Credit, Netflix
More than half a century after one of psychology's most famous and controversial studies was prematurely terminated amid allegations of abuse and severe emotional distress among volunteers, the Stanford Lockdown Experiment has been recreated into a six-episode Netflix reality series.
In the New Stanford Imprisonment Experiment, 30 volunteers are divided between guards and prisoners in a disused wing of a real prison, promising a modern version of American psychologist Philip Zimbardo's 1971 study.
The launch, which took place on October 21, reignited debate over the original experiment and raised new questions about the fine line between science and entertainment.
Zimbardo, then a professor at the prestigious Stanford University in the United States, wanted to explore how people reacted to authority and confinement.
He recruited 24 young men, randomly assigning them to play prisoners or guards in a simulated prison in the basement of Stanford's psychology department.
Scheduled to last two weeks, the experiment was stopped after just six days.
According to Zimbardo, some guards became increasingly authoritarian and abusive, while several prisoners suffered serious emotional problems.
Credit, PrisonExpo.org
The findings were widely considered proof that ordinary people could behave cruelly in positions of power and in oppressive environments.
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The study entered psychology textbooks and inspired films and documentaries. But critics say it was flawed and should not be treated as reliable evidence.
According to some, participants were influenced by researchers' expectations, known as "demand characteristics", rather than behaving spontaneously.
Questions also arose about Zimbardo's dual role as lead researcher and prison superintendent, and the extent to which guards were encouraged to behave in certain ways.
But Scott Plous, a student of Zimbardo's at Stanford and now a professor of psychology at Wesleyan University in the United States, says allegations that Zimbardo unduly influenced participants' behavior were "long debunked."
However, many scholars have disputed this interpretation. And even Plous, who remained close friends with Zimbardo until his death in 2024, agrees that the ethics of the study were deeply flawed.
"The Stanford prison experiment suffered from two crucial flaws in modern research ethics, both of which were publicly acknowledged by Professor Zimbardo himself," he told the BBC.
"The simulated prisoners and guards were not fully informed about the risks of participation... and were led to believe that they could not leave the study."
Stanford University acknowledged that the experiment would not be approved under modern research standards.
The BBC's own prison study, conducted in 2002 by social psychologists Alex Haslam and Stephen Reicher and broadcast as a documentary series, also assigned participants the roles of guard and prisoner, but came to different conclusions.
Rather than guards inevitably becoming oppressive and prisoners submissive, researchers found that group identity, leadership, and collective action shaped behavior.
They suggested that tyranny was not an automatic consequence of power, but emerged only under certain social conditions.
Plous says comparisons between the two studies are often misleading.
“The BBC prison study was widely misinterpreted as an attempt to replicate the Stanford prison experiment,” he says.
To combat this misinterpretation, researchers from both projects issued a statement in 2018 stating that the BBC study "is not a direct replication of the previous study."
But both the BBC study and the Netflix series are inevitably shaped by the legacy of the original experiment, says Noah Cohen, associate professor of police studies at Western Sydney University in Australia.
"The mere fact that these recreations were modeled after such a well-known study will undermine any future variation," he says.
Assigning arbitrary power to participants in a prison environment can also generate "frustration and tension," making it difficult to obtain meaningful scientific results.
Press reviews have also generally suggested that the New Stanford Prison Experiment works better as social entertainment than as behavioral science.
The program "aims to be scientific", but "it is a condescending reality show", says the British newspaper The Guardian, with participants "acting for the cameras" instead of behaving naturally.
The American New York Times, in turn, calls the series "a harsh sentence".
"You are basically condemned to boredom, watching a program that is neither as scandalous as you might fear, nor as edifying as its creators would like," the newspaper quips.
Presented in its debut episode as an improvement on the 1971 experiment, promising "no interference, no bias, just observation," it actually involved a lot more interference than the original, Plous says—interviews with prisoners and guards conducted while filming was underway, cameras and boom microphones in plain sight, and staged "interventions" designed to provoke "fear, humiliation, anger and resentment."
In any case, any attempt to recreate the Stanford experiment faces a fundamental problem.
"If we accept the ethical principle that people should always have the freedom to discontinue their participation in a study, including a study shown on TV, it becomes impossible to accurately simulate the experience of a prisoner who is actually incarcerated," says Plous.
Netflix attendees could leave at any time by saying the safe word "pineapple," which one inmate described as an option for "getting out of jail." In 1971, however, participants were led to believe they could not leave.
"This difference means that the Netflix prisoners were not actually imprisoned in a meaningful way," says Plous.
Cohen claims that Netflix took little advantage of Zimbardo's work beyond using the name of the Stanford prison experiment and a few basic guidelines.
“It was intentionally engagement and audience oriented,” he says, “designed not for study purposes but for entertainment.”
Its structured phases, constantly shifting power dynamics, and focus on "discourse and discord between groups" are designed to "amplify tension" rather than generate meaningful scientific discoveries.
'Failed spectacularly'
According to Netflix, participants underwent psychological evaluations and had access to psychologists throughout filming.
Executive producer Jane Lipsitz says that her team spent more than a year developing the project and creating security measures that were not included in the original study.
"When the series was first announced, there was a lot of outrage at the idea of anyone even trying to repeat the Stanford Prison Experiment — and considering what happened with the original version, I completely understand that reaction," she told Netflix.
"If we were simply recreating the original experiment, this would be inconceivable."
Plous is not convinced.
"Overall, I thought the Netflix series worked well as a reality show," he said.
"But when it came to 'repeating the experiment,' as the program claimed to have done, it failed spectacularly."
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