The Lab · August 1971 · A basement at Stanford University

The Stanford prison experiment: would you have stopped it?

What do you do?

The case

Told from where the person who decided stood. In the game each line is written into a drawing as you tap.

You are a psychology professor. You have built a mock prison in a basement and filled it with students, paid 15 dollars a day.
A coin made some of them guards and some prisoners. Within days the guards are humiliating the prisoners. Some prisoners have broken down and left.
The study is planned for two weeks. It is day five. What you are filming could be the most famous experiment in psychology.
A colleague visits and is appalled. “What you are doing to those boys is terrible.” You are too far inside it to see.

The two calls

Stop it now.End the study and send them home. Your great experiment ends as a study that failed.
Finish the two weeks.The findings matter too much. Nine more days, for the sake of the result.

Make the call in the game Free. No account. Two minutes.

What happened

Philip Zimbardo stopped it, on day six of fourteen, after Christina Maslach told him what she saw.

For decades it was taught as proof that a role can turn ordinary people cruel.

In 2019 a study of the archive showed that the guards had been told how to behave. It was stopped in time. What it was said to prove has not held.

Source: Le Texier, T. (2019). Debunking the Stanford Prison Experiment. American Psychologist 74(7), 823–839. doi.org/10.1037/amp0000401

How to read this

History is not an answer key. This page says what was done and what came of it. Whether it was right is the question the case leaves with you.

Where the game asks it

The same kind of question runs through The Review (What would change your mind?), one of the nine journeys of the game.

More from The Lab

All the rooms: the case files