Transcript: Stanford Prison Experiment: What the Guards Were Told First
Every line of episode 4 as narrated, with the time it starts. Back to the episode page.
Stanford's prison guards were told they could create fear.
The tape survives.
It was the day before the prisoners arrived, in August 1971.
The man speaking was Philip Zimbardo, who ran the study.
The study's own report says the guards got only minimal guidelines.
His critics say that for nearly half a century, his study has been read one way.
Put people in a toxic role, and the role, on its own, brings out cruelty.
So what were they told in that room, and does it change what the study shows?
In 2019, a researcher named Thibault Le Texier went through the study's archive.
He went through its papers and its tapes, and interviewed fifteen of its participants.
His paper says the guards were given precise instructions on how to treat the prisoners.
Le Texier had already published a book on the study, in French, in 2018.
Zimbardo and his co-author Craig Haney answered their critics that same year.
Both sides agree on the words said in that room.
They split on what the words did.
Volunteers agreed to play either a guard or a prisoner, for fifteen dollars a day.
The report says neither group got any specific training in their roles.
The guards had one firm rule. No physical punishment, and no physical aggression.
Their job, in the report's words, was to maintain the reasonable degree of order within the prison necessary for its effective functioning.
How to do that, the report says, was not spelled out.
The authors wrote why. They wanted the guards' genuine reactions, not simply their ability to carry out instructions.
The study was planned for two weeks.
It was stopped after six days.
Its report said many of the volunteers stopped telling their prison role apart from themselves.
Now go back to that Saturday, the day before the prisoners came.
The meeting was taped.
The guards met for an orientation.
Zimbardo was there as the prison's Superintendent.
With him was an undergraduate who played the Warden.
The report thanks him by name, David Jaffe.
Zimbardo told the guards they could not hit the prisoners.
Then he told them what they could do.
We can create boredom. We can create a sense of frustration.
We can create fear in them, to some degree.
We can create a notion of the arbitrariness that governs their lives, which are totally controlled by us, by the system, by you, me.
In his own 2018 account, he named one more thing they could create.
A sense of powerlessness.
Zimbardo called these his instructions to the guards.
He pointed to the recordings himself.
His point was the ban on hitting.
Le Texier's point was everything else they heard.
And the Warden, David Jaffe, had a job of his own.
In a note Le Texier found in the archive, the Warden wrote what it was.
I was given the responsibility of trying to elicit tough guard behavior.
On one tape, the Warden talks to a guard who was holding back.
Zimbardo's own site prints the words.
The guards have to know that every guard is going to be what we call a tough guard.
What I mean by tough is that you have to be firm, and you have to be in the action.
He told the guard it mattered for the experiment.
Making it seem like a prison, he said, depended largely on the guards.
The word the Warden kept coming back to was tough.
Le Texier found something else in the archive.
The prison had been tried before.
Three months earlier, students in one of Zimbardo's classes ran a prison of their own.
It lasted one weekend, the fifteenth and sixteenth of May 1971, in a dorm called Toyon Hall.
Six guards and six prisoners, with a student warden in charge.
In Le Texier's account, that student went on to be the Warden at Stanford in August.
Zimbardo himself once wrote about it, in a note at the back of a book.
He said the study's rules were an extension of ones the Warden and his comrades had developed for a project in his class.
Then Le Texier counted the rules.
The Stanford study had seventeen prison rules.
He says eleven were copied straight from the dorm project.
He says the other six were adapted to the new space and the longer run.
In 1972, Zimbardo and a co-author had written that the guards made up their own set of rules.
Le Texier says Zimbardo gave the dorm project credit only twice.
Zimbardo's long 2018 reply to his critics does not mention the dorm at all.
But Zimbardo said the guards were never told to be brutal.
We did not give any formal or detailed instructions about how to be an effective guard.
He wrote that the team never instructed guards to employ brutality, and banned physical force outright.
And by his account, the Warden's push did not work at first.
He wrote that none of the guards behaved in a dominant way during the first two shifts.
What changed things, he said, came on the second day, when the prisoners rebelled.
