to college. Teachers pick the dozen smartest kids, typically six boys and six girls, from my grandparents’ town, called Cammarata. It’s in the mountains near Palermo. We have a big ceremony at City Hall, we give them each a thousand euros and certificates, and it’s a big honour for their parents. Then we follow them up every year just to be sure they’re going to school. Most of them have been very successful. Most of them graduated; they’re in business, they’re starting businesses. Education is being embraced more and more in Sicily now.

Brian Rose: And you’re an example of that when you go to see students.

Philip Zimbardo: Yes. I say I was a poor kid. My father dropped out of school in primary school. The notion was that you had to stay in school until 16, and then you could quit, and my father’s thinking was that you go to work. I loved school, because it was clear to me that school was the way out of poverty. When I graduated high school my father said, “Okay, now you’ve got to go to work.” I said, “No, Dad, it doesn’t make sense. If I can get a college degree I’ll make more money.” He said, “Okay, but if you’re not bringing in money, you have to support yourself.” So I worked every night at the St James Theatre on Broadway as a concession boy, checking hats and coats, selling programmes of the show, records and things. That was in the fifties.

Brian Rose: And what was the Bronx like in the thirties and forties?

Philip Zimbardo: It was a ghetto, a ghetto of immigrant children from all over. It was all we knew, so for us it was exciting, because it was a time when kids lived on the street. Any time of day or night you could go down and there’d be some kids there, and it was your playground. We played stickball with a broomstick and a Spalding ball, we played games in the street. Boys played together, girls played together, and your mother would call you from the window, “Philip, come up for dinner,” and you went up and came back down as quickly as you could. There was no television then, but you would listen to The Shadow or Captain Marvel on the radio, and then you came back down. So it was an exciting time.

The only thing that was terrible, and it’s true of ghettos anywhere in the world, is that there are always young men who are there to tempt kids to do criminal things for money: to break into a store at night through the transom, to take a package from here to there, and you knew it was narcotics, or to get girls to sell their bodies. I remember the standard fee was ten dollars, and ten dollars in the forties and fifties was an enormous amount of money. I had friends who gave in to temptation, and some of them got caught by narcs and went to prison, and their whole life was ruined. Other friends and I didn’t. So as a little kid I was asking a basic psychological question: what’s the difference between kids who give in to temptation, who are seduced by money, and kids who can resist? I didn’t know how to answer it. The simple answer I gave at the time was that it had everything to do with a mother who was loving and caring but also had a moral compass: this is bad, this is good, don’t do this, do this, and ultimately, don’t do anything that brings shame to your family. That was the guiding principle. Then when I became a psychologist, it turned out there was a whole area of understanding the nature of temptation.

Brian Rose: So does it have anything to do with upbringing and moral code, or is it about the environment?

Philip Zimbardo: It is about the environment. But I’m saying that even in the same environment, and in all the research we did later on situational forces, not everybody gets seduced and not everybody blindly obeys authority. It’s a majority. The power of the situation gets the majority of people to do things that go against their conscience. So for me nurture is more powerful than nature, but nevertheless there are kids whom nature gives a push in a good direction or a bad direction.

14:39 Brian Rose: And you also felt a lot of racism back in the day. People forget that Italian immigrants were the lowest of the low at one point.

Philip Zimbardo: Yes. Now being Italian is celebrated in America. But America is a land of immigrants; everybody in America is an immigrant except for the Native American Indians, who live on reservations in terrible conditions. Each group that came in, I think first the Germans, then the Irish and the Italians, and later the migration of black people from the South to the North after the Second World War, was discriminated against. One of the largest groups of people lynched in the South were Italians. I won’t go in too deep, but there were Italian Americans who were lynched, allegedly for a crime, and there was no evidence for it. They were put in jail for trial, and people came, took them out of the jail and lynched them. I’m pretty sure it was nine men in a single lynching.

Brian Rose: The single biggest one. And you felt that growing up in the Bronx as well?

Philip Zimbardo: We always felt it. Where we lived there were these mini ghettos, meaning everybody on this street was Italian, around the corner on Beck Street everybody was Jewish, up the corner on 151st Street everybody was Irish, and you met in the corner grocery store, the bodega, or the candy store. For me it was exciting; it was vibrant. Nobody discriminated against each other when you were in that neighbourhood, but you never left the neighbourhood. In those days the New York subway was five cents, and for five cents you could travel the whole day. We used to just get on the train and go all the way to Coney Island to go to the beach, and it cost five cents.

16:55 Brian Rose: I want to talk about the experiment, but I also want to ask you: if you look back at your life in the fifties and sixties, what were the questions you were asking yourself that led you up to doing this famous experiment at Stanford?

Philip Zimbardo: I was always looking at why people did evil. Instead of focusing only on the kids who gave in or not, I looked at the guys who corrupted kids. And I grew up in the Second World War. If I was in Germany, would I have become a Hitler Youth? When you look at these things, what they did to Jews was so repulsive. I didn’t mention earlier that there were always Jewish kids, and we envied them because they were always the smartest. Well, they really weren’t always the smartest; they simply worked hard. Their parents insisted that they do their homework. That was a value for them, and it was not a value for the Irish or the Italians. In my neighbourhood I had Armenian friends, Jewish friends, black friends. Our gang had one or two of each.

So I was curious about people whose career was doing bad things, and curious about Hitler. How could he see the world in this distorted way? And more than that, how could he create a system which got so many people not only to believe in him but to be willing to do whatever he said? He said Jews are inferior, Jews have to be segregated, Jews have to be sent to concentration camps, Jews have to be cremated. And you’d see pictures on the news of kids like me marching in parades, looking like Hitler, the Hitler Youth.

Brian Rose: Did this cause you to investigate the electric shock test? This was before your Stanford Prison Experiment.

Philip Zimbardo: What I did first was to ask: how could it be that someone like me could knowingly harm somebody who was also like me? So I first did research on what I call deindividuation: what happens when you take away somebody’s identity. This is what being in the military is. Look at a military parade: everybody is identical. In America soldiers are called GIs, and GI means government issue. You’re not even a person; you’re the issue of the government.

I was teaching at New York University, and all students in my class had to take part in three or four experiments as part of the course. Women came to my laboratory in groups of four at a time, and we said we were interested in how people perform under stress: when you’re stressed, does that reduce your creativity? I said to the four, “You’re going to meet two women, other students, who are trying to be creative under stress. Your job is to stress them.” How? “You’re going to give them electric shocks.” At various times you press a button, and you can hold your finger down as long as you want, up to five seconds. She and I would be behind the screen, she would try to ignore the shock, and I would ask her questions about creativity. The key is that half of the participants we put in hoods, literally like Ku Klux Klan hoods with little eye slits, and we took away their names: one, two, three, four.

Brian Rose: You were always a little crazy.

Philip Zimbardo: Yes. And we compared them to other women whom we made to feel special. They had name tags: Marcella Weinstein, Jeannie Meyers. Everything else was the same: you’re going to give electric shocks to somebody trying to be creative. Of course the women behind the screen with me were models; they pretended to be shocked. What happened was simply that where we took away your identity and put you in a position where you were permitted to harm someone, they gave twice as much shock. They held their finger down twice as long, and they did it for the entire ten minutes, compared with the women we made to feel special. It makes you think about Mardi Gras, situations in which people change their identity, and when they do they can begin to do things they never could have thought of before. But it’s also the situation. At Mardi Gras it’s having fun, so people get drunk and think, “I can have random sex.” But in the military, in war, I put you in a uniform. It’s just like being put in the hood of the Ku Klux Klan. I cover your identity, and now you can do things you would never imagine doing under normal circumstances.

Brian Rose: Which is acts of violence.

Philip Zimbardo: Yes, acts of dehumanisation.

22:16 Brian Rose: So the seeds of the Stanford Prison Experiment were planted when you were doing research there.

Philip Zimbardo: Yes. And the other thing goes back to the Bronx. In 1949 and 1950 I went to a school called James Monroe, after one of the early presidents of the United States, and sitting next to me was a little Jewish kid named Stanley Milgram. As a kid he was saying, “Could the Holocaust happen in America? Could my family be sent to a concentration camp?” Other kids said, “Stanley, don’t be stupid, we’re not that kind of people.” I can still hear his voice saying, “How do you know what you would do until you’re in the situation? I bet they thought the same thing when they saw other kids doing bad things.”

