The Stanford Prison Experiment lasted less than a week in 1971, but its claims about human nature endured for decades. Now, a new Netflix series is bringing one of psychology’s most controversial studies, and some of the biggest concerns surrounding it, back into the spotlight.
Organized by American psychologist Philip Zimbardo, the experiment involved a mock prison set up in the basement of a Stanford University building. He selected 24 male college students out of more than 70 respondents to a newspaper ad for “a psychological study of prison life” and randomly divided them into prisoners and guards. At the heart of this work was a fundamental question about good and evil.