After that, one guard called the prisoners dangerous, and several guards became much tougher.
Craig Haney went further, in a statement of his own.
They certainly were not following any orders to be harsh and tough.
Some of them actually pushed back against me when I instructed them to treat the prisoners more humanely.
Even the 1972 report says the cues built into the experiment obviously exerted some directing influence.
In 2012, two psychologists, Haslam and Reicher, put it like this.
While it may be true that Zimbardo gave his guards no direct orders, he certainly gave them a general sense of how he expected them to behave.
They added that even with that guidance, not all guards acted brutally.
On the night shift, the prisoners gave one guard a nickname.
John Wayne.
By Zimbardo's account, the guard said he modeled his role on the warden in the film Cool Hand Luke.
In 2011, he told Stanford Magazine more about it.
What came over me was not an accident.
It was planned.
I set out with a definite plan in mind, to try to force the action, force something to happen, so that the researchers would have something to work with.
So I consciously created this persona.
I was in all kinds of drama productions in high school and college.
But the other guards didn't stop me.
They seemed to join in. They were taking my lead.
He later said nobody on the research team stepped in to tell him to tone it down.
So we took that as approval and support.
But on one point, his own story cuts against Le Texier.
The Stanford Daily reported in 2018 that he doesn't recall the kind of explicit cues Le Texier cites.
And Zimbardo wrote that what this guard did went far beyond simply playing the role of a tough guard.
Le Texier quotes guards who said they had been acting.
Guard 4 told the Warden at the debriefing, throughout the entire experiment I was an actor, and I was hamming it up.
Guard 1 wrote to Zimbardo three months later.
I was always acting.
In the guards' daily answers, Le Texier found only two, Guards 10 and 11, who sometimes felt completely immersed.
That is hard to square with the report's verdict that many volunteers stopped telling role from self.
In 2002, the BBC broadcast a prison study run by Haslam and Reicher.
It ran for eight days. They pointed to one difference.
Unlike Zimbardo, however, we took no leadership role in the study.
Their guards didn't take to the role.
They were reluctant to use their authority.
In the end, the prisoners got the better of them.
Then the volunteers tried to run things as equals.
When that broke down, some pushed for a harsh regime, and the resistance to it grew weaker.
Its authors say it came close to recreating the tyranny of the Stanford study.
Zimbardo wrote that it in no way met the scientific criteria for a replication.
In 2019, in the same journal issue as Le Texier, Haslam and Reicher went back to the Stanford study with a colleague.
Their summary says the experimenters directly encouraged the guards to adopt roles and act tough.
They call it a kind of leadership.
So how much of this dispute reached the students who learn the study?
In 2014, a psychologist named Griggs checked thirteen introductory psychology textbooks.
Eleven covered the Stanford study.
Only six of those mentioned any criticism of it.
The other five mentioned none.
That count came five years before Le Texier's paper.
Philip Zimbardo died in October 2024, at 91.
In his 2018 reply, he wrote that no criticism brought substantial evidence that altered the study's main conclusion.
Its core message, he wrote, is not that guards and prisoners always, or even usually, act that way.
He called it a cautionary tale of what might happen to any of us.
So was it the role, on its own?
The report and Zimbardo both say they were told to keep order and never to hit.
And the tape still holds the sentence this all started with.
We can create fear in them, to some degree.
Zimbardo called those words his instructions to the guards.
The 1972 report called that minimal guidelines.
Le Texier called it precise instructions.
The guard nicknamed John Wayne remembers no explicit cues.
He also remembers that nobody told him to stop.
So at Stanford, the role never came on its own.
Those words came with it. How much they did is the part the two sides argue over.
Zimbardo put the study's records in the Stanford archive himself.
That is where the recording from that Saturday is kept.
Next time, 1931.
A psychologist and his wife took a young chimpanzee named Gua into their home.
They raised her beside their own baby son, Donald, as playmates in the same house.
For nine months, they tested the two of them, side by side.
Then the parents wrote the study up themselves, in a book called The Ape and the Child.