Then in 1962 and 1963 he devised the most dramatic unethical study ever done, in which men aged 20 to 50, not students, were put in a situation where they were encouraged to give electric shocks to someone else who was trying to memorise information. The cover story, the big lie, was that we want to see if punishment improves memory as well as reward. In front of the teacher was a big shock generator with 30 switches, and the authority was in a white lab coat. He was really a high school biology teacher, but he had the white lab coat. He tells you, the teacher, that your job is to deliver shocks of increasing intensity each time your student makes a mistake. It begins with 15 volts, and there’s no reaction, then 30, 45 and so forth. When it gets to a hundred, the learner begins to yell and scream, “Hey, this is too much.” As it gets higher the learner says, “I have a heart condition, I don’t want to go on.” In every case people are basically good: they turn to the experimenter in the white lab coat and say, “I don’t really want to go on. I don’t want to harm an innocent person.” And he says, “I’m sorry, you have a contract, you took your money,” which was five dollars in those days, “you must go on.”

So people dissent verbally, but the important thing is what they do behaviourally. 65% of these men went all the way to 450 volts. At 375 volts there’s a scream and then silence, and you can hear people say, “Hey, are you okay?” into the silence. At that point, if you step back, you’re a grown man and you’re supposed to be helping improve somebody’s memory, and he’s unconscious. Everybody should quit at least then. And everybody who gets to 350 goes all the way to the end. The most dramatic thing is that before Milgram began his study he interviewed 40 psychiatrists at the Yale Medical School and asked what percentage of American citizens would go to 450 volts. They said on average only 1%, the sadistic ones. In fact it wasn’t 1%, it was 65%.

Brian Rose: What does that say about humanity?

Philip Zimbardo: It says we have less free will than we believe. We’d like to believe, “My decisions come from within, from inside of me. I’m not influenced by other people. I’m not influenced by mass media.” But in fact that’s a lie. Who we are is in part what we are surrounded by. Who we are is what our friends think, typically what politicians say, what the anchors of the TV programmes we watch say. In America, if you watch Fox News, the more you watch it, the more right-wing Republican you’ll be. If you watch other kinds of news, you’re less likely to be. You begin to watch something that fits some of your beliefs, and suddenly their views become yours.

Brian Rose: And we’re much more capable of evil deeds. Most people walk around and think they are not evil.

Philip Zimbardo: Most people think they’re good, and in fact they are. I focus on nurture rather than nature, especially when I talk with young kids. Most people are really good. They’re kind; they want the best for other people. But then you put them in poverty, and they see the income inequality. Why can’t my father get a job, when this kid’s father, who’s less smart than my father, has a great job? He has a connection. For a lot of us the ugly sins are jealousy and envy, rather than saying, “If somebody’s got something good, I should figure out how they got that job.” For me it was: I don’t need any of that, all I need is a good education. That drove me not only to get educated but to love school, to love doing homework, to be teacher’s pet from kindergarten through graduate school.

Brian Rose: Two things I noticed about this shock experiment. One is the incremental change. You don’t ask anyone to start at 400 volts.

Philip Zimbardo: No, nobody would.

Brian Rose: It’s incremental, and you could say this was the same as the rise of the Nazi Party. And you had an authority figure that removed your responsibility a little bit.

Philip Zimbardo: Yes. He’s telling you what to do, but really this authority is taking away your moral conscience. Why are you doing it? He told me to do it. Now, you could quit at any time, obviously. The other thing about Milgram’s experiment is that it was the first one publicly judged to be unethical. If you read the article he wrote, you would not be concerned at all. It’s only because he was the first researcher to make a film. He actually wanted to be a documentary filmmaker, so he made a film called Obedience, and you could see the anguish in the people saying, “Come on, please get it right, please get it right,” and then they get it wrong, and there’s the yelling and screaming, and you could see the anguish as they turn to the experimenter and say, “I really don’t want to go on,” and he says, “You must go on.”

Brian Rose: So the shocks were real?

Philip Zimbardo: No, the shocks were not real. That’s the important thing. The person being shocked, your student, was a confederate who was actually in another room, pretending. It was a script, and to keep everything the same there was a recording of the yelling and so forth. At the end of the experiment you were introduced to the man, and he said, “Oh, you weren’t shocking me,” but you still felt guilt, because you thought he was getting shocked and you kept doing it. And because Milgram filmed it, the wonderful power of multimedia, it was deemed to be the first study that was considered massively unethical.

29:36 Brian Rose: So you saw this and thought, I want to do something just like it, and film it.

Philip Zimbardo: Again, Stanley and I were friends. We were in the same class in high school.

Brian Rose: That’s a weird coincidence.

Philip Zimbardo: We were literally together in 1949 and 1950. And I talked to him after he did his research. He actually went to Yale, where I had been a graduate student, just after I had left to go to NYU, and he did his research at Yale. For your audience: NYU and Yale are on the east coast of America, and Stanford, where I taught and did the prison study, is on the west coast. It’s 3,000 miles.

Brian Rose: Explain the differences between those two coasts.

Philip Zimbardo: Oh, they’re enormous. In fact, social movements in America began around San Francisco. Rock music began around San Francisco. This is a Jerry Garcia tie, the Grateful Dead. Almost all American rock groups started there. What happened is that people could go west, and when you go west you don’t have family, you don’t have grandparents, you don’t have tradition. So people coming to the San Francisco area were not bound by tradition, by “this is the way we do it here”, so people could create, and they did. The hippie movement was in San Francisco. There would be rock concerts in the park for free. I got there in 1968, and 1967 was the Summer of Love, this whole idea of caring and sharing and daring. So it was an exciting place to be. It’s less so now, because it’s a high-tech area and it’s more traditional.

Brian Rose: And the anti-Vietnam War movement almost started in the Bay Area, Haight-Ashbury, gay rights, women’s rights. You were in the middle of it. Was that an intentional choice, to go west?

Philip Zimbardo: The intentional choice was that Stanford offered me a great job. It’s a great school. If you’re a professor you can apply for a job, and they take very few people, but I had a reputation for being a really good teacher, I loved to teach, and even though I had only been out of graduate school eight years I’d done a lot of research and published. As an academic it’s clear: publish or perish. When you do something you don’t just talk about it at conferences, which I did, you have to publish. So whenever I did something I talked about it at a conference and then I published it. So Stanford said, “Come here, New York kid.”

32:46 Brian Rose: How long were you at Stanford until you decided to cook up the prison experiment?

Philip Zimbardo: I got there in 1968 and I did the study in 1971. Milgram’s study was all about an individual authority telling you to do something wrong, and I said there aren’t many examples like that. Maybe in the military a sergeant says, “Take that hill,” or, “Kill this traitor.” But usually we’re in a business, we’re in a corporation, we’re in a gang, and no one person tells you to do this. Everybody else is doing it, so you see what everybody else is doing. So I wanted a situation where it was not an individual authority telling you or showing you what to do. You’re playing a role: you’re the foreman, you’re the manager, and in that role there are role expectations. When you play this role, this is what you should be doing. That’s what I wanted to study.

In Milgram’s study it was men aged 20 to 50. He had one group of women, who behaved the same as the men, meaning two out of every three gave the full shock. But I wanted bright, intelligent college students.

Brian Rose: Why? Because they’re untainted?

Philip Zimbardo: More untainted, but also they’re smart. They should be able to figure out what’s happening and refuse.

Brian Rose: But you knew they wouldn’t.

Philip Zimbardo: I didn’t know. I really didn’t at the beginning. Also, it’s 1970 and 1971. A lot of these kids are anti-war activists, the civil rights movement was under way, and all of them hate police, because when students were revolting on campus against the war, the university administration would often bring police onto campus. In one place in Ohio called Kent State, the National Guard actually shot and killed students who were protesting, which was unheard of. So students hated cops and hated prison guards. When we began the study, nobody wanted to be a guard.

Brian Rose: How many students were there?

Philip Zimbardo: There were 24. We put an ad in the Palo Alto newspaper saying, “Male college students wanted for a study of prison life, to begin on August 14th. It will go one to two weeks, and you’ll get $15 a day.” We did it at that time because summer schools were ending and I knew students had two weeks free before starting school in September and could use some money. So we got a lot of students from all over the country. They were not mostly Stanford students. In fact two of the guards were brothers who had been at Stanford in summer school.

