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One of the most infamous
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psychological studies ever conducted
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was the Stanford Prison Experiment.
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It's mentioned in almost every intro to psychology textbook.
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They tend to focus on how unethical it was,
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and are less critical of its supposed conclusion.
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August 14th, 1971.
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Palo Alto, California.
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Twelve young men are rounded up from their homes by police,
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placed under arrest,
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and brought to a makeshift prison
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in the basement of Stanford University.
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It all begins as a study on the psychology of prison life,
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led by Stanford psychology professor Dr. Philip Zimbardo.
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24 volunteers--
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12 guards and 12 prisoners.
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--have agreed to spend the next two weeks
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recreating life in a correctional facility.
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[guard]
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The prisoners are booked and stripped nude.
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They're no longer individuals,
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forced to wear smocks, stocking caps and shackles.
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Identified only by their prisoner numbers.
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The guards quickly adapt to their new profession.
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Given anonymity by their mirrored sunglasses,
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some of them start to control the meager food rations,
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restrict prisoners' bathroom use.
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And, as tensions rise,
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so do their cruel methods.
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Within just six days of the planned two-week study,
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conditions are so bad
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that the entire operation is shut down.
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[man]
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Goddamn it...
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The study makes international headlines.
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Zimbardo's fame skyrockets,
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and his conclusions are taught to students worldwide,
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used as a defense in criminal trials
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and are even submitted to Congress
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to explain the abuses inflicted at Abu Ghraib.
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The study brings up a question
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just as important then as it is today:
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is evil caused by the environment,
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or the personalities in it?
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Zimbardo's shocking conclusion
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is that when people feel anonymous
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and have power over depersonalized others,
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they can easily become evil.
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And it occurs more often than we'd like to admit.
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But while it's true that people were mean to each other
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during the Stanford Prison Experiment,
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what if what truly caused that behavior
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wasn't what we've always been told?
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The Stanford Prison Experiment
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has always had its controversies.
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But a wave of recent revelations
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have pushed it back into the spotlight
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47 years later.
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Today, I'm going to speak with journalist Ben Blum,
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whose recent writings have brought criticism
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of the experiment to a larger audience
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than ever before.
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How did you get involved in the Stanford Prison Experiment
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in the first place?
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Well, my involvement was quite personal.
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Like everyone, I had kind of absorbed
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the basic lesson of the experiment
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through the cultural ether.
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And then my cousin Alex was arrested for bank robbery.
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This was a team of mostly military guys with AK-47s.
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Alex was the driver.
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He was a 19-year-old U.S. Army Ranger.
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And it was a superior of his on the Rangers
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that organized and led the bank robbery.
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Alex thought the whole thing was a training exercise.
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He was just so brainwashed in this intense Ranger training
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that when a superior proposed this bank robbery,
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he took it as just one more kind of tactical thought experiment.
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Then Dr. Philip Zimbardo participated
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in his legal defense.
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Zimbardo submits a letter to the court,
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advocating leniency in sentencing on the grounds
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that Alex, my cousin, had been so transformed
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by the social environment of the Ranger battalion
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that he participated in the bank robbery
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without exercising his own free will.
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Well, how did that affect Alex's sentencing?
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He received an extraordinarily lenient sentence of 16 months.
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So Zimbardo was a family hero.
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But over time, Alex, finally he did admit to me,
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you know what, I knew this was a bank robbery by the end,
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and I just didn't have the moral courage to back out.
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Oh, wow.
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Alex, myself and our whole family
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came to view the Zimbardo argument
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as a way to shirk personal culpability,
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and to put all the blame on the situation.
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So you start looking
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at the Stanford Prison Experiment in particular.
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You reached out to Dr. Zimbardo himself,
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as well as some of those who participated.
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What did you learn?
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I learned, to my deep surprise,
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that quite a number of the participants
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had stories of their experience that completely contradicted
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the official narrative.
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Which is, look, these regular people,
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good people, came together,
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and because of the situation, became evil.
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[Ben] Right.
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Zimbardo has claimed that the guards
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were put in the situation,
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and then the kind of hidden wellspring of sadism
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that apparently lies in all of us
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unfolded organically.
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[Zimbardo]
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There was an orientation meeting for the guards.
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They had been told quite explicitly
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to oppress the prisoners.
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That falls under the heading of what psychologists call
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demand characteristics.
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Experimental subjects tend to be motivated
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to give experimenters what they want.
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[Michael] Demand characteristics occur
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whenever participants being studied
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act differently than they normally would
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because they've guessed what hypothesis is being tested
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and feel that a certain kind of behavior is being demanded.
