E191 | Netflix’s Stanford Prison Experiment: The Danger of Unearned Power

0:00 As a psychiatrist, when I found out that Netflix was recreating one of the most controversial psychological experiments of all time, which famously ended in total chaos, I knew I had to watch. But can you learn anything meaningful from a reality TV show? Today I'm going to discuss what I think you can learn from the show, in particular how people organize themselves into status hierarchies, how people act when they have power, when power is stripped away from them, and whether or not we all have an inner monster lurking inside of us, waiting to be unleashed.

0:35 So, in terms of the original Stanford Prison Experiment, of course, this was conducted in 1971 by psychologist Philip Zimbardo and his colleagues. One of the most famous studies ever, they set up a mock prison in Stanford University's psychology department. They had 24 male student volunteers and they randomly assigned them as prisoners and guards and had them live together in this mock prison.

1:02 And the central question they were trying to answer was: you know, does people's behavior in prisons reflect their personalities, or how much is it based on the roles and the environment? If you give someone a role, do they completely change? You know, is power corrupting? These are the kind of questions they were they were trying to answer.

1:19 The experiment was meant to last two weeks, but it stopped after six days. It had to be stopped because there was abusive behavior, people were in a ton of distress. This is a very famous story, movies have been made about it. And, you know, famously, this isn't a very good study from a scientific point of view.

1:38 A lot of people may claim you can say things about the nature of power or roles because of this study, but really you can't because there are a lot of major flaws. You know, it was a small sample size, the experimental stopped halfway through. Philip Zimbardo was famously the superintendent of the prison, so he had some authority over the gods.

1:57 He was coaching the gods and telling them to act in a certain way. So there aren't really robust scientific conclusions you can draw from this study. But of course, it's quite a compelling idea. So Netflix has decided to do their own version of this experiment. They set up 30 participants in a real prison facility for two weeks.

2:17 They had eight gods, including three women, and they had 22 prisoners, which were all men. And in this experiment, they had four planned phases, so four different phases where aspects of the show were changed in order to see what would happen. And I'm not going to spoil what the phases are. You know, I do say the word experiment, of course, this is not a scientific study, this is very much uh a reality TV show.

2:42 So don't let the word experiment fool you. According to producers, there are a lot more safeguards in this show than the original experiment. There was a psychological screening, the participants were constantly supervised by three experts, including a psychologist, a correctional officer, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.

3:03 Psychologists were available to the participants 24-7, and there was a safeguarding where participants could leave by using a safe word at any point. So if at any point someone was in too much psychological distress or they felt they were in physical danger, they could leave the experiment. Participants, as far as I could tell, were paid, but I can't tell you know how much.

3:26 I'll talk about caveats at the end. But first the artificial environments. We think artificial environments aren't a big deal, that it's not really going to affect us. But actually, I even notice in role-playing sessions with my clients, I might do role-playing where I get my clients to be more assertive, for example, than they might otherwise be, can be very, very powerful and can produce a lot of powerful emotional and psychological shifts.

3:51 And so, similarly, these participants walking to a real prison, hearing all the sounds of the prison, the uniforms, the clanging of the gates, people speaking down to them or speaking up to them if they're a god, I think has a huge effect on people. We we forget that we're a social species, we respond very powerfully to people's social cues, and we also forget how vulnerable we are to environmental cues as well.

4:16 And you can imagine if you were taken from your ordinary life and you are sent to a real prison and made to sleep in a cell or given a uniform as a god, it has a much more powerful effect on you than you might think. People can be cynical about it because it is a reality TV show, but I think we underestimate how much environment has an impact.

4:38 I guess the original experiment really wanted to find out how much is personality superseded by someone's role. So if someone has a certain personality, to what extent is that going to be dominated by their role as a god or as a prisoner? And actually, I was surprised to see how much personality was a really big deal.

4:59 And this makes sense because this is a very small time frame we were dealing with. It's only up to two weeks. And what I found is actually the personality of the participants really shone through a lot of the time. And you saw on the different participants, you could see some were inherently more rule-abiding, some were more pragmatic, some were more disagreeable, some were more rebellious in their temperament.

5:23 And this affected how they took up their role. People who had leadership qualities before going on the show. They definitely expressed those leadership qualities in the show, but it also affected how they saw the experiment at large. Like some people saw the experiment as something to just kind of pragmatically get through.