Brian Rose: And you did psychological profiles?

Philip Zimbardo: Personality tests, psychological profiles, physical profiles. We picked two dozen who were psychologically normal and physically healthy. And then the key to the study is that it’s like flipping a coin: you’re a guard, you’re a prisoner, you’re a guard, you’re a prisoner. Then we validated that by putting the guards in military uniforms with symbols of power: billy clubs, handcuffs, whistles. And an idea I got from the film Cool Hand Luke with Paul Newman: I put them in silver reflecting sunglasses. I should have brought a pair for the audience. That meant people couldn’t see their eyes, so there’s a kind of deindividuation.

Brian Rose: Had you researched each one of these aspects, or did you just know this would separate them from their individuality?

Philip Zimbardo: From their identity, yes. And for the prisoners we wanted a different kind of uniform, a simple smock, and we took away their names. They were a number, actually Boy Scout numbers we sewed on, and they became the number. They had to remember their number and all the other prisoners by number, and the guards referred to them by number: 8612, 1037, 5704. They became a number rather than a person, and that’s really critical, even before the study evolved. And in those days in the seventies everybody had long hair, like the musical Hair. Typically, in the military, you’d shave their heads, but instead we put women’s nylon stocking caps on them, so now they all looked the same.

Brian Rose: And you gave them a smock and no underwear as well, which again dehumanises them.

Philip Zimbardo: Dehumanises, but also feminises them, literally. If you bend over, your backside is sticking out. So we put a lot of time into this. It was me, two graduate students and one undergraduate; that was my staff. The administration had to approve the study, and they did. It was kids playing cops and robbers in an experiment. Although it was 1971, Stanford University had just developed a human subjects research committee, so I presented what we were going to do and why we were doing it, because nobody had ever done anything exactly like this. I said we’re going to be videotaping, and any one of your staff can come down and observe what’s happening. They came down the first day, and on the first day nothing was happening.

Brian Rose: And you videotaped it. Why did you know that was important? Back then that was hard to do.

Philip Zimbardo: We could only afford 13 hours, because in those days it was one-inch Ampex tapes and it cost $100 to develop them. But I knew we wanted to see the progressive change over time. Milgram’s study, and most research, is one hour or less. Here it’s 24/7. There are three prisoners in each of three cells, so nine prisoners at any one time, and three guards working eight-hour shifts one after another. Then we had replacement guards and replacement prisoners.

39:04 Brian Rose: And you physically arrested the students as well, with the local police.

Philip Zimbardo: I’m glad you remember that, because for me that was the key to making the study work instantly. I’m a bit of a Hollywood showman. An alternative career would have been nice; I think a Clint Eastwood type. What I knew was this: all the kids came down and signed an informed consent saying, if you’re a prisoner you’ll have a minimally adequate diet and you’ll be under stress, but any time you can’t handle it, all you have to do is tell the experimenter, “I quit the experiment.” They all signed it, so they all knew it was an experiment. Then we said we were going to randomly assign half of you to be guards and half to be prisoners, whether or not you want to be that. But I knew that if they came down and said, “Okay, I’m here for the experiment,” if they voluntarily gave up their freedom to be prisoners, they had the power to take it back.

So I worked with the Palo Alto Police Department. They had real policemen in a real police car go to the dorms or homes and make a very realistic arrest. “Are you Billy Johnson?” Or if they came to the home and the mother answered: “I’m here to arrest Billy Johnson for violation of Penal Code 459, burglary, breaking and entering.” They read the kid his rights, put handcuffs on him, put him in a squad car with the sirens wailing, brought him to the real jail, fingerprinted him, took a picture and put him in a jail cell. Even though the kids knew this must be related to the prison study, the police acted the role. They said, “You kids think everything’s a joke. You’ll see when you’re stuck here.”

Brian Rose: You shocked them, even though they knew it was an experiment.

Philip Zimbardo: They knew it was an experiment, but the police were doing everything they’d seen in the movies done to criminals.

Brian Rose: How did you get the police on board? Did you buy them dinner, tickets to a show?

Philip Zimbardo: Because the police would be called on campus to quell student anti-war riots, there was a lot of hostility between the police and the students, town-gown hostility. So I organised a programme to create positive relationships. I had policemen come to the dormitory where I was a faculty member and eat with students, and students rode around in squad cars. There was a new police chief who said, “I like what you’re doing. Any time I can do you a favour.” I said, “Well, we’re thinking of doing this study, and I’d like to have some of your rookies play the role of prisoners so they get a sense of what it’s like to be a prisoner.” He said it was a great idea. So I said it’s going to begin on Sunday, August 14th, and I need a squad car with one or two policemen.

I go down on Sunday morning, August 14th, and there’s a sergeant. I said the captain had arranged it, and he said he didn’t have any orders. Of course, coming from the Bronx, I never trust anybody, so I had brought along a cameraman from the local TV station to film this, because I thought, here’s this dramatic thing. Just then two cops come in and say, “Sarge, we’re off duty, we’re going home.” I said, “Gee, it’s too bad, because we’re about to film an arrest.” I still remember one of the cops took out a comb and combed his hair, and I thought, we’re home free. So they did the arrests, and that jump-started the study. Then very quickly each group got into the role.

43:28 Brian Rose: And the plan was twelve guards and twelve prisoners, and you were going to watch them for a week or two and see what happened.

Philip Zimbardo: Initially we were going to go for two weeks. It was exploration. That’s a long time, because it’s 24/7. At any time one of the four of us is asleep. And we made the simulation realistic. We had parole board hearings headed by an ex-convict, Carlo Prescott. We had parents come down on visiting day, we had a prison chaplain come down to interview the kids, we had policemen coming, so things were happening all the time. And then in 36 hours the first prisoner, 8612, Doug Korpi, had an emotional breakdown, because he had been the ringleader of the opposition of prisoners against the guards, and the guards abused him, stripped him naked and put him in solitary confinement in a closet. The rule was he could only be in there for an hour, but they kept him in hour after hour.

But the first 24 hours were very quiet, nothing happened, because the guards didn’t even want to be guards. Nobody wanted to be a guard, because that was a bad thing. They were embarrassed being in a military uniform. You can hear it on the videotapes; they’re saying, “Come on guys, take this seriously. This is not an experiment, this is a prison.” But then on the morning of the second day, 8612 and some other prisoners rebelled. They ripped off their numbers, locked themselves in their cell and started cursing the guards.

Brian Rose: Were they really mad?

Philip Zimbardo: They were angry at having this lowly position. The guards came to me and said, “What are we going to do?” I said, “It’s your prison, what do you want to do?” They said, “We need reinforcements.” So all twelve guards came at once, broke down the door, dragged the prisoners out, stripped all the prisoners naked, put some in solitary confinement and tied some of them up.

Brian Rose: And it was their decision to strip them?

Philip Zimbardo: It was their decision, because they got angry. The prisoners, in the security of their cells, were yelling at the guards, “You punk, when I get out I’m going to kick your ass,” a big prisoner saying that to a little guard. Now two things happened. One of the guards said, “These are dangerous prisoners. We’re going to have to show them who’s boss.” After that time, no one used the word experiment. Remember, all they had to do was say, “I quit the experiment.” Instead they began having nervous breakdowns, crying, screaming, out of control, and that became the way you got out of the study. So in five days, in something everybody knew was an experiment, five normal, healthy prisoners had emotional breakdowns. It was astounding. I couldn’t believe it. I thought they were faking, I thought they were acting, but it was clear; it was one after another after another.

Brian Rose: And they had forgotten they were in an experiment as well.

Philip Zimbardo: All they had to do was say, “I quit the experiment.” They didn’t. They had become the prisoners, and the guards had become guards. Once they said, “This is a dangerous prisoner,” that was the first act of dehumanisation.

46:44 Brian Rose: This is not a person any more. It’s us against them.

Philip Zimbardo: Yes, and then it’s only about power and safety. Evil is the intentional use of power to control other people, to dominate, and you have to constantly show that you have power and they have none. So it’s asking them to do more and more inhumane things, more and more horrible things. Do push-ups. Okay, that’s not so bad. Then you get his buddy to step on you or sit on you while you’re doing push-ups, so you get crushed into the ground. You line up, and one guard would tell a prisoner, “Tell him he’s an asshole. Spit in his face.” But it was gradual. Each day it was more and more extreme.

