The Stanford Prison Experiment: Unlocking the Truth– a limited series that just premiered on the National Geographic Channel and is streaming on Disney+ and Hulu – represents at least the sixth time the events of 1971 have been extensively portrayed on screen, either in documentary form or as quasi-fictional drama. How could anyone squeeze nearly three hours of video story out of such thoroughly covered events? I sat down and watched as the preview screener prepared to fast forward if necessary.

In fact, it never was. The series is artfully constructed and eminently edible. Its storyline goes through more layers of context than even someone aware of the relevant history is likely to see coming.

Many readers of this column (perhaps most) already know something about the experiment itself, with its near-legendary use of students as guinea pigs in the days before institutional review boards monitored such things.

But anyone who has doubts can see from this ten-minute video why the experiment has long been a staple of introductory psychology textbooks. It was provocative – and it still is, albeit for different reasons.

The professor who conducted the experiment, Philip Zimbardo (1933–2024), always presented the design and findings as quite clear. The guards and inmates were randomly selected from the same, apparently homogeneous group of participants (i.e., young, white, male Stanford students with no criminal history and who were considered to be in good mental health).

When their interactions quickly spiraled into sadism and rebellion, the deciding factor was not racial tension – or some psychological trait common to both groups – but rather the simulated prison environment itself.

The events at Stanford occurred just weeks before the prison uprising in Attica. Newspaper and television reporters who had paid little attention to Zimbardo’s initial press releases suddenly found their interest piqued. The availability of six hours of footage recorded during the experiment was a windfall for media attention. And the impact of the experiment is difficult to separate from its telegenic aspects.

On the National Geographic program shows a parade of video clips through the decades that Zimbardo was the ideal talk show guest: serious but personal and willing to leave out uncomfortable details in the interest of a striking story.

Early accounts reported that the guards’ attitudes toward the prisoners ranged from friendliness to aggressive contempt.

But over the course of repeated media appearances, Zimbardo came to see the impact of prison conditions as uniform and inescapable: all guards became dominant, at least in the publicity-friendly version.

And indeed, the most hostile and bullying guards set the tone of the footage captured during the experiment – ​​especially the guard nicknamed John Wayne by his colleagues and who takes the alpha position with gusto. But in a recent interview, one of the less enthusiastic guards describes being pushed aside by Zimbardo and encouraged to participate with more vigor.

Likewise, the Alpha Guardian remembers Zimbardo encouraging him to take on leadership. He had a background in theater and saw himself as a character inspired by the prison film Cool hand Lucas.

The participants interviewed for the documentary agree that Zimbardo had certain expectations about what would happen. He criticized prison as an institution, as did some test subjects.

Zimbardo may not have expected things to escalate so quickly, but the overall trajectory was largely as expected. A press release issued shortly after the start of the experiment referred to “reforms needed at the psychological level so that men who commit crimes are not made into dehumanized objects by their prison experience…” That the guards felt dehumanized by the procedure , is reflected in job interviews.

In 2019 the French scientist Thibault Le Texier published an article in the flagship journal of the American Psychological Association under the title “Debunking the Stanford Experiment,” drawing on archival sources and interviews with 15 of the experiment’s 24 subjects. It summarized the findings of a monograph he had published the year before, now out in translation Investigating the Stanford Prison Experiment: History of a Lie (Springer). Le Texier appears briefly in the documentary, but his influence is also clearly visible outside of it: the makers followed his investigation, but without endorsing the characterization of Zimbardo’s behavior as dishonest.

That is left to the surviving participants. Most of them felt (or felt) misled or abused by the experiment, or exploited by Zimbardo to increase his media stardom from the 1970s onwards. If I read my notes correctly, he is referred to as “the disco psychologist” twice, which was one of the less hostile comments.

Zimbardo appears in the third episode, responding to criticism and allowing his own invective to flow, but he is ultimately convinced that the experiment has shown something about how bad situations can turn good people into monsters. I don’t know if the story will ever make it to the screen again, but it’s unlikely that this rendition will improve.