# Transcript: Stanford Prison Experiment: What the Guards Were Told First

Source page: https://underthebehavior.com/episodes/stanford-prison-experiment/transcript

The full transcript of episode 4 of Under the Behavior, the stanford prison experiment, with the time each line starts and a link back to the episode.

Every line of episode 4 as narrated, with the time it starts. [Back to the episode page](https://underthebehavior.com/episodes/stanford-prison-experiment).

0:00 Stanford's prison guards were told they could create fear.

0:03 The tape survives.

0:05 It was the day before the prisoners arrived, in August 1971.

0:09 The man speaking was Philip Zimbardo, who ran the study.

0:13 The study's own report says the guards got only minimal guidelines.

0:17 His critics say that for nearly half a century, his study has been read one way.

0:23 Put people in a toxic role, and the role, on its own, brings out cruelty.

0:28 So what were they told in that room, and does it change what the study shows?

0:33 In 2019, a researcher named Thibault Le Texier went through the study's archive.

0:38 He went through its papers and its tapes, and interviewed fifteen of its participants.

0:43 His paper says the guards were given precise instructions on how to treat the prisoners.

0:48 Le Texier had already published a book on the study, in French, in 2018.

0:53 Zimbardo and his co-author Craig Haney answered their critics that same year.

0:57 Both sides agree on the words said in that room.

1:00 They split on what the words did.

1:03 Volunteers agreed to play either a guard or a prisoner, for fifteen dollars a day.

1:09 The report says neither group got any specific training in their roles.

1:13 The guards had one firm rule. No physical punishment, and no physical aggression.

1:19 Their job, in the report's words, was to maintain the reasonable degree of order within the prison necessary for its effective functioning.

1:27 How to do that, the report says, was not spelled out.

1:30 The authors wrote why. They wanted the guards' genuine reactions, not simply their ability to carry out instructions.

1:37 The study was planned for two weeks.

1:40 It was stopped after six days.

1:43 Its report said many of the volunteers stopped telling their prison role apart from themselves.

1:49 Now go back to that Saturday, the day before the prisoners came.

1:52 The meeting was taped.

1:55 The guards met for an orientation.

1:57 Zimbardo was there as the prison's Superintendent.

2:00 With him was an undergraduate who played the Warden.

2:03 The report thanks him by name, David Jaffe.

2:06 Zimbardo told the guards they could not hit the prisoners.

2:10 Then he told them what they could do.

2:12 We can create boredom. We can create a sense of frustration.

2:16 We can create fear in them, to some degree.

2:19 We can create a notion of the arbitrariness that governs their lives, which are totally controlled by us, by the system, by you, me.

2:29 In his own 2018 account, he named one more thing they could create.

2:34 A sense of powerlessness.

2:36 Zimbardo called these his instructions to the guards.

2:39 He pointed to the recordings himself.

2:42 His point was the ban on hitting.

2:44 Le Texier's point was everything else they heard.

2:48 And the Warden, David Jaffe, had a job of his own.

2:51 In a note Le Texier found in the archive, the Warden wrote what it was.

2:55 I was given the responsibility of trying to elicit tough guard behavior.

3:00 On one tape, the Warden talks to a guard who was holding back.

3:04 Zimbardo's own site prints the words.

3:07 The guards have to know that every guard is going to be what we call a tough guard.

3:12 What I mean by tough is that you have to be firm, and you have to be in the action.

3:18 He told the guard it mattered for the experiment.

3:21 Making it seem like a prison, he said, depended largely on the guards.

3:25 The word the Warden kept coming back to was tough.

3:30 Le Texier found something else in the archive.

3:33 The prison had been tried before.

3:36 Three months earlier, students in one of Zimbardo's classes ran a prison of their own.

3:40 It lasted one weekend, the fifteenth and sixteenth of May 1971, in a dorm called Toyon Hall.

3:47 Six guards and six prisoners, with a student warden in charge.

3:51 In Le Texier's account, that student went on to be the Warden at Stanford in August.

3:56 Zimbardo himself once wrote about it, in a note at the back of a book.

4:00 He said the study's rules were an extension of ones the Warden and his comrades had developed for a project in his class.

4:06 Then Le Texier counted the rules.

4:09 The Stanford study had seventeen prison rules.

4:12 He says eleven were copied straight from the dorm project.

4:16 He says the other six were adapted to the new space and the longer run.

4:20 In 1972, Zimbardo and a co-author had written that the guards made up their own set of rules.

4:26 Le Texier says Zimbardo gave the dorm project credit only twice.

4:30 Zimbardo's long 2018 reply to his critics does not mention the dorm at all.

4:36 But Zimbardo said the guards were never told to be brutal.

4:40 We did not give any formal or detailed instructions about how to be an effective guard.

4:46 He wrote that the team never instructed guards to employ brutality, and banned physical force outright.