Brian Rose: And it escalated. Why would it escalate?

Philip Zimbardo: Because you have to keep showing more and more dominance, or a new version of it. The other thing is that afterwards some of the guards said, “We had eight hours to kill and it was really boring.” They could have stayed in the guards’ quarters and played cards. Nobody said you have to do anything other than be there and not let the prisoners escape. But they said the prisoners became their playthings. “We were like puppet masters and they were our puppets.” That’s exactly what one of the guards said. “We were getting our jollies” was the phrase they used, by getting them to do whatever they wanted. Each day they’d think of something new; they didn’t want to do the same old thing, so they wanted to be creative. In fact the phrase I use is that they were creatively evil: what can I do that nobody’s thought about?

For example, in the last days they said, “Okay, you guys are female camels, bend over.” Remember, they have no underpants, so when they bend over their backside is showing. “You guys get behind them. Now we want you to hump them.” And the guards are laughing, because camels have a hump, but hump also means sodomy. In an experiment at Stanford University, college students who know it’s an experiment are simulating sodomy. We saw this some years later in Abu Ghraib; they did the same thing. Abu Ghraib in 2004 was my study on steroids, but instead of going for only a week, it was every night for three months.

Brian Rose: Why does it go so bad so quickly, and why does it go sexual?

Philip Zimbardo: I think it always goes sexual, because people have a sexual identity. You’re a man, you’re a college student, you want to be vibrant, masculine, and one of the worst things you can do is take away somebody’s masculinity. You’re not a man, you’re a camel, you’re bending over, and somebody like you is humping you. They didn’t actually do it, but they were simulating it. And when the prisoners were stripped naked, the guards would make fun of their small penises. There are endless ways to insult and degrade somebody using sexual terms and sexual activities.

49:57 Brian Rose: I want to get to Abu Ghraib, because it’s a fascinating parallel. What’s going on with you this whole time? You’re watching it all. Are you the prison official, or are you just observing?

Philip Zimbardo: I made a big mistake. I’m the senior psychologist. Working with me are two graduate students and one undergraduate, so I’m the only real adult, and I should have just been the researcher, which is how I started out. But over time we all took roles. The undergraduate, David Jaffe, was the warden. The graduate students, Craig Haney and Curt Banks, were my lieutenants. And I took the role of superintendent of the prison, meaning I had a door which said “Superintendent Zimbardo”. Once I did that, that was a huge mistake. I should have had somebody else do it, but we didn’t have money to hire an actor, and no professor wanted to do it.

Brian Rose: And you probably wanted to be the superintendent a little bit.

Philip Zimbardo: Maybe a little bit, I don’t know. But it was a mistake, because once I was the superintendent I became part of the situation, and I got corrupted. For example, one of the rules was that on visiting days any prisoner who had parents, friends or relatives in the area could have them visit on two different nights. Before they went in they had to meet with the warden, who would tell them how their prisoner son or boyfriend was doing, and before they left they had to meet with the superintendent.

So this is Wednesday, and the study started on Sunday. A mother and father come to see me, and the mother immediately says, “I don’t mean to make trouble, sir, but I’ve never seen my son looking so terrible.” Now I’m really the high school principal, and the parents have come because the teacher has slapped the kid. I said, “What seems to be your son’s problem?” It’s so vivid in my mind, even though it’s almost fifty years ago. She says, “He looks so tired. He’s got bags under his eyes. He’s not sleeping.” I said, “Does your son have insomnia?” So now I’m making it about the individual: what’s wrong with your son? She says, “No, they wake him up at all hours of the night.” I said, “Of course, we have to be sure nobody’s escaped.” I’m justifying it. Then she says once again, “Well, I don’t mean to make trouble,” and at that moment I thought, she’s going to go to the dean, she’s going to blow the whistle. What am I going to do? In a split second I became something I couldn’t imagine in me. I turned to the father and said, “Don’t you think your son can handle it?” And he starts saying, “Oh yeah, he’s tough.” I stand up, I shake his hand and say, “Yes, I think he’s a real man.” We shake hands, and he turns to his wife: “Come on, honey, we’ll be back next week.”

That night their son had a nervous breakdown. In fact she sent me a letter, which I have in my book The Lucifer Effect, saying, “I didn’t mean to make trouble, and I think what you’re doing is interesting, however I think I’m going to ask my son to leave.” Any parent could have said, “I’ll give my kid 15 bucks a day not to be in this thing.” But there’s a case where I changed. I became something I hate: a sexist. I was using masculinity, me and the dad against the mother. The father saw the same kid looking terrible, looking sad, and I was able to undercut that simply by saying, “Don’t you think your son can take it?” What I was really saying was, “Don’t you think you could take it?”

53:49 Brian Rose: I want to get to the masculinity material later. How did you stop the study, or why did you stop it? And what would have happened if it had continued for seven more days?

Philip Zimbardo: First of all, it could not have continued seven more days, because it was out of control. When I say it’s 24/7, it means something is happening all the time, and somebody has to sleep, so it’s really only three people most of the time. Somebody’s doing videotaping, somebody has to go and get food, somebody has to take the kids who break down to Student Health, somebody has to greet the parents. There are endless jobs being done all the time, and most of it falls on me. Then on Wednesday Craig Haney, my chief graduate student, has to leave because there’s a family emergency, so now it’s three people working 24/7. It was overwhelming, and most of it obviously fell on me.

Brian Rose: So you’re sleep-deprived too.

Philip Zimbardo: I’m sleeping on a couch in my office. I never leave that place. I’m trapped in the power of my own situation. I think I probably would have gone to Sunday, a week after it started, but I know I could not have gone on physically or psychologically beyond that. Also, because the guards systematically escalated their abuse of the prisoners, it’s not clear what they could have done beyond simulating sodomy. What would week two be? So I decided it couldn’t go on. I would have gone to Sunday and said the experiment’s over. But fortunately I ended it on Friday, and here is the real reason.

My girlfriend, Christina Maslach, had been a graduate student at Stanford. She had graduated and was going to be a professor at Berkeley, the University of California, near San Francisco. She was in the library at Stanford, and she contacted me and said, “Why don’t we have dinner?” I said, “Great. Why don’t you come down and pick me up at ten o’clock, after the night shift.” I had a schedule: eight o’clock breakfast, parole board hearings, lunchtime, visiting hours, and at ten o’clock the toilet run. That meant ten o’clock was the last time the prisoners could go to a real toilet. After that they had to urinate and defecate in a bucket in the cell, which they hated, because it stank out the whole prison. The guards used that as the last opportunity each day to abuse the prisoners. They lined them up against the wall and put paper bags over their heads, the kind used for rubbish; that was their idea. And again this was replicated in Abu Ghraib prison: bags over the head. They chained their legs one to another, pushed them, yelled at them, cursed them. The toilet was around the corner, but they put them in a lift, took them up a floor, walked them through the boiler room. They wanted to confuse them, so that if anyone tried to escape they wouldn’t have a clear idea of how to get out.

So Christina comes down, I’m wrapping things up, and I say, “Hi Chris, look at this.” You could look through a peephole, but you could also see it on a video camera. She sees all these things happening, and she begins to tear up.

She says, “I can’t look at this, it’s horrible.” I said, “What do you mean?” She runs out, I run after her, and we have a big argument outside the building; the prison was in the basement. I won’t go through all the details, but she says, “It’s horrible what you’re doing to those boys. They’re not prisoners, they’re boys, and you are harming them.” Not physically, but I was allowing people who were taking my orders to harm them, and worse, psychologically. I started arguing. I said, “This is the power of the situation. Nobody has seen this. Don’t you see the drama? What kind of psychologist are you?”

And then she said, “You have been changed by the power of the situation. I’ve known you for a long time,” we had known each other a few years. “You love students. You have a reputation for being one of the most caring professors. How could you see college students suffering, having breakdowns, and not want to stop it?” I was still arguing, and then she said, because we had just moved in together and were thinking that if living together worked we’d get married, “If this is the real you, I don’t think I want to have any more relationship with you.” That’s really heroic. She was willing to give up a relationship with somebody she cared for, a professor at Stanford. That was a slap in the face. It was like shaking me out of a nightmare: come on, wake up, wake up. I said, “Oh my God, you’re right. How could I have done that?”