5:40 Some people saw the experiment as a chance to cause mischief, as a chance to push boundaries. Some people saw the experiment as a chance to develop and show off their leadership skills. And however you view something like this is going to be hugely dependent on your personality. Your personality isn't just about how you behave.

6:01 Your personality is very much the lens through which you see the world. So, for example, if you are high in conscientiousness, trait conscientiousness from the big five personality traits, you see rules and duty as very important. If you're very extroverted, you see the world as a kind of social landscape.

6:20 If you're very disagreeable, you see the world as kind of something to rebel against. And you can see that in these participants, the whatever personality traits they go in with is of course gonna affect how they view this experiment and how they're gonna act. Often they would show you know a participant's behavior and then give a sense of their background and get them talking about their previous lives, so you could see a kind of alignment between how they would tend to act outside the show and in the show.

6:45 When people were given power or had power taken away from them, their personality had a huge impact on how they handled that. I'll talk about that a bit more later. But to me, the strength of personality really came through, and it was really interesting to hear about people's backgrounds and how that may have influenced who they are up until the point of getting into the prison.

7:08 I think this the what I found most interesting about this show is it doesn't just reveal the nature of power dynamics, but but status at large. So status is like this bigger thing than power. Status is how others perceive our power, influence, and value within a group. Something everyone needs to know about human beings is we are status-seeking creatures as social primates.

7:38 We exist in status hierarchies, whether we like it or not. Lots of animals have exist in status hierarchies. It's not just a product of capitalism, it's found very widely in nature, in different animals, and human beings know different. And status is something I've been thinking about and writing about quite a lot recently.

7:57 And how and I've been thinking about how people arrive at status, you know, what are the routes to status in a group or in a society? And I think there's basically four routes to status, and I think they can be overlapping. So you'll usually have different factors having an effect simultaneously, but I think there's basically four routes to status.

8:15 Those are dominance, like physical or psychological dominance, that's one. Two, competence or skills, your ability to do something skillfully or to solve a problem. Three, virtue or like morality, your ability to show good character traits like courage in the face of adversity, like honesty, when dishonesty would be more convenient, stuff like that.

8:42 And four would be maybe more of a product of modern society, kind of unearned status. So, for example, if you're born the Prince of Monaco, you kind of have status handed to you by virtue of your family. If you're born into a wealthy family, you kind of again have status just kind of arbitrarily given to you which you didn't particularly earn.

9:03 And the nature of the show exposes the differences between unearned and earned status because people are made gods or inmates kind of arbitrarily. They're given this power or they have power taken away from them. Um, but then as the show plays out, you see through different ways that the participants can show their value in other ways.

9:25 They could show their value through their character, they could show their value through their dominance, again, their mental or physical dominance, they could show their value through their competence or skill. And what the show really illustrates nicely is people don't react well to unearned status.

9:42 So people really don't like when people are given status arbitrarily, especially if they've been shown to be not competent, not skillful, not virtuous, not of good character, or not particularly dominant. Um people react very, very poorly to that. Uh and this makes sense because societies generally function better or worse depending on the degree to which people are given status that they earned or deserve on some level, uh, versus what you call like a mafia state, for example, where people are given status based on nepotism or corruption or other factors.

10:23 No country is perfect in this regard, but countries generally do better when people are able to earn or show that they can use their status well, or that they've earned their status on some level. And this microcosm in this prison among these like 30 participants was really a good illustration of that when people were given power and shown that you know, this power that they were randomly assigned, they couldn't wield it very well because they lacked character or they lacked the ability to handle a situation or they lacked competence, it really showed and people didn't like that at all.

11:00 People react very poorly to maybe what they would perceive as misassigned status, and we can all relate to this. You know, when we see someone maybe who's in a position of power at our work and we don't think they deserve it, we don't react well to that, and that that makes perfect sense. So I think the most important lesson I learned watching this is handing out power arbitrarily is a bad idea.

11:24 It's a bit like even when you hear about royal families, when royal families in different countries had a lot of power, so it was always a roll of the dice because you could get a prince or a king or a queen that was very talented, even-tempered, strategic, intelligent, or you could get the total opposite of that.

11:40 If you think of Kaiser Wilhelm in Germany in World War I, he had a real bad role of the royalty lottery, you had uh a monarch in power who really didn't know how to use that power well. But then you think of like a Queen Elizabeth II, someone who's much more uh even-tempered, and someone who's much more uh virtuous.