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There was a recording of explicitly correcting a guard
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who wasn't being tough enough.
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So a conclusion you could make
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from the Stanford Prison Experiment
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is that when you tell people to be cruel,
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they'll do it if you tell them
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it's for a greater good, like science.
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-Right. -Who would have thought?
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I think the study stands still as a fascinating spur
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to further more careful research
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as a demonstration that should make anyone curious
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as to how such extreme behavior could arise
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in such a short time.
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The experiment could still be useful,
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but it might need to be reinterpreted.
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Its data might lead to different conclusions
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than the one that we've been telling for so many decades.
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Right.
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The flaws in the experiment
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that Ben and other critics bring up
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call into question large portions of the narrative
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surrounding the study.
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So I want to hear from someone who was actually there.
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Dave Eshelman, the study's most infamous guard,
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agreed to tell me his side of the story.
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It's really an honor to meet you.
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You're a living, walking piece of psychology history.
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I'm never recognized in the street or anything like that,
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although I still get some hate mail.
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-Are you serious? -Yeah, absolutely.
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Well, what do you say to them when they react that way?
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I say, well, there's probably a lot about that
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that didn't happen quite the way it's been portrayed.
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Well, Dave, before we go too far,
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I'd like to watch the footage we have here
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so we can kind of talk about what we see.
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[Dave] That's me there, by the way.
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-[Michael] Look at that look. -[Dave] Mm-hmm.
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So how did you get involved with a Stanford Prison Experiment?
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My father was a professor at Stanford,
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and I was home for summer, looking for a summer job.
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So I'm looking through the want ads.
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$15 a day.
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You know, in 1971 that wasn't bad.
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The way it was introduced to the guards,
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the whole concept of this experiment,
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we were never led to believe
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that we were part of the experiment.
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We were led to believe that our job
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was to get results from the prisoners,
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that they were the ones the researchers
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are really studying.
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The researchers were behind the wall.
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And we all knew they were filming.
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And we can often hear the researchers
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commenting on the action from the other side of the wall.
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You know, like, "Oh, gosh, did you see that?
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Here. Make sure you get a close-up of that."
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Okay? So if they want to show that prison is a bad experience,
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I'm going to make it bad.
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But how did you feel doing stuff like that?
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Didn't you feel bad?
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I don't know if this is a revelation to you,
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but 18-year-old boys are not the most sensitive creatures.
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-Sure. -My agenda was to be
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the worst guard I could possibly be.
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-And it's pretty serious. -Mm-hmm.
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This is my favorite part of all the footage we have
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-from the experiment. -Mm-hmm.
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It's you and a prisoner confronting each other
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after the experiment.
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I remember the guy saying, "I hate you, man."
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-Yeah. -"I hate you."
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Each day I said, well, what can we do to ramp up
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what we did yesterday?
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How can we build on that?
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Why did you want to ramp things up?
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Two reasons, I think.
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One was because I really believed
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I was helping the researchers with some better understanding
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of human behavior.
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On the other hand,
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it was personally interesting to me.
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You know, I cannot say that I did not enjoy what I was doing.
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Maybe, you know, having so much power
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over these poor, defenseless prisoners,
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you know, maybe you kind of get off on that a little bit.
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You weren't entirely following a script from a director.
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Right.
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But you also felt like
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Zimbardo wanted something from you.
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-Yes. -And you gave that to him.
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I believe I did. I think I decided
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I was going to do a better job than anybody there
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of delivering what he wanted.
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But does that excuse me from what I was doing?
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Certainly it started out with me playing a role.
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So the question is, was there a point where I stopped acting
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and I started living, so to speak?
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The standard narrative is that Dave Eshelman did what he did
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because when people are given power,
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it's easier than we think for abuse to happen.
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That may be true,
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but how predisposed to aggression was Dave?
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I mean, he signed up to something called
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a "prison study," after all.
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Also, his feeling that cruelty was encouraged
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and helped the experiment, may have affected his behavior.
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What I'd like to see is,
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in the absence of outside influence,
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can anonymity, power, and depersonalization alone
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lead to evil?
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To answer that question,
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I'd like to design
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a demonstration of my own.
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So I'm meeting with Dr. Jared Bartels
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of William Jewell College,
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a psychologist who has written extensively
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about the Stanford Prison Experiment
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and how it is taught.
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I would love to do the Stanford Prison Experiment again.
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You could probably make it more ethical,
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but still find the same conclusions.
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That's my hypothesis.
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I absolutely think it's worthwhile.
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It's important. It's interesting.
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Probably the best approach