59:18 We went to dinner. It was about eleven o’clock at night, and I said, “I’m going to end the study tomorrow morning.” That’s not so easy to do, because you have to call all the prisoners who had broken down, all the guards on all the shifts, and get the money from the bank to pay each of them what they had earned. We also wanted to do, and we did, a psychological debriefing. We spent two hours with all the prisoners, the ones who had been released and the ones who stayed, talking about what we did and why we did it, and then with all the guards separately, while the prisoners changed out of their uniforms into their street clothes. Then we had the prisoners and guards come together. I said this has been difficult, and this is a time for moral reflection. The guards of course felt guilt, and many of the prisoners felt shame. I said, “What we have experienced first-hand is what’s known as the power of the situation. We all knew it was an experiment. You signed on. You all knew that if you were a prisoner you could have quit.”

When a prisoner broke down, the other prisoners never mentioned that he had disappeared. A curious aside: we bugged the cells and analysed what they were talking about. Almost all the conversations were about the present moment: the terrible food, which guards were dangerous, how they could escape. They never talked about what they were going to do with the money, what school they were in, what they were majoring in. They never talked about the past or the future. So they made it worse for themselves. They took a terrible situation and that’s all they thought about and talked about. That’s the time distortion. There were no clocks and no windows, so you didn’t know if it was day or night, except that after a while you knew this was the night shift.

Brian Rose: You really cooked up a serious fun house in there. Dangerous fun. Did you know at the time that this was going to be groundbreaking, and also controversial?

Philip Zimbardo: No, not at all. It was a better demonstration than Milgram’s, because now it was about the power of roles becoming real. It’s the transformation: I’m playing a role and then I become the role. I become a prison guard, a sadistic prison guard. I become a prisoner who has a breakdown in an experiment. What could be more humiliating? And college students are supposed to be in charge of your well-being.

Brian Rose: If you ran this experiment a hundred times, in your mind would it play out the same way?

Philip Zimbardo: I think something would happen. The curious thing is whether it would happen now, even if people didn’t know about this study. Would the mentality be different now? I don’t know the answer. Probably not.

The other thing is that as soon as we ended it we thought about what would happen if we had only women. And at the time it was the start of a more positive psychology orientation. One psychologist, Elliot Aronson at Santa Cruz, said that if he could have trained the guards in understanding the dynamics of human relationships, they would not have done what they did. So I actually applied to Stanford to say I’d like to redo my study with only women, and with guards previously trained in positive psychology. The ethics committee said, “Do you guarantee that you won’t get the negative result?” I said, “No, you don’t do research if you can guarantee the outcome.” They said, “Then you can’t do it.”

Brian Rose: Do you believe it would be different?

Philip Zimbardo: I think you could train guards to be sensitive to their role. I’m not sure about women; there’s very little research on women’s prisons. But later I got more involved with actual prisons, and in women’s prisons there’s almost none of the physical violence you get in men’s prisons. In many cases the women prison guards tend to make the women prisoners feel more infantile. They encourage them to have dolls, even though many of them are drug addicts or prostitutes. So they control them by the guards being more like mothers and the prisoners more like little children. But that would have been interesting.

Brian Rose: I was about to say that your girlfriend, later to become your wife, gave you a dose of female energy, which might save us in the world. But really it was a dose of an outside perspective.

Philip Zimbardo: It was both of those. Had she been one of the researchers, she could have been drawn in gradually too. Why didn’t my graduate students say, “Hey, we’re going too far”? The thing is, it’s increment by increment, each day a little worse.

1:04:41 In the Milgram study, if you started out at 300 volts, nobody would do it. It’s the slippery slope of evil. What I say in my teaching is that the real message of the Milgram study is that all evil begins with 15 volts. Once you press that first button you’re on the slippery slope, because then 30 becomes easier, and 45, and so on. It’s the same thing once you curse somebody to their face, once you strip somebody naked. That’s the beginning of the slope, and it’s only going to get worse and worse. It’s what you saw in Nazi Germany. Fifteen volts was that all Jews had to wear a yellow Star of David. In some cases they were proud of it, but it meant you were segregated, different from other Germans. Next, anybody with a Star of David can’t go to school, can’t have regular housing, can’t have a job. Then finally they’re put in ghettos and sent to concentration camps, and 450 volts is of course extermination. It’s always this gradual slope. It’s never in your face.

Brian Rose: That’s why we have to always be on the lookout for these things.

Philip Zimbardo: Yes, and around the world now there’s a horrific rise of right-wing political movements. I do a lot of work in Hungary, so Viktor Orbán; Turkey; now in Italy there’s a right-wing mood; and in America, Trump is really almost like a right-wing dictator.

Brian Rose: Vladimir Putin as well. What do you make of all those people?

Philip Zimbardo: Even though the people are different, the ideology is the same. It’s really, “We know better.” We all like the knowing father who is going to tell us what to do. Many of these are democracies, but in every case it’s also a populist movement, in Poland as well. It’s exclusionary: Hungary for Hungarians, America for Americans. It’s isolationist, nation by nation. Since the Second World War we had made such great strides, with the UN, with America’s Marshall Plan, with thinking of “us” rather than “them”, and it’s really a terrible reversal, in England, France, Germany. Interestingly, in many cases it’s women who are still upholding democracy.

How could somebody like Trump be elected? They say his popularity is the lowest of any president, and still it’s 35 to 40 percent, millions of people, no matter what he does, no matter that he makes a dozen tweets a day and night, stupid things like a little kid. He’s addicted to tweets, by the way. And the Washington Post determined that he had made over two thousand public lies or misrepresentations, and still people say yes. He’s appealing to the less educated, and I think many of these right-wing governments are appealing to less educated people who feel they’ve been left out. The sad thing around the world is the economic inequality gap. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer almost every day, and the poor resent it, and there’s nothing they can do to change their status. You’re in a low-level job, and depending on the job you’re going to be replaced by a robot. I visited a factory in Detroit where there’s one person for every ten robots making a car. America’s auto industry is booming, there’s a resurgence in sales of American cars, Ford, Dodge, Chrysler, and they’re all made by robots. Those jobs are never going to go back to people. So he’s playing to those people.

1:09:07 Brian Rose: Let me get back to it. What was the fallout, the aftermath, of the Stanford Prison Experiment?

Philip Zimbardo: There was very little at first. I wrote a few articles in scientific journals, and that was it. I didn’t write a book about it, The Lucifer Effect, until 2007, because I got involved in Abu Ghraib and many other things happened. And we didn’t publish a video until much later. Milgram put his film out more or less simultaneously, I think the next year, so people jumped on him, and people are still talking about the Milgram study. The Stanford study was not seen as unethical, even though it was worse than the Milgram study, because people suffered day and night. Interestingly, there was not a lot of negative impact.

The other two things I should mention: by serendipity, the day after we ended our study there was a huge riot at San Quentin prison, which is about an hour from Stanford, near San Francisco. George Jackson, a black political rebel, allegedly had a gun smuggled in, though it’s still not clear, and freed the prisoners in solitary confinement, many of whom then killed guards and killed prisoners who were seen as stooges, and George Jackson was killed. Suddenly prisons were a big issue. One of the reporters had come down to the Stanford prison study in the middle of it; I actually had journalists come down to see for themselves. They asked the warden at San Quentin, “Do you think any of this happened because of the dehumanisation the guards imposed on prisoners, like they showed in that study at Stanford?” He said, “Oh, they don’t know what they’re talking about. They don’t know about real prison.” Then I was interviewed on national television, arguing with the warden, and that gave me instant notoriety.

Then three weeks later prisoners took over Attica prison in New York. It became a national and international story; celebrities came down. In the end the governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller, called in the National Guard, who shot prisoners and the guards being held hostage, and killed many of them. So prisons were a hot issue, and I was invited to give testimony in Congress about prison conditions. When I started the prison study I knew nothing about prisons. I had taught a course on the psychology of imprisonment that summer, where I had ex-cons and policemen come in, but I had never visited a prison before that.

Brian Rose: I want to talk about Abu Ghraib, because I think it’s important. But looking back on it now, how do you feel about the whole experiment? There are people who hate you because of it.