12:00 That's an example of someone who's in the position to use that power well, but ideally you don't want the power just handed out uh arbitrarily. So it's interesting just even to see people's body language, and often when you're observing people, you can just look at their body language and simple things like, for example, who's moving more, who's fidgeting more, who's speaking more, who's leaning in more versus who's more reserved.

12:22 You can see who's holding more power in that particular interaction. And this is the kind of show where you can just watch it on mute and you can tell, okay, I think this person is a little bit more dominant in this situation, or this person's holding a bit more power or assertion in this situation, whereas the other person is kind of feeding in, like falling into their frame as it were, a bit more.

12:44 It was interesting just to watch that. And the other thing that I found that's very specific to systems like prisons is that when people are contained in these systems, they need consistency, and it's a bit like children. Like children really need consistency from their parents. Not total consistency, but a reasonable amount of consistency.

13:06 When children are dependent on their parents, or like in this case, inmates are dependent on gods, they don't have a lot of power, and so how the guards act or how someone's parents act are a reflection of how reliable and predictable the world is for all intents and purposes. And so when people in power don't act predictably, people freak out a bit, they get very, very stressed.

13:31 And you you see this a lot in this show where if the guards changed their behavior or there was a change between the day shift and the night shift, guards were divided into day shift and night shift teams. The the inmates found it very stressful because they didn't know what to expect. One I remember one participant actually said, When guards were acting inconsistently, one inmate said, I feel like vomiting because I don't know what's going to happen next.

13:57 There is this question of the inner monster. So, you know, even in the original experiment, there's this idea, do we all have an inner monster that's waiting to be unleashed as soon as we're given power? And I my take on this is it just depends on the individual, it depends on who you are. Some people have sorted themselves out and they know who they are and they have a strong sense of identity and they have a strong sense of a morality and an ethic.

14:26 And you see people like that in the show, and when they're given power, they have some decent sense of how to use it. If you haven't gotten a developed morality, if you've never done any serious introspection, if you've never learned how to integrate or use your aggression or your ability to assert yourself, if you're full of resentment and then you're given power, you're likely to misuse it.

14:50 Power is something that you need to be ready for. Power is not something you can escape. There isn't going to be a situation where people in a society don't have power or where power is distributed perfectly equally. I think that's unrealistic. What we need to understand is people need to be trained and ready to handle power.

15:10 People need to develop things like those other factors I mentioned: character, virtue, competence, skill, um, the ability even to be dominant sometimes in some situations, so that when you're handled power, you actually know how to use it. There are inner there are people who have inner monsters, and if you give them power, I think that power will hugely amplify the harm that they can do.

15:35 Uh, but then I think on the other side, when you have people who are who have done the work and they're they they're a bit more virtuous, if you give them power, then that can amplify that as well, and means they can do more good than they otherwise would be able to do. Now, are there situations where people are reasonably virtuous and then they're given power and that can corrupt them?

15:56 Absolutely, I'm sure that can happen as well. That isn't really what you see in this show. The show is probably too short and too simplistic, and there aren't enough participants to really show that. But I'm sure that can happen in real life. So is there like an inherently corrupting aspect to power?

16:12 Probably, especially when you're thinking of power at a really like large scale, like the scale of running a country. But this show doesn't particularly show that. No one was made into a completely different person because of power, as far as I could tell in this show. Um, it was really interesting, however, to see how people rationalize their behavior.

16:34 So, for example, people who um weren't so ready to have power, I think they were given power at points in the show, and they would exert it under the guise of maintaining order. But really, you could tell that you know they were just really interested in finally being able to exercise some power, and then those same big personalities, when they're deprived of power, they try to gain it by rebelling.

16:58 And this is in the name of standing up to authority, but actually, you could tell they have a bit of a chip on their shoulder, they have some resentments they haven't worked out. So it's interesting to see in this show how people can rationalise their behavior like they're doing something from my standpoint to meet a kind of psychological need, but consciously they think they're doing it in the name of, for example, standing up to authority or in the name of maintaining order.

17:24 And this is something you see in real life all the time. Of course, you see it in politics. People are acting out um their personalities and acting out their unmet needs, but they're doing it in the name of fill-in-the-blank. And I think that's a really important psychological dynamic to be aware of.

