by Grace Boey

Kyle Patrick Alvarez's latest award-winning film, The Stanford Prison Experiment, depicts a real-life psychology study from 1971 that went horribly wrong. What implications do the findings have for moral philosophy?

This month, moviegoers will flock to cinemas to watch The Stanford Prison Experiment (or, if they don’t, the film has at least already won two awards at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival). Directed by Kyle Patrick Alvarez, the drama depicts the infamous study of the same title conducted by Stanford Professor Philip Zimbardo in 1971. The experiment, which subjected its participants to a simulated prison environment, sparked intense debate at the time with the disturbing questions it raised about human nature. After being randomly assigned roles of either ‘prison guard’ or ‘prisoner’ in the simulation, participants became so engrossed in the experience that many guards turned abusive towards the prisoners, who themselves did little to protest the abuse. The experiment was meant to last two weeks, but Zimbardo pulled the plug after six days.

The Stanford Prison Experiment has since become required reading for college Psych 101 classes everywhere. The key takeaway from the study—other than the fact that it’s generally a good idea to terminate an experiment when subjects start denying each other access to basic sanitation—is the idea that seemingly ordinary people can be manipulated by their environment into committing very bad acts. Or, in other words: within everyone lies a ruthless tyrant, ready to reveal itself in the right situation.

At the time it was made, Zimbardo’s proposition was nothing new. Prior to the Stanford Prison Experiment, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram had found in 1961 that ordinary people would readily follow instructions by subjecting others to apparently dangerous levels of electric shocks, at the calm and cordial request of an authority figure. Later studies also showed similar findings that didn’t involve terrible atrocities: for example, researchers Mathews and Canon found in 1975 that when ambient noise was at normal levels, people were 5 times more likely to help an apparently injured man who had dropped his books than when a power lawnmower was running nearby. And—displaying just how arbitrary yet powerful such influencing factors can be—researchers Isen and Levin found in 1972 that people who had just found a dime were 22 times more likely to help a woman who had dropped some papers than people who had not.

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