Philip Zimbardo: Not if they’ve talked to me about it, about what we learned and what it meant. I’m sure some of the prisoners who had breakdowns are still embarrassed by it. But aside from the debriefing, all the prisoners and guards came back two weeks later, and we actually showed them the videotapes. They came back a month later, to be sure there were no negative after-effects. Then the Stanford prison study became a media baby. We were on 20/20 and 60 Minutes, and I brought some of the prisoners and some of the guards with me, so we maintained really close connections for many, many years. Am I sorry I did the study? No. Am I sorry that I was not only the researcher but the superintendent of the prison? Yes. I think if I had only been the researcher I might have ended it sooner. I also might have put more constraints on the guards: you can’t do this, you can’t do that.

Brian Rose: But you might not have learned as much.

Philip Zimbardo: Yes. But also the guards would wait until I went to sleep. They knew that in the middle of the night Zimbardo couldn’t be looking in on them all the time.

1:13:40 Brian Rose: Let’s talk about Abu Ghraib. I remember seeing those images, and of course I watched them in your TED talk, and they were shocking to the world. What shocked me more than anything was these young, innocent-looking men and women. The girl looks like she’s from Iowa and grew up on a farm, next to a young man, posing in front of this naked mess of abused, tortured Iraqis, dragging one around by a leash on his neck. Can you explain to people what happened there?

Philip Zimbardo: Two things happened. It’s a war that’s still going on, and it’s really the curse of George Bush and his cabinet. America was one month away from victory in Afghanistan. We were also talking about destroying the poppy farms. Suddenly he says, “We’re going to take the troops from Afghanistan, because we’ve almost won that, and bring them to Iraq, and we’re going to show Saddam Hussein.” They called it the shock and awe campaign: we’re going to bomb the hell out of them, blast them with all our might. Then, if you remember, George Bush goes on an aircraft carrier in a military uniform and says, “Mission accomplished.” The next day American tanks, Humvees and jeeps are being blown up by something called improvised explosive devices, IEDs. We didn’t even know what that was. We had assumed the Iraqis were happy to be liberated, but they were not. We didn’t realise there were different sects, Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds, who never agree and were always at each other. Suddenly the CIA and the American military had no clue who this new enemy was, so they started arresting all the men and boys around any explosion and putting them in an old prison called Abu Ghraib.

They started interrogating these men and got nothing, no information, because some of them just happened to be near an explosion. So the head of military intelligence goes to the head of the military police and says, “We want your guards on the night shift to help us get actionable intelligence.” That was the phrase. “We want them to take the gloves off, to use whatever means they have, so that when we interrogate them they’re going to spill the beans.” They only told that to the night shift, not the day shift. The night shift was nine soldiers, I think three women and six men, working twelve-hour shifts. And if you talk about the power of the situation, at the end of their shift they went to sleep in a prison cell in a different part of the prison. They never left the prison. The prison was also under bombardment from across the street, so it was a dangerous place for everybody.

The man in charge of the night shift was named Chip Frederick. None of the guards were regular soldiers; they were Army reservists, and they have no prestige among real soldiers. They never went to proper boot camp. He’s put in charge of the night shift, though he’d never been in charge of anything, because he was a staff sergeant. He’s also in charge of 60 Iraqi policemen, who don’t speak English, and he doesn’t speak Arabic, and those police are smuggling drugs in and helping prisoners escape. So he’s overwhelmed, he’s young. And the guards on their twelve-hour shifts begin to say, “Let’s have fun with these prisoners, it’s so boring.” It’s not clear how it started or who started it. It was the start of digital cameras, and they said, “Let’s do something nobody’s ever seen. Let’s strip the prisoners, put them in a pyramid, and take a picture of them with us giving a thumbs up.” Once you’ve done that, that’s old, so each night they would think of something more interesting, more dramatic, and they documented it with photos. There was a CD with more than a thousand photos, which I had to view, because I became an expert witness in the trial of Chip Frederick.

Brian Rose: When you first saw those pictures, did you know exactly what had happened?

Philip Zimbardo: I couldn’t even imagine it. They were so extreme: dragging prisoners around on a leash, having dogs actually bite prisoners, torturing prisoners in ways that were like the Middle Ages, and then being proud of what they were doing, because they were saying, “We might only be Army reserve, but nobody has ever done what we’re doing.” It was exposed by a soldier, Joe Darby, who’s one of the heroes. He took the CD with these photos to a senior officer and said, “This is what’s happening every night. You can’t allow this to go on.” He knew he was going to be in trouble, because these were his buddies. So they shut down the night shift. All of them were then confined, and they all got dishonourable discharges, and some of them went to trial.

Now, they’re all guilty; they’re in the pictures, there’s no question. Chip Frederick said, “I’m guilty. I don’t know why I did it.” I spent the day with him and his wife and his family. I checked out his whole background. He’s a really good guy. He had won a dozen medals and awards before. When he was in Kuwait he used to work with Kuwaiti children, and people loved him. I said, “How could you do that?” He said, “I have no idea. I went down, other people were doing it, and suddenly there I was. People said smile, and I did, and the next thing they show me: hey, look at this great picture.”

1:21:12 So in his trial I was able to say to the judge, “Chip Frederick is guilty as charged, sir. He admits it, and I say so too. However, it is my psychological opinion that he never would have done any of those things, which are reprehensible, and which he feels and I feel are reprehensible, had he not been put in an untenable situation by the higher-ups. Everything I know about him says that had he been on the day shift, and there were no abuses on the day shift, we wouldn’t be here. Every guard on the night shift abused prisoners to varying degrees; no guard on the day shift did. Your honour, that’s what you call a situational variable. Had he been on the day shift we wouldn’t be here. He was on the night shift, and here’s the document showing what he was told to do.”

Brian Rose: What did the judge say?

Philip Zimbardo: The judge appreciated that, but Frederick was the highest-ranking of all the people being put on trial. He was the first one, and he was going to be the model, because the reply from the White House and the military was that it’s a few bad apples.

Brian Rose: Let’s throw them in jail and move on.

Philip Zimbardo: Throw them in jail and throw away the key. The head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, I’m blanking on his name now, and the White House said these are a few bad apples. In fact they said at a congressional hearing that 99.9 percent of our soldiers are fine and upstanding, and these are a few bad apples. They were going to give him 15 years of hard labour. He didn’t kill anybody. He hit one prisoner once, because the prisoner was trying to escape, but he did some of the other degrading things. My testimony, I think, is the first time psychological testimony affected a legal decision. They reduced it from 15 years to 8, and finally from 8 to 4. He still served four years in prison. They took away all his medals and awards, and the worst thing was that, after 21 years in the military as an Army reservist and in the National Guard, they took away his retirement pay. So when he came out he was dead broke, his wife left him, and he had to go back and live with his parents. He suffered for it. Some of the others got a year in prison or so, and they all got dishonourable discharges. It was a national disgrace.

What happened was that I happened to be in Washington DC. I had been president of the American Psychological Association, and I used to go to Washington, where the organisation is based, regularly. A former student of mine who was working for National Public Radio tracked me down and said, “Hey, Dr Z, those images are like the ones you used to show in class: bags over their heads, guards doing terrible things in a prison. Do you want to come in and share your ideas?” The first thing I said was, “I don’t think these are bad apples. I want to believe American soldiers are good apples, and somebody put them in a bad barrel.” I was the first one to use that phrase, bad apples versus bad barrel, and the media picked up on it. The bad barrel is the situation they were put in and had no control over. If you take a sweet cucumber and put it in a barrel of vinegar, it comes out a sour pickle. The media picked up on that instantly. It was a good image, and I tied it to the power of the situation.

Then the thing I added was that in order to change the bad barrel, we have to know who the bad barrel makers are. In Abu Ghraib not a single senior officer was given even a letter of reprimand. None of them went on trial. This was happening on their watch for three months. How could they not know? If they didn’t know, it was dereliction of duty. If they knew and did nothing, it was worse. So the system protected the officers and let the grunts bear the burden. Then I gave a talk at the TED conference called The Psychology of Evil. Even though these pictures had been censored by the government, I said I was going to violate that in the interest of honesty and openness, to show a few of them, not even the worst ones, at the TED conference.

1:25:20 Brian Rose: What did you conclude from all this? I know that when you were writing your book The Lucifer Effect you got kind of depressed towards the end. Are you describing man as essentially an evil being, and we have to try everything we can just not to be evil? Most people wouldn’t agree with you, because they believe they’re inherently good.