17:39 Ultimately, I think having a strong ethic, a strong sense of virtue, a strong character, a strong moral system means you're able to act consistently despite whatever level of power you happen to have at a given point in time. Again, power might amplify what you're able to do. But I think if you're a moral person, of course, no one's a perfectly moral person, but if you are a moral person, what that means is you can be roughly the same person acting recognizably the same way when you don't have a ton of power, but also when you have power.

18:12 And I think that's the essence of integrity that you're not some vastly different person in a different situation, or as soon as you know your fortunes change. And again, I thought I thought that was something interesting to observe in the show as well. It's also just fascinating how bringing people together in a situation where they didn't have phones, they didn't have distractions, um they didn't have a ton to do, but they it was a challenging situation.

18:38 It seemed like some really strong bonds formed among the people in the show. Uh, and that's always interesting, again, to remind us that we are a social species. We're often isolated now, we often spend a lot of time by ourselves, but if you put us amongst each other without a ton of distractions in the way, human beings are so ready to form these tight bonds and connections with each other.

18:59 I guess my thoughts on the show itself are they did create a really compelling atmosphere in the prison. I like that they had a lot more safeguards than the original experiment. Um, in a weird way, it it is a reality TV show, so it's definitely not science. But because the show had no prize, and so the participants weren't really competing against each other for anything, in a weird way it was quite subversive, and it did seem like just an opportunity to quietly observe how people react in strange situations.

19:35 Of course, as with any reality TV show, you do have to take it with a pinch of salt because people sign up for these shows for different reasons, they're not necessarily totally ordinary people, quote unquote. And the hidden prize of any reality TV show is um social media exposure and gaining a social media following.

19:57 But I actually did get the sense that a lot of people on the show seemed pretty ordinary by all appearances, and didn't particularly seem uh attention-seeking, although some differed from that. And of course, it's still fully, it's not totally clear how much production would have interfered, how much the production team on the show would have coached people to act in a certain way, or to to create a certain storyline, as it were.

20:21 We just don't know the answer to that question. Hopefully, they didn't do it very much. Um, the show did use interesting devices again to play with power dynamics, and I thought that was actually a strength of the show. The impact on me for a show like this was you can't help but imagine how would you act in that situation and what what value would you get from it, and what would you do when you have the power?

20:43 How would you try and wield it responsibly? How would you act when it's taken away? It actually reminded me a lot of my time working in an inpatient psychiatric wards. Of course, psychiatric wards aren't prisons and the patients having committed crimes, um, but it was this kind of contained system. Often the wards were locked and people were held under a section of the Mental Health Act.

21:06 As a psychiatrist, you do wield a lot of power in that respect. And personally, I found it very challenging to wield that power. Uh, power is something that's hard to deal with, again, and that's why you need character and virtue and competence, and so it's no joke. And so a lot of what I saw on the show really reminded me of the tense and difficult dynamics of working with patients on locked wards.

21:30 Um and ultimately, this show ended up ending in a in a way that was a lot more wholesome than I thought, and I'd be curious to hear your guys' opinion on that. My concluding thoughts are it's a fascinating look at how people act and contain systems, how people organize themselves, how leaders emerge, how rebels emerge, how people gain or lose status.

21:55 Again, those four factors I mentioned. Personality is a huge deal. Personality is gonna impact the lens through which you see the situation and how you think is the best way to conduct yourself. Of course, personality can change with stress and trauma, but going in personality is gonna have a huge effect.

22:13 Of course, you can't draw any scientific conclusions from this show, it is not a scientific study, but I disagree that you can't learn anything from it, and I disagree with the take that none of these experiences are real because I think artificial environments are very powerful, and if you put people in simulated environments, you can be surprised how much of a psychological and emotional shift that can cause.

22:36 A lot of people really disliked this show, reviews are still coming out. Um I think, although you should take it with a pinch of salt, it's fairly fascinating if you're at all interested in human nature and ultimately a lot less trashy and sensationalist than it could have been. But I'm curious what you guys think.

22:56 If you guys watch it or have watched it, let me know what you think in the YouTube comments section. That's all we have for this week. If you want to support the show, check out the links in the description, like, subscribe, follow wherever you happen to be listening or watching. In the meantime, thanks so much for listening, and we'll see you here next week.