4:53 And by his account, the Warden's push did not work at first.

4:57 He wrote that none of the guards behaved in a dominant way during the first two shifts.

5:01 What changed things, he said, came on the second day, when the prisoners rebelled.

5:06 After that, one guard called the prisoners dangerous, and several guards became much tougher.

5:13 Craig Haney went further, in a statement of his own.

5:16 They certainly were not following any orders to be harsh and tough.

5:20 Some of them actually pushed back against me when I instructed them to treat the prisoners more humanely.

5:27 Even the 1972 report says the cues built into the experiment obviously exerted some directing influence.

5:34 In 2012, two psychologists, Haslam and Reicher, put it like this.

5:39 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.

5:48 They added that even with that guidance, not all guards acted brutally.

5:53 On the night shift, the prisoners gave one guard a nickname.

5:57 John Wayne.

5:59 By Zimbardo's account, the guard said he modeled his role on the warden in the film Cool Hand Luke.

6:05 In 2011, he told Stanford Magazine more about it.

6:08 What came over me was not an accident.

6:11 It was planned.

6:12 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.

6:21 So I consciously created this persona.

6:25 I was in all kinds of drama productions in high school and college.

6:29 But the other guards didn't stop me.

6:31 They seemed to join in. They were taking my lead.

6:35 He later said nobody on the research team stepped in to tell him to tone it down.

6:40 So we took that as approval and support.

6:43 But on one point, his own story cuts against Le Texier.

6:47 The Stanford Daily reported in 2018 that he doesn't recall the kind of explicit cues Le Texier cites.

6:54 And Zimbardo wrote that what this guard did went far beyond simply playing the role of a tough guard.

7:00 Le Texier quotes guards who said they had been acting.

7:03 Guard 4 told the Warden at the debriefing, throughout the entire experiment I was an actor, and I was hamming it up.

7:10 Guard 1 wrote to Zimbardo three months later.

7:13 I was always acting.

7:15 In the guards' daily answers, Le Texier found only two, Guards 10 and 11, who sometimes felt completely immersed.

7:23 That is hard to square with the report's verdict that many volunteers stopped telling role from self.

7:30 In 2002, the BBC broadcast a prison study run by Haslam and Reicher.

7:35 It ran for eight days. They pointed to one difference.

7:39 Unlike Zimbardo, however, we took no leadership role in the study.

7:43 Their guards didn't take to the role.

7:45 They were reluctant to use their authority.

7:48 In the end, the prisoners got the better of them.

7:51 Then the volunteers tried to run things as equals.

7:54 When that broke down, some pushed for a harsh regime, and the resistance to it grew weaker.

7:59 Its authors say it came close to recreating the tyranny of the Stanford study.

8:04 Zimbardo wrote that it in no way met the scientific criteria for a replication.

8:09 In 2019, in the same journal issue as Le Texier, Haslam and Reicher went back to the Stanford study with a colleague.

8:16 Their summary says the experimenters directly encouraged the guards to adopt roles and act tough.

8:22 They call it a kind of leadership.

8:25 So how much of this dispute reached the students who learn the study?

8:30 In 2014, a psychologist named Griggs checked thirteen introductory psychology textbooks.

8:36 Eleven covered the Stanford study.

8:38 Only six of those mentioned any criticism of it.

8:42 The other five mentioned none.

8:45 That count came five years before Le Texier's paper.

8:49 Philip Zimbardo died in October 2024, at 91.

8:54 In his 2018 reply, he wrote that no criticism brought substantial evidence that altered the study's main conclusion.

9:02 Its core message, he wrote, is not that guards and prisoners always, or even usually, act that way.

9:08 He called it a cautionary tale of what might happen to any of us.

9:13 So was it the role, on its own?

9:17 The report and Zimbardo both say they were told to keep order and never to hit.

9:22 And the tape still holds the sentence this all started with.

9:26 We can create fear in them, to some degree.

9:29 Zimbardo called those words his instructions to the guards.

9:32 The 1972 report called that minimal guidelines.

9:36 Le Texier called it precise instructions.

9:40 The guard nicknamed John Wayne remembers no explicit cues.

9:44 He also remembers that nobody told him to stop.

9:47 So at Stanford, the role never came on its own.

9:51 Those words came with it. How much they did is the part the two sides argue over.

9:58 Zimbardo put the study's records in the Stanford archive himself.

10:02 That is where the recording from that Saturday is kept.

10:06 Next time, 1931.

10:09 A psychologist and his wife took a young chimpanzee named Gua into their home.

10:14 They raised her beside their own baby son, Donald, as playmates in the same house.

10:19 For nine months, they tested the two of them, side by side.

10:23 Then the parents wrote the study up themselves, in a book called The Ape and the Child.

Stanford Prison Experiment What the Guards Were Told First

10:31 · Episode 4 · YouTube [Watch the episode](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RGCwyy1tZY)