Philip Zimbardo: No. I think most people are inherently good. But what’s surprising is how little it takes to move across the line between good and evil. The example I used to give is the novel Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Here’s this good Dr Jekyll, a scientist, who takes a chemical and gets transformed. He moves across the line and becomes a killer, a murderer, a rapist, and then when the drug wears off he goes back across the line and he’s good again. The drug is the equivalent of our situational forces. You go into the military, and your job in the military is to be a killer. You’re trained to shoot, you’re trained to kill, and the idea is that you win the war when you kill more of them than they kill of you.

If you’re in the American military you’re called a GI, government issue. You’re no longer a person. They shave your head, they take away your identity, and each soldier has a number, just like our prisoners. So we have to realise that situations can corrupt almost all of us, certainly a majority, even the best and brightest. As we said earlier, nobody wants to believe that. They want to believe, “I could take Dr Jekyll’s chemical and stay holy and good.” Nobody can be sure of that.

The point of all of this is that self-knowledge is the main protection against going to the dark side: realising that most people, and you have to consider yourself part of most people, can blindly obey authority. We do it all the time. We obey our bosses, union leaders, politicians. We obey parents who are sometimes prejudiced; a lot of parents are obviously discriminatory, and depending on the circumstances you seem like a good child doing what your parents say. In Nazi Germany parents said, “Jews are vermin. Don’t play with them, and if they try to hide, expose them.”

1:27:51 Brian Rose: Talk to me about masculinity, because I found your thoughts on that really interesting. What is the state of the union of masculinity in this country? Where are we headed, and what do we really have to be worried about?

Philip Zimbardo: Oh, we have to be really, really worried. In America this year, one woman said that her boss at a major film studio had been sexually harassing her as the price of keeping her job. Once she went public, thousands of women all over America, and now all over the world, said “me too”. They started an amazing movement against sexual harassment called Me Too, and the media picked it up because it was a movement. Many of these men were fired and lost their jobs, many well-known people. Matt Lauer, the man from the Today show, actually interviewed me when I first published the shyness book. He was a sweet guy then, he had just started, and over time he got corrupted by the power of his position.

But it turns out it’s not just sexual harassment. Educated, talented women in business are discriminated against and make much less than men doing the same job. In Hollywood, women who are recognised, named stars make less money than the male actor in the same film with the same profile. So now there’s an awakening about the negatives of masculinity. Masculinity has always meant power, and in the good sense it meant the power to protect the weak and protect your family. Now it means entitlement: because I’m a man, I’m entitled to get to the head of the line, I’m entitled to make more money, I’m entitled to tell you to do whatever I want, I’m entitled to ask you for a sexual favour, and if you don’t give it to me I have the power to fire you. That’s the negative, and I think it’s being changed.

Here’s one of the great things about the media. The media typically follows evil. When terrorist attacks started in America, and I did lots of work on this, the media always exaggerated them because they made the headlines. Three people died in a subway and it was all over the news, while the same day 50 people died in car accidents. More people die in America in fatal car accidents than from all the terrorist attacks ever. But here’s a case where I applaud the media. They took this up and said, here is something worth reporting, worth following up with individual stories as well as a movement, a movement that is changing reality, saying that women and men who do the same job to the same standards should be treated the same in terms of salary, recognition and fellowship.

Now, the new phenomenon, which is really sad for me, is young men and boys living in virtual reality. We all spend our lives on Facebook, on Gmail; this is where the phone sits all the time. In wonderful San Francisco, which used to be the head of the social movements, somebody’s walking with a Starbucks cup in one hand and a mobile phone in the other, not noticing the beggars, not noticing other people. The problem with young men is that they are choosing to live in a world of virtual reality, meaning playing video games non-stop. Video games are enchanting and exciting. It’s one of the few things in life where a young boy or young man knows that the more I practise, the more I play, the better I will get, and not only that, everybody will know, because I get a score, and the more I play the more my score goes up. So I get prestige by being a star at World of Warcraft or whatever, and you have to keep playing.

Interestingly, research by cognitive psychologists says that if you play video games two to three hours a day, it improves cognitive functioning and hand-eye coordination. The tipping point is when you go beyond five hours, typically every night, while still going to school. Then it begins to become an addiction, part of what I call present hedonism. You get trapped in the moment. You don’t think about the past, you don’t think about the future. You stop chatting to friends because it’s a waste of time; you text. You give up your job, you give up exercising, you become obese, you sit in your room eating junk food, and you’re a consumer rather than a creator. You don’t write, you don’t learn a foreign language, you don’t want to travel. In fact, this year for the first time more eighteen-year-old young men in America chose not to take driver’s education to get a driving licence. They said, “We don’t want to go anywhere. We want to stay in our room.” And this is affecting masculinity, because they don’t want to be men. They just want to be the star video game player.

Brian Rose: It’s almost two different sides of the equation. We have the Harvey Weinsteins, who are maybe too masculine, and then the young men who are not man enough. How does this play out?

Philip Zimbardo: What makes it worse is the way they partially regain their masculinity. For the first time in history, pornography is available free online 24/7 in most countries around the world. That’s never happened. In the old days you had to go to a penny arcade, or to Times Square, 42nd Street. But now it doesn’t cost you anything. You type in a website and there are hundreds and hundreds of free porn sites, and many sites where you pay a dollar and have access to beautiful, stunning women. For a dollar you have a woman talking to you, telling you how beautiful and sexy you are, telling you to undress, or imagining she’s undressing you. So this is where young men are gaining their masculinity, and they’re giving up girlfriends. The sad thing is that many wives are divorcing their husbands because the husband would rather masturbate watching pornography than have sex with her. They try to convince them to go to family therapy, but once they’re addicted it’s over.

The problem is that young boys are playing video games five to ten hours a night, and they use pornography as the break. They watch pornography, masturbate, go to sleep, wake up. The consequences are that they’re failing in school because they’re not doing their homework. They give up their job; if they’re on a team they stop playing sports. Their whole life gets funnelled down to sitting in front of a computer, a mobile phone or an iPad, playing video games and watching pornography. And the new problem is that in America, in England, in many countries around the world, there’s a rise in single mothers, because divorce is increasing, and in almost all countries custody goes to the mother. Boys are growing up without a father, and girls too, obviously. Fatherlessness is a new phenomenon.

Brian Rose: You’re making me very depressed. So what do we do about all this?

Philip Zimbardo: What happens is that the mother has given up on conditional love. The mother says, “Try hard, I love you.” Boys need fathers. Fathers say, “You’re shaming your family. You’ve got to try harder, work better. I’m going to take away your allowance, I’m going to pull the plug.” Boys don’t have that any more. Mum is happy that Billy’s in his room. She doesn’t know what he’s doing, but he’s not outside getting into trouble, he’s not in a gang. So I wrote a book, first in England with Ebury Press, called Man (Dis)connected, and now I’ve revised it in America as Man, Interrupted. We have a whole chapter on what women can do, what parents can do, what schools can do. I’m sounding an alarm. I gave a four-minute talk at the TED conference and I ended by saying, “I’m sounding an alarm, loud and clear.” At this point we don’t have solutions; it’s only going to get worse. And it’s even worse in Asian countries, in Korea, China and Japan. This is now a global phenomenon. There are lots of things you can do about it, and for the answers, check out Man (Dis)connected or Man, Interrupted.

Brian Rose: Thank you for sounding that alarm.

1:37:24 Before we finish, tell me a few things about Dr Z. If I asked a bunch of your friends what Philip’s superpower is, what would they say? How do you stay so productive? It’s your 85th birthday today and it seems like you’re just getting warmed up.

Philip Zimbardo: I am. I should say also that I haven’t slept for several days. I’m taking a medicine which makes you urinate all night, so I was really exhausted when I came here. I thought, oh my God, why do I have to do this? I couldn’t tell you. But I have an enormous amount of energy. I love what I’m doing, and I’m privileged to be in this position. I could be shining shoes, I could be cutting people’s hair, I could be making shoes like my grandfather did, I could have a low-level job. Instead people are paying to hear me talk, people are paying tuition for me to be their teacher. So I feel honoured and privileged. Kids come up and say, “Can we take a selfie?” and I say, “I’m on it.”

The last thing I should mention is that in recent times I’ve switched from being Dr Evil to Dr Good Z. I started a non-profit in San Francisco called the Heroic Imagination Project, HIP, so the acronym is “be hip”. What it does is inspire young people, now around the world, since our programme is in many countries, to stand up, speak out and take action: effective action, how to do it in an ensemble, a hero squad, not as a solo hero. It has nothing to do with traditional heroes of bravery. It has to do with transforming compassion into social action, starting in your family, your school, your community, making other people feel special. The enemy of heroism is egocentrism. If you’re thinking about me, you don’t notice when you go into a place that somebody is sitting in the corner, maybe a shy person, somebody in tears, maybe there’s been a death in the family. So my focus is always “we”, not “me”; “us”, not “I”. It’s changing those little things that change the way your mind works.

Even in San Francisco, as much as I love it, we have an enormous problem of beggars on the street. There are 7,000 people without homes in a city of only 800,000, and they’re begging everywhere, and people just ignore them. To be a beggar means you put yourself in a position of shame. So each day I say, okay, I’m going to give a dollar, or a pound here. I pass by, usually older people or women, and I stop and say, “Hello, I’m Phil Zimbardo,” and shake their hand. “What’s your name? Where are you from? How long have you been without work? Here’s a dollar. I wish it could be more. I hope your luck changes.” In many cases they start tearing up, because I treat them as a person without a home rather than a homeless person. So I’m saying heroism starts in the mind, rethinking who you are and how you relate to other people. I call it everyday heroism. It’s not Nelson Mandela, it’s not Martin Luther King, it’s not Winston Churchill. It’s ordinary deeds, but it becomes a social habit of heroism. You do it all the time, and you do it with other people as a community. Last night at the Emmanuel Centre we had the first meeting of the London HIP launch. We hope to have our programme in many schools throughout London, and then the people we train will go, I think, all over the UK. We’re in a dozen other countries, but we’d never been in England. Clearly this is what we need.

Brian Rose: I love it, and thank you for doing that here. What keeps you awake at night?

Philip Zimbardo: I’m thinking about how many more years I have to do this project, to do good, and also what kinds of things I should be doing that I haven’t done. I get interested in lots of things. Somebody pointed out to me recently that I’ve published in 41 different areas of psychology. The negative is that people think if you’re eclectic you’re superficial. But when I get interested in something I ask, what would research like this look like? Then I do it, or I convince students or colleagues to do it, and then of course you write it up. It’s not enough to do it; people have to know what you did. Or I talk about it, and more and more I do media things. And I hate to say it, but there is an element of mortality. It’s hard to imagine that I won’t live forever.

Let me mention this quickly. Growing up in a ghetto, the other toxic thing is not just the bad guys trying to corrupt you. The physical environment is toxic. When I was a five-year-old child I lived for six months in a hospital for children with every known contagious disease. In the ghetto there was tuberculosis, scarlet fever, polio, all these diseases. This was the late 1930s, 1939 and 1940, and I had whooping cough and double pneumonia. There was no treatment. Penicillin was not available; the military was using the sulfa drugs. So you lie in bed with no treatment, and every day kids around you die, hundreds and hundreds of kids. The nurses had to wear masks, so you never saw the nurses’ faces.

Brian Rose: Maybe that’s where the idea for the hoods came from.

Philip Zimbardo: I think you’re right. What would happen is that you’d wake up in the morning and Billy or Mary next to you wouldn’t be there. “Nurse, where’s Billy?” “He went home.” “Why didn’t he say goodbye?” Pretty soon you realised that going home meant they had died, but you couldn’t say that. It was a conspiracy of denial between the nurses and the kids. Would God kill kids? No. I grew up a Catholic, and I hadn’t been very religious, I was only a little kid, but I became very religious, and I said it’s got to be the devil, if it’s done at night. God does his good work in the daytime. At night they shut off the lights, and it was always scary, because when the nurses walked in front of a light it would make shadows: here’s the devil coming to make his choice. So I would pull the cover over me and say a prayer to God, “Please save me,” and then I’d say a prayer to the devil: “I know you are required to take a certain number of children. Please don’t take me, I’m a good boy.” And then the thing I still feel guilty about: “There are a lot of other kids available.” I didn’t realise it, but I was doing self-hypnosis, and I’d wake up in the morning. Now I teach hypnosis. I pulled the cover over, said a prayer to God and a message to the devil, and the next thing I knew it was morning.

I survived, and at the end of six months, magically, I don’t know why, I was released. I remember the nurse said, “Little Philip, you’re going to go home,” and I started crying. I thought she meant I was going to die. “No, no, you’re better, you’re going home.” At that point I realised that if I’d survived all of that, why should I bother dying? So I began to think maybe I’m immortal, maybe I’m one of those exceptions who doesn’t die. I’ve always entertained that possibility, that maybe I could just go on and on. And the last thing I want to say is that I teach big classes at Stanford, 300 students, and here in London each day for the last four days I’ve talked to a thousand A-level students from all over the UK, and I get turned on by it. I say to my students, “I want to make a deal with you. All of you are young, 18 to 21, you’ve got a long life ahead. I’m much older; I’ve got a short life. How about a trade? If each of you gives me five seconds of your life, in return I’ll give you the best of all the knowledge I’ve ever had. Who wants to make that trade?” So I have a thousand kids each year giving me their seconds, so I could be almost immortal.

Brian Rose: So they give you the five seconds, and maybe you will live forever.

1:46:44 Dr Z, I always ask everyone a few questions at the end. If I could give you one of those magic mobile phones, like the one you were holding earlier, and you could call the 20-year-old Philip, who would probably just be starting college somewhere, and give that young man a bit of advice based on everything you know now from the last 65 years, what would you tell him?

Philip Zimbardo: Oh, that’s a great way to put it.

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Brian Rose: It’s great advice. The second part of that question: the best advice you ever received. It could have come from one of your professors, a colleague, anyone, or maybe your parents.

Philip Zimbardo: Well, I’m running through lots of things. One is: don’t get married before you have a good job, and don’t have a family before you can afford it. But really it’s this: don’t do anything to anyone that you would not want them to do to your family. Growing up Sicilian, family was the core. Don’t do anything that brings shame on your family. Not shame on you; shame on your family. And think about what would make your family proud of what you do. It doesn’t have to be academic success. Learn some skill, learn to be really good at something. I’m as proud that I’m really good at making French omelettes, lasagne and soufflés. I took classes in them, just to do something totally different from being an academic. And I think it’s important to be more well-rounded, because I was a workaholic, future-oriented: work, work, work. Take time out. The old phrase is to smell the roses; I mean take time out to enjoy people. I think that’s great advice.

Brian Rose: Final question. To that 20-year-old watching us somewhere in the world, what advice would you give if they want to take on a lot of this knowledge you’ve just shared and use it to change their lives? What should they focus on?

Philip Zimbardo: I would say the first thing is to develop an active future orientation, meaning set goals and think about the means by which you go from where you are to that goal. Don’t live in the present moment. Don’t do things just because they’re exciting and fun, because the excitement wears off. So be future-oriented, but not a workaholic. Blend that future orientation with taking time out to be with friends. And try to solve puzzles, not crossword puzzles, but things about human nature that you’re curious about. Take time out to read, which young people often aren’t doing. There are people who came before you who spent their whole life trying to understand a problem in biology, psychology, history or language. Get away from your computer screen and read a book, or an e-book if you will, because there’s a world of knowledge that will enrich you and make you a better person. And some of the books you should read are The Lucifer Effect, The Time Paradox, and Shyness: What It Is, What to Do About It.

Brian Rose: All of your books. Dr Zimbardo, thank you so much for your time today, and thank you so much for pushing the envelope back in the day with your groundbreaking research, and maybe going a little too far, because I think it teaches us some really important lessons about ourselves. It’s easy to walk around in this world and think we’re the good person, and everyone believes that, but if you’re not constantly checking your behaviour, then these things happen, like Abu Ghraib or Nazi Germany.

Philip Zimbardo: And so say to yourself, “What do I have to do to be a good person?” rather than, “I’m good.” To be a good person means you have to do things. What do I have to do to be a good person? That should be foremost in your mind each day. What am I going to do to make my world better? It’s always with little things, not usually heroic things. A daily heroic act.

Brian Rose: Thank you so much, sir. I appreciate it. And happy birthday.

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